The question of whether Islamic laws are compatible with the principles which informs the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has preoccupied many scholars of Islam and human rights for decades. The ensuing debate on this question, however, has yet to result in a definitive answer. On the one side are scholars, particularly those with a legalistic approach, who see the two as fundamentally in conflict, pointing at matters such as the Islamic penal code, discriminatory laws against women, and precepts about religious minorities (note 1). On the other side of the debate, are scholars who challenge the legalistic approach and tackle the question from a historical or a multi-variant perspective (note 2). By doing so they pay more attention to the differences among Muslims, including Muslim scholars, who offer varied interpretations of, and approaches to, Islamic laws, ethics, and philosophy and therefore complicate the incompatibility thesis. To contribute to this debate, this paper studies the positions of two prominent Shii Ayatollahs, Mohammed Taqi Mesbah Yazdi and Hossien Ali Montazeri, on the relationship between Islam and human rights. The approaches of these two Muslim scholars to Islamic laws and human rights have certain elements in common but also reveal some profound and consequential differences. While the position of Mesbah Yazdi on Islam and human rights lends its support to the incompatibility thesis, the position of Montazeri, especially in the last three decades of Montazeri’s life, definitely cast a deep shadow of doubt on that thesis. The overall judgment of this paper, despite the complication that the case of Mesbah Yazdi creates for it, is that the second group, in the above mentioned debate, have provided a more suitable approach for understanding the totality of Islamic experience in its meeting with the contemporary norms of human rights. 1. See, Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Islam and Human Rights, Boulder, 1995, Reza Afshar, Human Rights in Iran: The Abuse of Cultural Relativism, Philadelphia, 2001, and Nazila Ghanea Hercock, Human Rights, the UN and the Baha’is in Iran, Oxford, 2002. For a recent collection of short articles on Islam and human rights go to: http://www.iranrights.org/english/library-86.php 2 See Katerina Dalacoura, Islam, Liberalism, and Human Rights, London, 1998 and Irene Oh, The Rights of God: Islam, Human Rights, and Comparative Ethics, Washington, D.C., 2007.