Humanitarian Crises and International Relations (1959–2013)

Sadaka is also very often invoked in the hadiths to show that charity diminishes and abolishes

Sadaka is among the five pillars of Islam. Sadaka is a spiritual link and expression of solidarity with all other Muslims.

Field research proved beggars and the dispossessed remained a constant to all societies around the Mediterranean. The scourge of poverty was shared, regardless of Islamic or Christian cultures.

Compassion for the poor shifted from a civic-oriented responsibility to one of spiritual value

form of collective conscience or sense of duty to the most vulnerable citizens

The evolution of charity from a civic responsibility to religious grounds was a remarkable fact during the centuries after Christ and Muhamed

philanthropy, tsedaka was viewed as a religious obligation.

Similarly, both Judaism and Islam advanced the notion of sadaka, both of which resonated with the Christian notion of charity. In classical Hebrew, the notion of tsedaka means right, fairness, or justice. In Judaism, tsedaka refers to the religious obligation to perform charity and philanthropic acts

The notion of “humanitarian” is rooted in the notion of charity.

Charity, as a concept, was prevalent in the regions around the Mediterranean Sea prior to the advent of Christianity. Greeks and Romans maintained a political and social notion of what was referred to as euergetism, a term derived from Greek to mean: “I do good things”.