The philosophical tradition that produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has a specific geography in the modern imagination: Greece, Rome, the Enlightenment, Paris, Philadelphia. This geography is not wrong. It is incomplete.
In the cave outside Axum, in 1667, I wrote: "God created me with intelligence. Because God is good, what my reason tells me about good and evil must be trustworthy." This is a human rights argument. It predates much of the European Enlightenment. It arises from an entirely different tradition.
I make this point not from pride of origin but from a practical concern. If you believe that reason and dignity are the inventions of one civilization, you can accept or reject them as a package. If you understand that they have been arrived at independently, through different routes, by thinkers across multiple centuries and continents, then they begin to look like conclusions rather than premises — something harder to dismiss.
The person who has genuinely examined themselves arrives, eventually, at the same recognition I arrived at in that cave: that what you most want for yourself is exactly what you owe others. This is not soft. It is the most rigorous conclusion reason has ever reached.