multiculturalism

This article addresses contentious questions concerning individual freedom and democratic citizenship education in the contemporary circumstances of multiculturalism. It suggests that educating children for civic equality is an ambitious aim for any democracy and not one that can ever be realized once and for all. It provides evidence that multicultural conditions can challenge the very aim of educating children for civic equality. It explains that democracies are variously multicultural and the varieties of groups make a difference in the kind of education and the progress toward civic equality that can realistically be expected at any time.

The guiding question of this paper is “How can, if at all, the universality of human rights survive critical examinations within the prevailing multiculturalist frame of reference?” This paper examines the possibility conditions of critically reasoning for the universality of human rights. The discussions in this paper runs at two levels of analysis. At the conceptual level, a theoretical monist-pluralist frame of reference will be developed to reformulate the problematic of the universality of human rights in a form more compatible methodologically with multiculturalist approaches in the humanities, social sciences and current discourses of cultural studies. Demonstrating the weaknesses of the alternative solutions, the main hypothesis of this study suggests to refer to a reconstructed version of the “golden rule of reciprocal fairness.” At the practical level, this paper will set forth three “why”, “which”, and “how” questions regarding those principles which can bolster a universal reception of the human rights as fairness.  

Secularism is a political ideology that disintegrates religion from state governance. While secularism may work for countries where the majority professed religion that has no specific legal system viz. Christianity, it begins to exhibit its ineptness in countries that either have a multicultural identity or adopt a systematic religion like Islam as its official religion. To unravel this, secularism acquiesced to embody two divisions of secularism entailing freedom of religion and freedom from religion. The objective of the writing is to resolve the conflicts of the secularism ideology in multicultural state.  The methodology adopted in the research is doctrinal legal research which employed qualitative research. For multicultural counterparts, the absolute disintegration of religion raises difficulties, hence, they opt for the secular concept of freedom of religion. However, from the Islamic perspective, secularism contrasts with Islamic teachings as it is conclusive in every aspect of human life. It has its own foundations and laws that shall be followed at all times. Additionally, the impacts of secularism on the social, educational, and moral aspects have made its germaneness be put in question. Thus, there must be a law to regulate the abovementioned matter in order to ensure the community live with peace and harmony