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The first mistaken conception is this. Some Muslim theorists argue that only God can proclaim what justice, right, and rights are; hence parliaments and other state institutions lack the sovereignty to create laws and to proclaim rights. They presume that Western states in their legislation and the UN in their Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 claim such sovereignty. Many Western theorists share their view, differing only in the evaluation. But human rights imply that states must follow them and lack the sovereignty for legislation incompatible with them. The German constitution is explicit on this lack of human sovereignty. It declares in Art.1: “The following basic rights shall bind the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary as directly applicable law.” Hence, the idea of human rights implies that human rights and basic principles of legislation are valid not because states have declared them but because of their inherent qualities. It also implies that states are legitimate only if they conform to such basic principles and excludes the idea that the principles are legitimate because states or mankind have accepted them. Therefore, Western and Islam conceptions of law and sovereignty are less different than they seem. Second, it is generally accepted in Islam and the West that there is a right and even the duty of every human being to fight for justice and the protection of human rights. But there are two conceptions of such a fight both in Islam and the West. The model of the fight for human rights in the centralist conception is a bureaucracy that imposes its rules on the cases it administers. The model in the autonomous conception is a scientific community that solves its differences by principles developed in the community itself.

The legitimacy debate between ‘universal’ human rights and its apparent conflict with the Islamic value system (broadly characterized as the ‘relativist’ challenge to ‘universal’ human rights) is still far from settled. My paper will reflect on this debate in terms of the current international treaty law. <br />The paper will consider this conflict in the light of the interaction of Islamic states with multilateral human rights regimes, starting from United Nations Charter, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the two covenants (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights) and the stream of other international and regional human rights regimes. It will analyze through the ‘reservations’ clause of human rights regimes, the interaction between ‘universal’ human rights and Islamic law. <br />In particular, it will focus on how Islamic states have put forward what has come to be known as the “Islamic reservations”, and it will attempt to outline to what extent these reservations are contradictory to universal human rights, as noted in the objections to these reservations by various states parties to the treaties. An assessment will also be made of the extent to which the human rights to which the ‘Islamic reservations’ have been made, may actually be incorporated into the legal systems of the reserving Islamic countries. <br /><strong> </strong>

Second language writing instruction has been greatly influenced by the growing importance of technology and the recent shift of paradigm from a cognitive to a social orientation in second language acquisition (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006). Therefore, the applications of computer-assisted language learning and activity theory have been suggested as a promising framework for writing studies. The present study aimed to investigate the perception of Iranian EFL learners of the efficacy and affordance of activity theory integrated with computer-assisted language learning in writing improvement. To this end, sixty-seven sophomores majoring in English translation were selected as the participants of this study. The writing instruction was geared to an e-learning platform based on the six elements of activity theory--subject, object, mediating artifacts, rules, community, and division of labor--appropriate for the writing course. The students were assigned to write nine expository paragraphs on six different developmental patterns and share various relevant materials on the platform during the treatment. Their assignments were carefully monitored and evaluated by the instructor. Upon the completion of the treatment, the students completed a closed-ended questionnaire and an open-ended questionnaire and took part in a semi-structured focus group interview to express their perception. The results showed that the students held favorable perception toward the use of computer-assisted language learning within the activity theory framework. The findings of the study also revealed that there was a significant difference among the students' perception concerning the four mediating elements of activity theory.

While the advantages of cooperative learning activities have been extensively acknowledged in L2 literature, this type of pedagogy has not received due attention in the Iranian EFL context. Indeed, the traditional reading method still dominates in most Iranian EFL university classes even though it fails to meet its main objective which is training competent EFL readers. In an attempt to address this challenge, the current case study incorporated cooperative learning pedagogy into two EFL reading comprehension classes in a medium size university in Iran and sought learners’ behaviors and reflections toward the student-centered activities they engaged in during an academic semester. To serve that end, two volunteer cohorts of learners (less and more experienced) from two EFL reading comprehension classes were recruited. Class observation field notes along with focus group interviews comprised the data collection instruments of the study.  While the learners’ behaviors and activities were recorded in observation field notes throughout the semester, the two focus groups were interviewed right after the course had finished. Data analyses indicated that the learners expressed favorable attitudes toward the new approach they were involved in, even though some issues were raised by the interviewees. Some pedagogical implications and recommendations are proposed for efficient incorporation of cooperative learning activities in EFL reading comprehension classes which have traditionally been dominated by teachers based on the findings of the current study.

The present study investigated differential effect of two types of feedback namely, computer-mediated and metalinguistic, on Iranian EFL learners’ writing accuracy. To this end, based on Nelson Proficiency Test (300 A), 69 Iranian advanced EFL learners, including 45 males and 24 females, aged between 17 and 24, learning English in language institutes in Salmas, were selected randomly out of the total population of 121 EFL learners and then divided into three groups. The participants in the two experimental groups received metalinguistic and computer-mediated feedback separately while those in the control group received no feedback. The analyses of the results obtained through a pre-test and a post-test indicated that both feedback types significantly influenced learners’ writing accuracy. However, analysis of the participants’ performances on the post-test demonstrated that metalinguistic group outperformed computer-mediated one. Thus, the effect of metalinguistic feedback was more than that of computer-mediated feedback. In addition, both of them were more influential than no-feedback instruction. The findings of the present study can be fruitful for syllabus designers and EFL teachers. 

This paper focuses on the impact of an asynchronous online discussion forum on the development of students’ ability in and attitudes toward writing in English. Two groups of third-year students (N = 60) majoring in English were assigned to two treatment and control groups, each receiving different types of feedback. Students in the treatment group were required to participate in an online learning environment and exchange feedback with their peers, whereas students in the control group received the traditional face-to-face feedback provided by the teacher. The results of a pre-test, a post-test, and a survey revealed that students’ writing in the treatment group significantly improved, both semantically and syntactically, and they expressed more positive attitudes toward writing. The findings also indicated that as a result of engaging in the asynchronous online discussion forum and exchanging feedback with peers, students exhibited more control over their work, involved more effectively with the learning tasks, collaborated more with their classmates, and employed self-assessment strategies to independently revise or rewrite their work. The implications of the study offer guidelines to improve and facilitate writing skill in EFL contexts.