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Foreword

O you who believe! Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to Allah, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be (against) rich or poor: for Allah can best protect both. Follow not the lusts (of your hearts), lest you swerve, and if you distort (justice) or decline to do justice, verily Allah is well-acquainted with all that you do. (Qur’ān 4:135)

This book is about justice. It is about the blueprint of a social order aimed at restoring equilibrium, harmony and peace. Historically, two schools of thought have illuminated this inquiry: the religious school and the secular school. In this title, the religious school is epitomized by Islam while the secular school is represented by a range of select ancient and contemporary views on justice considered most influential in setting the direction of intellectual debate on this subject. The promise that both these schools offer to their adherents revolves around answering the intriguing question of what constitutes good life. Islam seeks to address this inquiry by taking the position that life is the creation of Allah Who has created humankind to serve as His vicegerent on the earth. In this capacity, people are required to acknowledge Allah, worship Him alone, and manage affairs of the world and use its resources in accordance with His revealed will in the Holy Qur’ān and the Sunnah of the Prophet (peace be upon him). In submitting to this Will lies the secret of good life according to the teachings of Islam. Revelation in this paradigm, therefore, is not only a manual of instruction on faith (‘aqīdah), worship (‘ibādah), and individual morality (khulq) but also a source of general principles of socio-economic and legal guidance which elaborate the concept of justice for social organization.

The religious understanding on life and its purpose has attracted fierce criticism from the secular schools since olden times. It is argued that principles of ethics, economics and politics do not need the aid of metaphysics and can be rationally extracted by reflecting on the life of human beings in a social setting. However, in the absence of a purpose established for mankind from outside, existence understandably becomes an aimless and brute ‘absurdity’ in the secular theory. In a bid to provide life some meaning through philosophical speculation, the focus is shifted to a number of options including Aristotelian stress on virtue, Kantian emphasis on obligation, and the nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers’ accent on preference satisfaction. These reflections, severely at odds with one another, as they cannot but be, work as building blocks of a secular social order and remain infested with contradictions or tensions. The author has done a good job in bypassing the heuristics used in deriving such perspectives and focused instead on the crux of the matter, i.e. the principles advanced for political, economic, and social organization in such thought-streams. Once these diverse principles are critically examined, a comparison between the religious and the secular views sets the scene for an objective assessment of the Islamic position. This evaluation indeed provides a fitting climax to the author’s insightful, penetrating, and at times, breathtaking argument on the pros and cons of many competing perspectives on justice.

There are a number of ways in which this monograph is expected to make a contribution to the existing literature on justice. First, it is a timely effort in examining the substance of contemporary theories on justice from the vantage point of Islam. Such an endeavour had become overdue after a renewed interest in moral philosophy in the Western tradition since the appearance of A Theory of Justice by John Rawls in 1971. Second, this attempt opens up the possibilities for a rational dialogue between Islam and the West on issues widely acknowledged as the root cause of discord between the two civilizations, in fact of the underlying currents of contemporary civilizational crisis. In doing so, it provides an opportunity for readers to rise above the stereotypical images of Islam and evaluate it on logical terms pari passu with the contemporary Western philosophies. Third, this study provides an occasion to appreciate and celebrate the common concerns of humanity as elucidated in threads that run across a range of humanistic Western perspectives on justice and Islam. In fact, it is very clear from the research presented that the differences of opinion among multiple secular positions are starker than those between them and Islam. As the author argues, the Islamic position lies somewhere in the middle of a range of secular liberalisms and Marxian perspectives. Fourth, it is important to reflect deeply on the differences between the Western and the Islamic perspectives, too. In my view, some of these differences stem from an ad hoc and inherently fragmented approach to knowledge and society imbued in the conventional social science approach. As ‘empirical’ evidence grows on the connection between human actions on the one hand and social disruption and environmental disasters on the other, humanity is compelled to belatedly admit its bounded rationality. At this critical juncture, Islam can play a role in holding the hands of the ‘rational animal’ and connect him back with the Superior Intellect without Whose Guidance the human mind cannot transcend oneself and rise above the compulsions and attractions of ‘here and now’ in order to reconcile self-interest with communal harmony and values of justice, freedom and world peace.

In the end, I hope this study will be of interest to students and scholars of diverse interests including those focusing on Islamic economics, political philosophy and global social movements. Equally, I hope it stimulates a series of attempts to provide a more expanded version of Islamic principles of economic and political justice to serve the dual purpose of developing a characteristically Islamic alternative to modernity and participating fully in the global inter-civilizational dialogue on the future shape of the world.