The Marrakesh Declaration, approved on January 2016, in Morocco by more than 250 Muslim religious leaders, heads of state, and scholars, represents essential progress for the qualification of religious freedom in international law. Seen within a political and territorial context, it represents a crucial milestone in the research and definition of individual subjects’ freedom. The aim of the declaration is to create a formal structure for this fundamental right, useful as a standard in societies identified by their religious profile (Muslim-majority countries). In Western democracies, for example, the principle of ” religious freedom ” is rarely disputed—or so it would appear—because it is seen to enable and entitle everyone to exercise privately, or in public, his/her own rituals. However, the individual declinations of this ” principle, ” as well as its translation and execution into positive law, are not always successfully shared or supported. The ways in which it is permissible for individuals and groups to exercise their religious freedom are not clearly defined. The classification of the ” allowed ” and ” not allowed ” acts of worship (in the jurisprudence of some countries) is continuously being updated as religious communities increasingly make claims aligned with their publicly expressed exigencies including, for example, the right to dress or eat according to their own religion precepts. Modern legal systems, in turn, face issues directly attributable to the cultural and religious diversity of the population. It is evident that one of the challenges of our current period is the management of religious conflicts, and that among the crucial roles of the law is that of attaining ” social peace. ” It is through the law, in fact, that we must seek concrete ways to increase religious freedom in the world, although we are certainly aware that a merely quantitative increment will not be enough without a concurrent qualitative improvement in our ability to let people ” be themselves, ” while remaining within their social and legal contexts. The real challenge is allowing people to wear, eat, work, live, and die according to their cultural exigencies. Surely, achieving these ends would translate into significant improvement in quality of life at both an individual and a group level, in terms of ” social well-being ” and ” social happiness, ” with the immediate and happy consequence of diminishing social tensions resulting from intolerance born of ignorance. The Marrakesh Declaration represents a fundamental move forward in the development of interreligious dialogue and the recognition of the right to religious freedom. The appeal to jurists, instead, seems to be less significant; they are called upon to reformulate the content of the right to religious freedom as a right of all and for all. Clearly in the Islamic world it is necessary to verify the compatibility between a universal right for all and religiously-oriented juridical systems. The document, at least, is focused on the issue of religious liberty, an important and innovative turn that is the real strength of the Marrakesh Declaration. The Declaration, in fact, requests a concrete dedication from the involved countries and Muslim jurists to recreate a right to religious freedom and worship within their legal systems for non-Islamic people, anchored in a ” non-political ” idea of citizenship. In the Western world the document (unexpectedly) made little impression, and the innovative elements of the Declaration seem to have escaped notice. We were there; following the progress of the work we felt strongly that those leaving from the Marrakesh Declaration saw it as a major milestone with the potential to lead to great results; the Declaration and its contents should not, and I believe will not, be ignored.
