ing the treatment of orphans and the plight of the
poor. The Quran clearly evidences the urgency
of addressing issues that fall under the rubric of
socioeconomic or distributive justice, rebuking
those who have greedily consumed their inheri-
tance while having a greedy passion for wealth
(Q 89:19–20). Moreover, the enshrinement of
zakat (almsgiving) as the third pillar of practice
in Islam makes this duty integral to Muslim iden-
tity, effectively institutionalizing a “right” for the
needy and deprived to a share in the community’s
wealth. In addition to this compulsory obliga-
tion, Muslims of sufficient means are expected to
practice voluntary charitable giving (sadaqa). The
Quran’s ill-understood opposition to usury (riba)
further illustrates the attempt to deal with prob-
lems of distributive justice.
Historically, questions of political justice were
first broached in the Khariji opposition to the
Umayyad caliphate (661–750). The khaWariJ
invoked the doctrine of qadar (power; Free Will,
thus the corollary proposition that each indi-
vidual is responsible for his or her acts) against
the Umayyad rulers’ attempt to legitimize their
rule through the principles of ijmaa (consensus,
agreement) and bayaa (oath of allegiance), forti-
fied with the theological doctrine of jabr (lit.,
compulsion; predestination; here in the sense
that Umayyad rule was seen as ordained by God).
The absolute justice of God was one of the five
tenets of Mutazili kalam (theology), unremark-
able in itself until we learn that it was bound up
with debates over the nature of evil and injustice,
including the metaphysical and ethical scope of
man’s free agency. The Mutazila even took to refer-
ring to themselves as the People of Justice (adl)
and Unity (tawhid). The pursuit and realization
of justice for the Mutazila was determined and
constrained by the powers of reason (aql).
“The Father of Arab Philosophy” and Islam’s
first significant philosopher, Abu Yusuf Yaacub ibn
Ishaq al-Kindi (d. ca. 866) held justice to be the
central virtue owing to its balancing and coordi-
nating functions vis-à-vis other (principally clas-
sical Greek) virtues, thereby demonstrating the
integration of Peripatetic and Neoplatonic ideas
into a distinctively Islamic philosophy. Islam’s
first truly systematic philosopher, al-Farabi (ca.
870–950), envisioned the ideal Islamic polity
portioning such goods as security, wealth, honor,
and dignity according to a desert principle of
distributive justice. Rational justice, formulated
in terms of a social contract theory beholden to
Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics, as well as
the Islamic sciences generally, was the center
point of Ibn Sina’s (Avicenna, 979–1037) politi-
cal scheme to secure the common welfare from
a pool of basic resources. For Muhammad ibn
rUshd (Averroës, 1126–98), justice was the sum
and highest of all virtues of man as a citizen of the
polity. Furthermore, it inheres in the fulfillment
of responsibilities and duties in a social division
of labor structured according to the standards and
strictures of philosophy (falsafa). While some vir-
tues, such as wisdom and courage, are class-spe-
cific, justice was pertinent to all citizens, provided
they performed the vocation for which they were
fitted “by nature.”
Justice in jurisprudential terms entails, in
the first instance, equal treatment of all before
the law (fiqh). With the sharia as lodestar
(recalling, with Abou El Fadl, that the sharia “is
God’s will in an ideal and abstract fashion, but
the fiqh is the product of the human attempt to
understand God’s will” [Abou El Fadl 32]), both
ethics and law in Islam approach justice through
the doctrinal formula of “commanding right
and forbidding wrong” (al-amr bi’l-maaruf wa’l-
nahy an al-munkar). In short, fiqh is a system of
ethico-legal obligation formulated in imperative
(amr) and prohibitive (nahy) terms, with all
human actions exhaustively classified as manda-
tory (fard or wajib), encouraged (mustahabb or
mandub), permissible (halal or mubah), discour-
aged (makruh), or forbidden (haram). Procedural
justice in Islam tends toward personalism rather
than corporatism and administrative principles
insofar as trust is placed in the “just judge” orjustice 417 J