Radical/extremist Islamist actors use social media to disseminate uncompromising stories of monist religious political orders and identities. As a reaction, counter-movements to online Islamist radicalism/extremism emerged in Western societies (and beyond), while uncertainty about effective outcomes remains widespread. In a bid to understand how inclusionary and exclusionary discursive spaces are created, we ask: How do some Muslim actors create discursive spaces open to self-reflection, pluralism and liberal-democratic principles, while others construct illiberal, particularistic and non/anti-democratic spaces? To respond to this question, we compare two contrasting storytellers, one who agitates for exclusionary Islamist radicalism/extremism (Generation Islam) and one who offers inclusionary prevention and deradicalization work against that (Jamal al-Khatib). We draw on novel narrative approaches to the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), via which we compare text-level and context-level narratives disseminated about three Muslim-related crises: the racist terrorist attacks/genocide to represent the national, European and global level. Our two-layered, DHA-inspired narrative analysis illustrates that, at the level of text, narrative persuasion varies between both contrasting actors. While Jamal al-Khatib disseminates persuasive stories, Generation Islam is much less invested in narrative persuasion; it seems to address an already convinced audience. These two text-level strategies reveal their meaning in two antagonistic narrative genres: Jamal al-Khatib’s “self-reflexive savior” creates an inclusionary discursive space represented in a self-ironic narrative genre, while Generation Islam’s ”crusading savior” manufactures an exclusionary discursive space represented in a romance featuring a nostalgic return to the particularistic Islamic umma.

The current scientific debate about the universality of human rights can be structured into a horizontal and a vertical dimension. Whereas the horizontal dimension is about the different ways one can approach the topic “human rights” from different disciplines, the vertical dimension is dealing with the fundamental question whether human rights are universal or particularistic. However, the debate lacks the view of the most important group: the individual human being. Consequently, this paper aims to bring the individual’s perspective on universal human rights into focus by a) striking a balance between universal and particularistic views on human rights and b) building on a realistic human nature in order to understand and embrace the individual’s conviction. The approach meeting these two criteria is a combination of Rainer Forst’s “right to justification” and Richard Rorty’s “sentimental education”. This is the only way to an individually backed and culturally sensitive universality.