Human Rights Lesson from Selected Malay Proverbs

Human rights culture is relatively new in Malaysia. Thus, locating and unearthing the values of human dignity from traditional heritage would help to enhance understanding on modern human rights. An attempt to connect traditional values buried under Malay proverbs with contemporary sociological findings should be made. In order to make this attempt successful, George F. Mclean’s formulated framework ‘human rights and the dialogue of civilizations’, together with the categorisation of Malay proverbs by Syed Hussein Alatas, was chosen. Mclean’s formulation looks into the needs of civilisations in dialogue, values and virtues, cultures and traditions and the ontological foundation of the many faces of humanity. Syed Hussein Alatas’s categorisation of Malay proverbs helps to select suggestive and ‘reprimandative proverbs’ that contain human rights values. This essay intends to identify features of human rights in traditional society, and by doing so, challenges the notion that human rights are a Western product and incompatible with the culture and religion of Islam.