Human Rights: Christian Roots and Contemporary Challenge

I want to make it clear that this topic is of particular interest to me: when I was at university, I took a full semester of a subject devoted, in Arabic, to Islamic declarations of human rights.

The recent death of Jürgen Habermas, who, in his famous dialogue with Joseph Ratzinger had reflected on the «pre-political» foundations of the liberal state, he once again brings to the forefront a decisive question: on what foundations do secularism and human rights really rest in our democracies? In this debate, the secular philosopher recognized that religious traditions can offer moral resources that the state alone is unable to produce, as long as they can be translated into a language accessible to all in the public sphere. 

In the West, we take it for granted that every person, by the mere fact of being a human being, possesses inalienable rights, regardless of his or her social class or origin. However, it is important to remember that this view did not come out of nowhere, but has its roots in the Christian tradition.

Freedom and the person in the Christian heritage

The great German philosopher Georg Hegel, in his work “Introduction to the History of Philosophy”, states: “Neither the Greeks, nor the Romans, nor the Asiatics knew that man, as man, is born free: they knew nothing of this concept. They knew that an Athenian, a Roman citizen, an ‘ingenuus’, is free: that freedom is granted and not slavery. However, they did not know that man is free as man - that is, universal man, man as conceived by thought and as apprehended in thought. It was Christianity that brought the doctrine that before God all men are free.”.

This leads to a paradigm shift: the dignity of the person no longer depends on birth, status or education, but on the simple fact of having been created in the image of God. For this reason, for authors such as Marcello Pera, the culture of human rights in the West is based on a moral choice of Christian origin: a moral law prior to the positive law, which is the foundation of equality and the inviolability of fundamental rights.

Pope Catechism of the Catholic Church recalls furthermore that freedom has its foundation in reason and will, and that every person, as the image of God, has the natural right to be recognized as free and responsible. The right to exercise freedom, especially in the moral and religious sphere, must therefore also be recognized and protected in the civil sphere, within the limits of the common good.

Tradition« in Christianity

How has the idea of freedom and human rights evolved in Christian and Islamic thought? Differently, since they are two different systems of thought, starting with the idea of God, his attributes and the interpretation of the sacred texts.

The different conceptions of freedom can be attributed both to theology and to the limitations imposed by the interpretation of the sacred texts, the Bible and the Koran.

In Christianity, and in particular in Catholicism, the constitution “Dei Verbum” affirms that, although God is the author of the corpus of sacred texts, those who wrote these texts were men inspired by God, with their own historical and cultural limitations.

Therefore, Scripture must not be understood as dictated directly by God, but must be interpreted «critically», through a hermeneutic based on multiple disciplines: the historical-critical method, linguistic, textual, comparative, etc. analysis.

Faith and reason, religion and science, revelation and tradition go hand in hand and allow the faithful to assimilate the divine teachings through the seal constituted by the apostolic tradition and the doctrine of the Church. The famous phrase «Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's,» pronounced by Jesus and recorded in the Gospels, constitutes, so to speak, the basis of the so-called separation of powers in Christianity.

The Islamic vision

In Islam, this separation does not exist: there is an indissoluble union between divine power and temporal authority. In fact, the constructive work of derivation of «law,» of «right» (Arabic: “shari'a”), both religious and secular, is based on four sources (the Qur'an, the sunna, the qiyās and the iǧmā‛) and is called “iǧtihād” (from ǧ-h-d, the same root as the term “ǧihād”). This effort, a genuine elaboration of Islamic positive law, based however on a «revealed» word, lasted until the tenth century, when the legal schools (“maḍhab”) were formed, after which time «the gates of ‘iǧtihād’» are considered officially closed. Since then the idea prevails that no further innovations should be introduced (“bid‛a”).

The rigorist currents, such as Wahhabism and Salafism, insist on a return to the «golden age» of the pious ancestors (“salaf”), in particular the model of Medina and the first caliphs. It is true that the Islamic world is very varied, with different schools and interpretations, but the idea that revealed law has primacy over state legislation remains common. 

The vision of the human being: the basis of the human rights discourse

As we have seen, the concept of «human right» is based on the so-called natural law, which in the West has been recognized through the moral perspective of Christianity. 

Hegel points out that, for Christianity, the individual has infinite value because he is the object of God's love and is destined for the greatest freedom in his relationship with God.

This means that human freedom has an origin, a cause and an objective: to be like God in the relationship with Him, a relationship that deepens throughout life and makes the meaning of existence to be discovered, not invented.

Authors such as Vladimir Soloviev point out that, in classical Islam, we do not find, on the contrary, an ideal of «divinumanity», that is, of perfect union of man with God. The emphasis is rather on submission to God and the observance of the commandments that define religious life from the outside. 

Christian fundamentalisms

While there are those who accuse Muslims alone of religious fundamentalism, it should be remembered that in the Christian sphere there are also fundamentalist currents and groups. In these contexts, the Bible (especially the Old Testament) is read in a rigid and literal way, without the filter of the living Tradition of the Church, of the magisterium and of the critical exegetical method adopted by the Catholic Church. 

Some forms of Christian fundamentalism tend to reject the distinction between Church and State, to distrust modern human rights and to reduce the Gospel to a juridical code to be imposed on society through political power. In this way they obscure the vision of the person - free, responsible and capable of dialogue - which is one of the most precious fruits of the Christian tradition.

The recent magisterium, from the Second Vatican Council onwards, has clearly distanced itself from any ideological use of Christianity and from any form of violence perpetrated in the name of God, reaffirming the primacy of conscience, religious freedom and the rejection of any coercion in matters of faith.

Declarations of rights: the UN and the Islamic world

These theological and anthropological differences have had concrete consequences. Paradoxically, although not as much so, the Christian vision has contributed to give rise to the modern liberal state and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), in which the foundation of law is the human being himself and natural law is interpreted from a secular perspective. 

In the Islamic world, on the other hand, the UN Declaration has often been considered an expression of a secularized Judeo-Christian tradition and therefore not fully acceptable. Diplomat Sa'id Rajaie Khorasani (representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the UN) defined it, for example, as «a secular interpretation of the Judeo-Christian tradition.». 

Thus various «Islamic declarations» of rights emerged: the Islamic Declaration of Human Rights (1981), the Cairo Declaration (1990) and the Arab Charter of Human Rights (1984). In all these texts, rights refer explicitly to divine Islamic law: it is God, through the Koran and the sharia, who is the sole supreme legislator of relations between individuals. 

Consequently, religious law prevails over secular law, and no Muslim should be compelled to violate sharia law; indeed, he or she may feel entitled to disregard state laws that contradict it. In practice, the scope of rights differs from what is understood from a Western perspective. 

Some critical points

There are some problematic points in the Islamic declarations in relation to the Western concept of universal human rights. Among them, it is worth noting:

• Lack of full equality between men and women: in the family codes of all Muslim countries, men enjoy advantages in inheritance, child custody, repudiation and testimony. 
• Denial of the right to apostasy: switching from Islam to another religion remains a very serious crime, sometimes punishable by death.
• Limited religious freedom: Muslims are allowed to profess and publicly manifest their faith, while restrictions for other religions can be very strict. 
• Conditional freedom of thought and expression: although there is a margin of freedom, the State may limit or control it if it considers it dangerous to the security of the community, by controlling the media and social networks (as is the case in Iran). 

These elements show how the claim of universality of rights is, in fact, reformulated in the light of religious law.

A challenge for dialogue

In conclusion, all fundamentalism - whether religious or ideological - is incompatible with the effective recognition of the dignity and rights of the person, because it arises from a refusal to face the complexity of reality and generates exclusion, if not violence. 

And that course at the university, along with my life experiences, taught me that anyone who cares about human rights must fight fundamentalism, first and foremost, within his or her own tradition.