Introduction and Summary of the Conception of Justice in Islam

Abstract

Rawls and others focus on justice as the virtue of a society’s distributional institutions. Alternatively, scholars express justice as principle or criterion. Exceptions are Plato and the Platonic Islamic scholars who thought of a just society as an enlightened collectivity ruled by philosopher-kings. Only two systems of thought conceive justice as a system—Zarathustra, whose system requires that a just social system be anchored on just governance; and Islam, situating a just system explicitly around the axis of just governance. The Qur’an’s basis for justice is that societies do not need a separate theory of justice, but that compliance with rules of behavior handed down in the Qur’an assures the emergence of justice as a natural outcome of the practice of a rule-compliant society.