The UDHR’s cross-cultural legitimacy rests partly on a hagiographic misreading of Malik

Evidence

Charles Malik, who championed the right to freedom of conscience, has been portrayed as a figure at the ‘crossroads of many cultures, and personally and professionally shaped by both Christianity and Islam’. But the Lebanese diplomat was hardly an ideal mediator between religious traditions. An Orthodox Christian by birth, though with a strong predilection for Roman Catholicism, Malik would later align – during his active participation in Lebanon’s civil war – with the Christian Maronite sect. Malik’s role as an active participant in his own country’s sectarian conflicts has not dented his image in human rights scholarship as a figure who embraced tolerance and mutual understanding. The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, whose mother’s cousin was married to Malik, gives a very different account, describing Malik as ‘the symbol and the outspoken intellectual figurehead of everything most prejudicial, conflicted, and incompatible with the Arab and largely Islamic Middle East’. Malik was not the ‘surrogate for the absent Muslim voice’ on the commission on human rights that he has often been portrayed as. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 129

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the broader theme of orientalist ‘representative’ voices seen in Islamophobia and the Novel (Muslim public figures read as living texts) and in A Mission to Civilize. — connects to: Christian anticommunists like Malik wrote the UDHR’s dignity language — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 126; The UDHR preamble’s religious language encoded Western-civilization claims against Islam and Communism.; Kenan Malik’s anti-multiculturalism polemic has three serious analytical defects.
• SEED: Angle for an essay on how the ‘cross-cultural’ founders of liberal documents are laundered through hagiography — Malik as the Lebanese counterpart to idealized framers elsewhere.

Broader Connections

• Kenan Malik’s anti-multiculturalism polemic has three serious analytical defects. #epitomizes (0.95)
• The UDHR preamble’s religious language encoded Western-civilization claims against Islam and Communism. #corroborates (0.80)