Book Review [Minority Rights in the Middle East, by Joshua Castellino and Kathleen A. Cavanaugh]

Abstract

One can scarcely imagine a more acute test of democratic governance today—in the Middle East or beyond, including Europe—than the issue of minority citizenship. Indeed, this volume is part of a series of works from Oxford University Press on the legal and political aspects of minority rights at large. Over a decade ago, Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman noted a stubborn general tendency to separate matters of democratic citizenship from minority equity, despite the resurgence of interest in both.This is all the more vexing given the shared challenges: the public role of religion, globalized mobility, and the growing demands for communal autonomy, among others. In the Middle East, as elsewhere, these trends and their implications need to be understood in their unfolding historical context; the alternative is to reduce complexity to slogans such as ‘the clash of civilizations’ and ‘Islam is the problem’. It is salutary that the authors of Minority Rights in the Middle East are alert not only to Orientalist pitfalls but also to the need for a wider ethical critique of the normative frameworks at hand, regional and global alike.