The Ultimate Oxymoron: “Attaining Justice in the Islamic World”

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

    One of the best series of articles on the current liberation movements in the Arab World is available on the blog, http://just3rdway.blogspot.com/2011/02/attaining-justice-in-islamic-world-part.html.  This is part of an almost daily series of thinkpieces over the past couple of years by Michael Greaney, who is the long-time Research Director of the Center for Economic and Social Justice, http://www.cesj.org.

    This current series would be more productive if it would avoid the nonsensical reference to “Islamic countries” and “the Islamic world”.  There is not a single Islamic country in the world (though Indonesia might rank as high as a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10 in Islamicity), and therefore certainly no Islamic World. 

    The radical Muslims who want to impose a global caliphate or “Islamic state” use the word Islamic as a political term, when, in fact, the term “Islamic” refers only to each individual person’s relations with God and with one’s fellow human beings.  The term “Islamic” as in Islamic law, refers to a framework for moral education and for solidarity among people in shaping the institutions of society.  If Islamic law requires enforcement, the law has failed.  Perhaps the most important teaching in classical Islamic thought is to warn against the politicalization of religion. 

    Combining “state” and “religion” is inherently the greatest threat to human rights and always has been.  This is why America’s founders said that the separation of the two is the first requirement for faith-based governance (i.e., a community or nation of politically and economically sovereign individuals led by leaders who are led by God). 

    The drafter of America’s Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, said, “No nation can remain free unless the people are properly educated; proper education consists of teaching virtue; and no nation can remain virtuous unless every person’s life, both personal and public, is infused with awareness and love of Divine Providence”, by which he meant God.

    The single greatest disinformation used by the Islamophobes is to agree with the Al-Qa’ida-style ideologues by confusing Islam the religion with ignorant and hypocritical Muslims as its would-be practitioners.  The concepts of Islam and Islamdom are similar to the well-established distinction between Christianity and Christendom (or Judaism and secular Zionism), which often or even usually throughout human history have been opposites.

    Without this distinction, justice is a fraud, because justice is not created by human beings.  Justice is a set of principles that are found in natural law and can be pursued through enlightened religion as a means to seek greater understanding of justice and as the greatest motivator to understand and apply it.  For Muslims the primary and most universal source is the Qur’an.  Justice is merely the expression of absolute truth, including the basic axiom that whoever says he has the truth does not.

    In classical Islamic jurisprudential thought justice has been referred to generally as the maqasid al shari’ah or universal purposes of law as a system of universal faith-based ethics, known in classical Christian thought as “moral theology”.  This is distinct from the manmade regulations or fiqh, which often are based on totally fraudulent sources, like the single spurious hadith that is used to justify stoning women and the body of imperial hadith that the Muslim tyrants’ clerical lackeys proclaimed as a means to justify killing people who supported freedom of religion, including the right to change from one religion to another.  Even the few prescribed punishments in Islamic criminal law refer to maximums, with judicial discretion to apply lesser punishments or none at all.

    Justice is something that is to be sought, based on the premise that the search is never ending, because human understanding is always fallible and because the application of principles necessarily must be contextually shaped by changes in time and place.  Each generation must rethink all the basics of justice by respecting the best of the past for application in the present in order to build a better future for everyone of peace, prosperity, and freedom.

Update 2/25/11  Michael Greaney has graciously changed his title to “Attaining Justice in the Arab World” (instead of the Islamic World).