{"id":61703,"date":"2026-09-19T01:00:43","date_gmt":"2026-09-19T05:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=61703"},"modified":"2026-09-18T09:57:17","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T13:57:17","slug":"qotd-islam-and-the-rise-of-western-hegemony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/qotd-islam-and-the-rise-of-western-hegemony\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Islam and the rise of Western hegemony"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Governments across the Islamic world began to adopt constitutions that directly contradicted what Muslims had always believed was the perfect and eternal law given to them by God. Simultaneously, they began to sign up to international bodies that, despite their claims to neutrality, were shot through with the ideological assumptions of the West. The most significant of these was the United Nations, which in December 1948 issued a definitive statement of its guiding principles: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.<\/p>\n

This, which claimed in its preamble that acknowledgement of “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”, was in reality not at all as “universal” as it affected to be. Standing recognisably in a line of descent from the proclamations of the French Revolution, it served as well as a repudiation of some of the more foundational assumptions of Islamic theodicy.<\/p>\n

The concept of human rights was an alien one to Islam. Muslims, traditionally, had not believed in natural law. There were only laws authored by God. The insistence of United Nations agencies on “the antiquity and broad acceptance of the rights of man” derived, not from the great inheritance of the Sunnah<\/em>, but from the philosophes<\/em> of the 18th century. Tellingly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been signed \u2014 where else? \u2014 in Paris.<\/p>\n

Western hegemony over the Islamic world, then, did not end with the collapse of direct rule over it by the European powers. Western values, Western assumptions, Western concepts of law, all of them packaged and marketed as “universal”, continued to exercise an overweening dominance in global affairs. If this was true for Muslims in lands that had sought to reconstitute themselves as nation states, then how much more so was it for Muslims who, in the decades that followed the Second World War, travelled to Europe, and settled there in growing numbers.<\/p>\n

Tom Holland, “The age-old tension between Islam and France”, UnHerd<\/em><\/a>, 2020-11-02.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Governments across the Islamic world began to adopt constitutions that directly contradicted what Muslims had always believed was the perfect and eternal law given to them by God. Simultaneously, they began to sign up to international bodies that, despite their claims to neutrality, were shot through with the ideological assumptions of the West. The most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,41,11],"tags":[622,47,217,691],"class_list":["post-61703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-quotations","category-religion","tag-ideology","tag-islam","tag-rights","tag-unitednations"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-g3d","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61703"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104858,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61703\/revisions\/104858"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}