The UDHR’s freedom-of-conscience article carried anti-communist and anti-Islamic ideological freight.
Evidence
Malik portrayed freedom of conscience as the central value of this Western heritage. This provenance meant that ‘not all claims of conscience are therefore seen as being equal in the UDHR.’ Not only did Malik assume the religious and Christian contours of conscience; he also argued, more controversially, that the right to change one’s religion was a necessary aspect of this ‘Platonic–Christian tradition’. Malik saw such a right as central to upholding freedom of conscience in the face of two key adversaries: a ‘mass’ (working-class and communist) politics whose focus on economic welfare threatened to reduce the human to a material, rather than a spiritual, being; and Islam, which, according to Malik’s Orientalist depiction, lacked reason and distinction, and fused different orders (God and the universe, man and God, man and animal, and past and future) so that, in Islam, ‘man – as to his origin, his powers, his state, and his destiny – is exceedingly ambiguous’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 131
Categorization
- XREF: Direct evidence for the book’s thesis that the postwar rights regime was built against ‘mass’ economic-welfare politics — the material-vs-spiritual axis recurs throughout. — connects to: Freedom-of-conscience advocacy positioned itself against communism and Islam alike — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 131; The UDHR preamble’s religious language encoded Western-civilization claims against Islam and Communism.
- SEED: Angle for an essay: how a putatively universal human right (religious freedom) was drafted as an explicit weapon against both communism and Islam — universalism as disguised exclusion.
Broader Connections
- Freedom-of-conscience advocacy positioned itself against communism and Islam alike
#corroborates(0.95) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 131 - The UDHR preamble’s religious language encoded Western-civilization claims against Islam and Communism.
#expands(0.90)