AL-HUDA
Foundation, NJ U. S. A
Newsletter for February 2007
the Message Continues ... 6/66
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Defining Justice in Islam by Dr. Robert D. Crane
Justice is perhaps the most universal value in
all civilizations, which is why there is so much
negative reaction to the failure of American
policy-makers to include freedom and democracy within
the concept of justice as a higher paradigm of thought. Both Sunnis and Shi’a have a common foundation in their classical reliance on justice as central to their Islamic faith, and they have a common need to re-emphasize this in order to apply Islam as a constructive force in the world. The
study of justice in Islam is a distinct discipline.
Although it has never had a distinct name, just as many
Islamic disciplines did not have a name until centuries
after they existed in fact, the best term for the
Islamic study of justice might be ‘Ilm al ‘Adl.
The direct English translation is simply “knowledge of
justice,” which might connote a finished product with
all the challenges in the past. In fact, the classical
study of justice is heuristic in the sense that it seeks
knowledge about the sources, nature, and praxis of
justice, with the challenges lying more in the present
as a means to build on the best of the past in search of
a better future. The simplest definition of ‘ilm al ‘adl is the search for transcendent justice as a source of wisdom to be manifested or embodied in a set of essential principles for a universal code of human responsibilities and rights. Among these is the responsibility to respect freedom of religion. Only when people observe their moral responsibilities can any rights become real.
These two pursuits, the esoteric and the exoteric, as
both the classical Islamic thinkers and their
counterparts, Saint Thomas Aquinas and
Justice is a normative phenomenon in that its
applications must derive from higher norms or purposes.
Rules and regulations applied without guidance from
their higher purposes can produce injustice. In Islamic
jurisprudence the guiding norms are known as the
maqasid or purposes of Islamic law, or as the
dururiyat or essentials, or as the kulliyat
or universal principles.
Justice itself is nothing more than the Will of God, as
indicated in the Qur’anic ayah from Surah al An’am,
6:115, tama’at kalimatu Rabbika sidqan wa ‘adlan,
“The word of Your Lord is perfected and completed in
truth and justice.” Its nature and substance,
however, must be sought out through deduction from the
three sources of knowledge, namely, 1) haqq al yaqin,
known as Revelation; 2) ‘ain al yaqin, known as
natural law or the sunnatu Allahi; and some
jurists would say also from 3) ‘ilm al yaqin,
which is the human intellectual processing of the first
two sources.
In highly simplified explanation, the architectonics of
justice in the Islamic shari’ah consist of a
hierarchy of levels proceeding from the general to the
specific, the highest known as maqasid;
the intermediate or secondary level known as the
hajiyat; and the tertiary level known as
tahsiniyat, which might be compared to the specific
courses of action in program planning.
The number and even the meaning of the maqasid
are flexible, ranging from a generally accepted five a
thousand years ago to seven or more in later centuries.
Differences in interpretation depend in part on whether
one is referring to the maqasid narrowly as law
or more broadly as functional guidelines for public
policy. The strictest definitions are called maslaha
al mu’tabara, the broader as istislah, and
the broadest as istihsan.
We may identify at least seven irreducibly highest
principles. In highest priority, these start with
haqq al din, which for six hundred years until the
present third millennium was ossified in the Sunni
portion of the Muslim world to mean “protection of true
belief,” but in recent decades has been expanded by the
greatest modern scholars, following the lead of Shaykh
Ibn Ashur in the first half of the twentieth century, to
mean “freedom of religion.”
Next come three sets of pairs. The first pair consists
of haqq al haya and haqq al nasl, which
mean the duties, respectively, to respect the human
person and life itself and to respect the nuclear family
and communities at every level that derive from the
sacredness of the human person. The first one, haqq
al haya, includes the elaborate set of principles
that define the limitations of just war. The second one
includes the principle of subsidiarity, which recognizes
that legitimacy expands upwards from community or nation
to state, and not the reverse.
The second set consists of three responsibilities that
deal with institutionalizing economic and political
justice. These are, respectively, haqq al mal
and haqq al hurriya. Political justice is based
on the principles of freedom through both subsidiarity
and self-determination. It must be said that, more
often than not, this second pair of responsibilities
throughout much of Islamdom has been observed in the
breech. And even when the principles are acknowledged,
the derivative lower levels of institutionalized
implementation have been ignored.
The third pair of maqasid consists of haqq al
karama, which is the duty to respect human dignity,
especially in freedom of religion and gender equity, and
the duty to respect knowledge, including the secondary
level of implementation known as freedom of thought,
publication, and assembly.
The
Contributions of Shi’a Islam
Although the very concept
of justice died out in much of the Sunni world, it
survived among the Shi’i scholars over the centuries
because justice, ‘adl, as a normative framework
of thought among the Shi’a had always been the second of
the five statements in the Islamic creed, second only to
awareness and love of Allah, and immediately prior to
the acceptance of prophecy as a means of divine
communication by the Creator to sentient beings in the
Created world.
In the Shi’a school of
thought, what might be known as ‘ilm al ‘adl
encompasses all three of these highest purposes. Within
its purview are not merely what Ibn Ashur introduced as
‘Ilm Maqasid al Shari’ah but the still prior role
of intermediation between the level of existence, within
which the jurisprudential maqasid function, and
the still higher level of intermediation between this
and the Being of Allah. In this intermediation,
prophecy is one form of the more generic phenomenon
known as walaya.
Since Shi’a scholars over
the centuries have focused equally on both fields of
normative thought, the jurisprudential and the
ontological cum epistemological, they have a
responsibility to make their wisdom known. Their
challenge therefore now is to emphasize ‘ilm al ‘adl
as it was developed in fact though not in form by
Imam Jafar al Siddiq, ‘alayhi as-salam, into a
distinct set of what one might call the primary
maqasid (purposes), or kulliyat (universals),
or dururiyat (essentials) in the Shi’a statement
of Islamic belief, namely, taqwa, ‘adl, and
walaya.
The Shi’a concept of
walaya or intermediation between the divine and the
human through the spiritual successors of the Prophet
Muhammad was first developed as a jurisprudential
principle by the sixth Shi’a imam, Jafar al Sadiq,
‘alayhi as-salam, who founded the first of the six
currently recognized schools of Islamic law. Although
it is rejected by the Sunni Muslims, walaya is
directly related to the concept and role of justice
because it emphasizes the higher awareness of the
transcendent, which is basic to ‘ilm al ‘adl.
Since
all spiritually attuned persons in all religions
experience God as light, it is natural to conceive that
ultimate reality becomes manifest only like rays of
light emanating outward from the One and diminishing in
intensity as it moves outward from the center. Most
people live on the periphery or circumference of the
circle, not near its center, which is God, and will
continue to do so until they come into the presence of
God at the end of this life. In his Being as Al Rahman
and his manifestation as Al Rahim, Allah has always
provided guidance to the many through the few, which is
what one may
call
intermediary guidance as expressed in the term walaya,
of which prophecy or nubuwiya is one form.
The two levels of guidance
are not explained merely by the difference between
Revelation or wahy and inspiration or ilham.
The latter is accessible to every person regardless
of one’s “closeness” to Allah, but is not binding in any
way on anyone else. Revelation, which is the primary
source of haqq al yaqin as one of the three
sources of knowledge, is guidance that comes only
through prophets, for which all Muslims believe there
has been no further need since the final revelation in
the Qur’an.
The Shi’a believe that the
Qur’an exists at two levels, one the exoteric in what
one might call the ‘ulum al shari’ah, and the
other in the batin through ta’wil or
knowledge of the higher meanings that form the inner
mystery of the shari’ah or Islamic jurisprudence as a
tariqa or path to knowledge. In His mercy, Allah
provides an infallible guide to the inner meanings of
the Qur’an in order to protect this Uncreated Truth for
future generations. The Shi’a believe that this
intermediary guidance, which is just as essential as the
revelation itself, has been provided by the spiritual
successors of the last prophet.
While rejecting the Shi’a
credal principle of the Imamate, which is the fourth of
the five in the Shi’a creed, the fifth being recognizing
qadir or the absolute power and authority of God,
the Sunnis would do well to learn the science of ‘ilm
al ‘adl from the Shi’a, regardless of their
differences over accepted sources of authority. Working
together and with scholars from other religions, the
Sunni and Shi’a scholars can best contribute the wisdom
of Islam as the principal Islamic contribution to a new,
pluralistic, and global civilization.
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