When Socrates famously asked, “What is justice?”, he was able to elicit many responses from his interlocutors and to direct the discussion in myriad directions. Is justice related to the treatment of friends and enemies? Does it revolve around issues of war and peace? Is it confined to relations between the strong and weak? Does it involve utilitarian calculations? Is it a gift of revelation or the fruit of reason? Does it involve questions of morality? Does it concern the individual, the individual and society, the soul—or does it transcend relationships and stand alone as an abstract ideal? The conversation has been long and winding, and it continues to this day.

How has this conversation proceeded among Muslims, and how does the Muslim conversation merge with the contemporary conversation about justice raging in the West?

To begin, two Arabic words are usually translated as justice: ¢adl and qisţ. Although these two terms have nuances that allow us to differentiate between them in some contexts, they are usually viewed as synonyms, a practice we’ll also follow here.

Muslim scholars define justice most fully as “executing governance on the basis of the Book of God and the Sunnah of His Messenger, not on the basis of pure opinion.”1 Imam al-Shāfi¢ī, a pioneering Muslim legal scholar, states, “Justice is following [God’s] revealed edicts.”2 This obvious connection between justice and the divine law is one of the ways Muslims understand justice. However, other ways of understanding the term are not so immediately attached to the law. For example, most Qur’anic usages of justice involve impartiality and equity in human relations. For example, the Qur’an enjoins believers to be staunch advocates for justice:

O you who believe! Be those standing firm for justice, witnesses for God; even if it be against yourselves, your parents, or your relatives––regardless of [any party] being rich or poor, God more rightly knows their case [than you do]. Do not follow your vain desire, leading you to swerve from justice. If you swerve or turn away from the truth, God is well-informed concerning all that you do. (4:135)

This verse leaves no room for considerations of blood relations or socioeconomic status when standing for justice. Considerations of religion, from a strictly theological perspective, are likewise irrelevant. If one chooses to swerve from the truth by showing partiality, “God more rightly knows their case.” If you hide the truth in this world, it will be manifest in the hereafter, and you will be held accountable for your sin.

A related verse emphasizes this demand for impartiality from another perspective, while highlighting the relationship between God-consciousness and justice. God says:

O you who believe! Be those standing firm for God, witnesses for justice, and do not allow the hatred of a people to prevent you from being just. Be just, for that is closer to God-consciousness. Fear God. Verily, God knows well all that you do. (5:8)

The methods proposed by Kant and Rawls to arrive at their abstract ideal of justice are too abstruse to produce a shared value system, which has led to political instability and social fragmentation.

Muslim religious life is subsumed under two great objectives: adhering to the commandments of God, based upon the injunction to “be those standing firm for God,” and demonstrating compassion to His creation, beginning with our fellow humans, in accordance with being “witnesses for justice.” The believers are then enjoined to disregard potentially damaging emotional responses––in this case, responding to the temptation to treat unjustly those you may hate or who hate you––a quite demanding standard of justice.



This demand for impartiality is especially binding on rulers and judges. Consider, for example, the following verse: “Verily, God commands you to convey all trusts to their rightful possessors, and when you judge between [or rule over] people, to do so with justice” (4:58). The influential Qur’anic exegete Imam al-Qurţubī mentions that this order applies to anyone in a position of authority in any realm of human relations.3 Al-Burūsawī and others specifically define justice in this context as “fairness and equity.”4

The responsibility to uphold justice as fairness is binding on all members of a Muslim society, not just on judges and rulers. In a well-known hadith, the Prophet ﷺ stated:

I am human. You bring your disputes to me. One of you is more persuasive than another, and I [may] rule in his favor on the basis of what I hear from him. Therefore, for the one I have ruled in favor of concerning something rightfully belonging to his brother, let him not take it. Rather, I have portioned off for him a piece of hellfire.5

This hadith emphasizes the importance of truthfulness for claimants, thereby assisting judges in arriving at a proper verdict. Likewise, rulers are to be assisted in upholding the rule of law. When Abū Bakr g succeeded the Prophet Muĥammad ﷺ as leader of the Muslim community, he famously said, “If I do well, assist me, and if I err, correct me.”6 This collective societal responsibility helps to create an environment that encourages justice. Even the prophets f were enjoined to adhere to the same laws as ordinary believers. The Prophet Muĥammad ﷺ stated, “Indeed, God has ordained the believers the same commandments He has ordained for the messengers.”7

Considering the sources of justice leads us to the concept of natural law, or the idea that justice conforms, in the words of Sophocles, to the “unwritten, everlasting prescriptions of the gods.”8 A Muslim jurist who bases his or her rulings on divine revelation or on principles derived from revelation is merely writing down or codifying what was previously unwritten. Revelation thus constitutes the first moral foundation for justice from the Islamic perspective.

Kant, to take one modern example, while affirming natural law, rejects revelation as a foundation for justice and argues that justice must have its foundation in the rational choices of autonomous human beings. In his view, revelation, which privileges God by rendering the divine above the laws governing human actions, undermines human autonomy. This is so because conforming to that law, especially according to Muslim understanding, is motivated by a desire for paradise or the pursuit of God’s favor or the security provided by a community of similarly oriented individuals or avoiding the torment of hell or other objectives that rob us of true autonomy. Kant refers to this sort of motivation as “heteronomy.” Hence, he proposes a theory of justice based on an objective foundation, discoverable by reason, embodied in his categorical imperative.9 A full articulation of Kant’s categorical imperative would be lengthy and complicated. Michael J. Sandel ably summarizes the idea in its two iterations:

The first version Kant calls the formula of the universal law: “Act only on the maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” By “maxim,” Kant means a rule or principle that gives the reason for your action. He is saying, in effect, that we should act only on principles that we could universalize without contradiction….

The moral force of the categorical imperative becomes clearer in Kant’s second formulation of it, the formula of humanity as an end. Kant introduces the second version of the categorical imperative as follows: We can’t base the moral law on any particular interests, purposes, or ends, because then it would be only relative to the persons whose ends they were. “But suppose there was something whose existence has in itself an absolute value,” as an end in itself. “Then in it, and in it alone, would there be the ground for a possible categorical imperative.”10

John Rawls, an influential modern justice theorist, likewise rejects revelation or any other consideration that would remove the “veil of ignorance.” That veil is a denuded, primordial, abstract state of consciousness that would lead humans to agree on a shared, rationally defined, objective standard of justice. Rawls describes his veil in this passage:

Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, his strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.11

Both Kant and Rawls would argue that revelation could never lead to a universal morality, as a particular revelation privileges a specific community of believers, thereby being unjust to those who reject it. However, the methods proposed by Kant and Rawls to arrive at their abstract ideal of justice are too abstruse to produce a shared value system, which has contributed to the political instability and social fragmentation we are currently witnessing here in the West. I would propose that a firmer foundation for a common conception of justice and morality could be found in the shared values of the Abrahamic religions, which historically produced stable polities in medieval Spain, as well other places in the premodern world.12

Muslims go further than merely embracing religion as a private concern. They argue that religion, while being subjectively affirmed by individual humans, has been instituted by God to protect five objective universals (al-kulliyyāt al-khams): religion itself, life, the intellect, family, and property.13 Some add honor as a sixth universal.14 Religion, owing to its theocentric nature, might be the only universal many modern people find controversial in this set of universals. Islam, however, acknowledges a non-theocentric foundation for justice. This source is a universal human nature or an innate disposition (fiţrah) that allows humans to agree upon certain acceptable and unacceptable actions. These actions can be known independently from revelation, which can be seen as affirming them. These twin sources of justice––revelation and human nature––are summarized in the following verse:

These are the ones who follow the Messenger, the unlettered Prophet, whom they find inscribed with them in the Torah and the Gospel. He commands for them what is right (al-ma ¢ rūf) and forbids for them what is wrong (al-munkar). He makes lawful for them the wholesome (al-ţayyibāt) and prohibits for them impurities (al-khabā’ith). He relieves them of the burden of oaths and strictures previously placed upon them. Therefore, those who believe in him reverence him, assist him, and follow the light sent down to him. They are the ones who succeed. (7:157)

Most of the exegetes opine that what is right, in the context of this verse, is what is declared lawful by revelation, while what is wrong is what revelation declares to be unlawful. This is the first foundation of justice, emphasized by Imam al-Shāfi¢ī and others. Many exegetes posit that the wholesome and impurities, which are mentioned subsequently in the verse, comprise respectively those things human nature finds agreeable, good, and pleasurable and those things it finds repulsive, bad, and despicable. Human nature, therefore, is the second moral foundation of justice for Muslims.

The renowned theologian and exegete, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, comments on the wholesome and impurities after rejecting an interpretation that would render them synonymous with what is right and what is wrong:

Rather, it is necessary to interpret what is intended by al-ţayyibāt as agreeable, beneficial things according to human nature. This is because engaging with them brings delight [which is a benefit], and the ruling in beneficial things is lawfulness. This verse indicates that the ruling in everything the soul finds agreeable and good, and human nature finds delightful, is lawfulness—unless there is a detailed countervailing proof….

Anything the soul finds vile, and human nature finds filthy, engaging it is a source of pain [which involves harm], and the ruling for harmful things is unlawfulness.15

From this, we can understand that there are two “laws behind the laws”: revelation and the law of human nature, or fiţrah. While the former is the ultimate arbiter for Muslims, the latter by itself leads to a set of universally recognized and morally acceptable actions. The universality of these actions is rooted in the innate disposition humans have been fashioned upon. We read in the Qur’an:

Orient your face towards the true religion in accord with your innate disposition. [This is] the nature (fiţrah) of God upon which He has fashioned humanity. Let there be no alteration in the creation of God. That is the upright religion; however, most people realize it not. (30:30)

Muslims view fiţrah as a disposition shared with all human beings, moving it beyond immediate religious considerations. If we accept this, we accept that certain universally accessible and widely understandable actions (such as compassion for infants and the defense of the helpless) can rightfully serve as the source of a social order wherein people may differ religiously, even philosophically, while possessing sufficient shared values to allow for the formation of a viable political community. That community is grounded in a common sense of justice that keeps its members loyal to the polity and committed to its perpetuity.

The believer understands that, despite the joy to be found in the world—amidst its trials, tribulations, tests, and travails—the world remains a transitory way station on our journey to the hereafter.

Some would argue that such actions are not “natural,” in that they do not conform to a preexisting propensity to undertake them. We witness, for example, bystanders idly watching as a helpless person perishes. The Qur’anic response is that humans have been created in the very best of forms, and those forms naturally orient us toward good. It is nurture that distorts or covers up this natural inclination toward good. We read in the Qur’an, “We have created the human in the best of forms; then we reduce him to the lowest of the low” (95:4–5). Al-Burūsawī states, concerning this debasement:

Then We made him among the people of hellfire, which is the vilest and lowest of all things, because of his failure to conform to the requirements of the forms We created him upon. Had he acted upon the requirement of these attributes, he would be in the highest reaches of paradise.16

The North African exegete Ţāhir b. ¢Āshūr expounds more fully on this verse and its implications:



17 The verse informs us that the human is naturally disposed toward good and that in his nature is a disposition to provide benefit and good to himself, as well as hating what he thinks is false or a source of ruin. [He is also disposed toward] loving goodness and excellent actions. Thus, you see him pleased by justice and fairness. He advocates what brings good to others, relieves the distressed, acts with goodness, and protects the oppressed.

The implication of this is that the theocentric foundation of justice, which is voluntarily accepted by Muslims, and the natural foundation, which can arguably be accepted by all humans, lead to two complementary moral foundations of justice. Translating these foundations into functional legal institutions was one of the great objectives of the premodern Muslim legal project. Historically, it gave birth to the likes of the Ottoman millet system and provided the foundation for flourishing pluralistic cultural and political communities throughout the Muslim realm. Admittedly, those institutions and communities were not perfect, neither in theory nor in practice. They do, however, provide contemporary Muslims with a rich foundation from which they can begin to address the challenges currently threatening humanity’s harmonious coexistence.