Dr. Mohammad Hussein Bashayreh
Associate Professor of Commercial Law – School of Law – University of Yarmouk – Jordan

Abstract:

Globalisation has invaded all economic and cultural walks of life, introducing a challenge for protecting the cultural identity. While the family is intuitively an institution that safeguards this identity and its underlying values, it is itself vulnerable to the winds of globalisation that carry the seeds of concepts peculiar to Western societies. These concepts are spread under the promotion of human rights in their Western interpretation and concept of their universality, which rests upon individualism that has reached an extreme point in the last decades, claiming that the individual must be empowered to realise his self and will. According to this concept, self-reliasation is unattainable unless the individual is liberated from family values and respect for religion; thus the definition of the family has been revised and homosexuality has been imposed into the realm of right although scientific studies prove that it is a treatable disorder. And the promotion of human rights has been concentrating on the concept of universality that overrides cultural or social specificity and denies cultural diversity. This article aims to present an Arab-Islamic concept of the universality of human rights that ensures respect for them without undermining the social and religious values underlying the Arab and Islamic societies using positive legal bases, taking the Jordanian legal system as a case study, illustrating the principle of equality from a legal and Shariah perspective compared with the Western, materialistic conception of equality.
Keywords:
Equality; cultural globalization; women rights; interpretation of international conventions.
Punishment for the above-mentioned crimes is not a major legal

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