There is a widely shared belief, both within and outside the Muslim world, that Islamic law cannot be reconciled with the modern human rights regime that developed out of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights ( udhr ). Many Muslims perceive that the purportedly individualistic, secular, and Western orientation of human rights is alien to Islamic values. Abdulaziz Sachedina and other scholars of Islam have argued that the underlying tenets of the udhr and its progeny are simply incompatible with Islamic law. In reality, the problem is not an underlying conflict between human rights and Islam, but the mistaken assumption that the modern nation-state is the proper institution for interpreting and enforcing Islamic law.