Islam, A Coherent Social Justice Tradition

Islam: A Coherent Social Justice Tradition

Shaykh Omar Suleiman 16th MAS-ICNA Convention

Opening

Peace and blessings of Allah be upon you.

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the Worlds. May the peace and blessings be upon the Messenger of Allah, his family, his companions, and all who follow them.

I forgot my number one rule with conventions. When you check into the hotel, ask for the floor that's closest to the lobby. That's a pro tip for everyone that woke up and came at 10am. When you go to a conference, always ask for the floor at the very top floor. So you stop at every elevator and you got to worry about people that are pressing down over and over again, which segues good into the topic of social justice. Justice to the speakers.

But Alhamdulillah, I want to thank you all for coming on time to this conference. You don't really know what to expect when you're doing the first session of a conference if anybody's going to show up. So I was expecting to talk to five people.

So Alhamdulillah, this is a good opportunity to actually have a fruitful discussion with a group of motivated individuals. I want to thank you on behalf of Yaqeen Institute for being here. I want to thank everyone, all the fellows, all the volunteers, and Ali, who just heard his marriage story.

And our operations manager, Dr. Altaaf Hussain, the vice president, but also my mentor, as well as being the vice president of Yaqeen Institute, and everyone that's been following our work. And Alhamdulillah, some of you may have noted that we just hit our one year birthday. We are only one year old, but Alhamdulillah, we've been able to achieve a lot more than we could have expected by the grace of Allah.

Introduction to the 40 Hadiths on Social Justice

So a quick show of hands, how many of you have followed in some capacity the 40 hadiths on social justice? Not many of you. So this was a class, one of the first classes, actually the first class that I've actually taught on a weekly basis with Yaqeen Institute is the 40 hadiths on social justice. And just to let you all know, we're at hadith 25 now, so you still have time to attend the rest of it inshallah.

It should end the week of Ramadan, so it's every Tuesday night, we have a break right now until mid-January, but we're covering a hadith every week and then extrapolating from that hadith lessons on Islam's unique social justice paradigm. Now the reason why I chose to do this class, and at the end inshallah, it's going to be compiled into a book format, so there will be additional notes, and it will be made accessible in book format. There are already professional notes that are taken every single week, so if you've missed the first 24, then just read the notes if you don't feel like listening to the lecture.

But the idea was based on a foundational principle that we believe that Islam provides unique paradigms to deal with social injustices and inequities. That our religion is not just another religion that will throw in some languaging to already existing paradigms, but actually has unique paradigms and unique solutions to the problems that we face in the arena of social justice.

Islam's Unique Anti-Racism Tradition

And I was mentioning this yesterday at the Knowledge Retreat, that Islam, for example, on racism is the only tradition in which you have an explicit anti-racism tradition. You have explicit references to not discriminating against people on the basis of the color of their skin or their tribe or whatever it may be, and it's extensive. It's not one verse or one tradition of the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم),but it's extensive, whereas other religions, that was deduced from overall concepts of equality and the treatment of the other.

But Islam was very specific on the anti-racism references, which made it attractive to the Edward Blyden's of the world, and even had strands of Islam in Garveyite teachings, and then obviously found its way into the nation of Islam and many of the movements that became prominent here in the United States that were in the initial phase part of the rebirth of people like Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali.

So we have unique paradigms and we have unique languaging and we have unique constructs, and we should take pride in that. When Malcolm came back from Hajj, he said that I believe Islam has the solution to the problem of racism in America. He didn't say that I found a religion that transformed me, that removed racism from me, but he saw that Islam actually provided a solution to the problem of racism in America.

Malcolm was a brilliant man. He's an intelligent man. He's not saying, you know, he's not using any form of exaggeration or speaking about Islam in idealistic terms. He's saying that I believe Islam has solutions to the problem of racism in America and other problems that come out of that problem of racism.

And that's why when he left the nation of Islam, he formed Muslim Mosque and he formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity because he wanted people to see what he saw in Islam as a wholesome, comprehensive solution. But in the meantime, he saw that it was important to work with all people of all faiths, whatever their background was, to deal with the problem and to offer Islam as a solution rather than the solution.

To let Islam be part of the dialogue on how we solve these problems in society rather than dominating the conversation and disrespecting others that come with their solutions. Let Islam shine. Let Islam shine by showing itself as a practical, comprehensive, wholesome solution to this problem.

Unique Islamic Paradigms in Social Justice

So what are the unique paradigms that we find in Islam and social justice? Because one thing I don't want us to do is I don't want us to simply add to the mix that's already out there and not offer anything unique as a Muslim community and in the realm of scholarship.

The Role of the Hereafter

Well for one, in Islam, the concept of justice applies not just to the body but to the soul. And it applies not just to this dunya but to the akhira as well. It extends beyond this life and it goes into the afterlife. The presence of the hereafter is core to our understanding of justice. Why? Because the first rule on the Day of Judgment is:

There is no injustice today.

That does not force the one who is being wrong to acquiesce but it allows for the one who is being wrong to have something to look forward to even if justice is not served in this world. So the presence of the akhira, the presence of the hereafter is a unique factor in how we discuss justice as a whole.

That this world is not meant to be a place of fairness. That doesn't mean we don't strive for it. That doesn't mean that we fall into the disease of using religion to temper calls for justice or to quiet those calls.

But what it does mean is that we always have hope in Allah and we do believe that there is an eventual rectification of all of the wrongs that are done in this world.

Timeless Principles

Also in Islam we do believe in timeless principles. That the language of jurisprudence often changes. That sometimes necessities make things that are ordinarily prohibited permitted in certain circumstances. But at the end of the day that the prophets came with timeless principles. That at the core the message of Isa (عليه السلام) the message of Jesus peace be upon him was at its core the same message as the message of Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم) and the same message of Musa (عليه السلام) and whatever it may be.

There is a distinction. Many scholars have spoken about the attempt to pit Malcolm and Martin against each other in regards to their ideologies. To present Martin Luther King Jr. as the sanitized controlled civil rights activists that we could tolerate and Malcolm as the radical that we have to excommunicate.

And putting them on these opposing ends. Whereas if you look at Martin Luther King Jr. in his last few years you find a man that had adopted many of Malcolm's notions and there is the book Malcolm and Martin Dreams and Nightmares by James Cone which does away with that fallacy. Let's take that to a more traditional construct.

The idea that Musa (عليه السلام) was this vengeful man who was so radically devoted to justice that he was blinded from any sense of mercy. So Musa (عليه السلام) Moses was about an eye for an eye. But Jesus, Isa (عليه السلام) was so radically dedicated to mercy and compassion that he ignored notions of justice.

So Musa (عليه السلام) is portrayed as angry. Isa (عليه السلام) is portrayed as ever loving and ever caring. But Isa (عليه السلام) got into trouble because of his dedication to justice as much as his dedication to theology.

He was challenging the political establishment. He was flipping tables in the temple. You could read the remnants of his speeches, whatever amongst it is authentic or not. When he spoke in Jerusalem, when he spoke in Al-Quds, he challenged everybody. And he was very aggressive in his challenging.

But there are notions that have been fed to us that always conveniently put people in the places of heroes and villains in accordance with how much we feel like we can appropriate so that we can perpetuate systems of injustice either theologically or politically.

So that was done with the prophets of Allah and it's done with our figures even in the 20th century today. So the prophets have timeless principles and we believe that we can extract those principles from the prophets of Allah (عليهم السلام) and from the messengers of the prophets that came before him.

Redefining Social Justice Terms

So the question becomes, does Islam really have any unique paradigms in regards to social justice? Is it even valid? Is it even a valid discussion to use social justice? And I'm going to say this also that a lot of people have a problem with the term social justice because social justice might denote a certain ideology, right? And my response to that is that the prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) took things that were good at their face value, terms, models, slogans, but he rectified the internal mechanics and the mechanisms to be derived from that to where they were sound.

Example: Helping Your Brother

So for example, when the prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) said:

(Sahih al-Bukhari 2444) Help your brother whether he's oppressed or whether he's an oppressor.

The Arabs knew that sentence and that sentence was actually a very problematic sentence and an anti-Islamic sentence. Because what that meant before Islam, (انْصُرْ أَخَاكَ ظَالِمًا أَوْ مَظْلُومًا) Support your brother whether he's oppressed or whether he's an oppressor, was that whether he is wrong or right, he's your brother, you've got to have his back and you have to take his side in any dispute.

So they said to the prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم),we understand how we can support our brother when he's oppressed, but we don't understand how you're saying to support him when he's an oppressor. We thought that Islam rid us of these radical attachments and this partisanship that blinds us from justice.

And the prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) said:

Support your brother when he's oppressed and support your brother when he's an oppressor by stopping him from oppressing.

So he changed the meaning of it while still maintaining its face value. So even if these terms could denote certain ideologies and constructs and paradigms, that doesn't mean that the terms are useless because justice that is demanded from within, from a society that has self-restoring mechanisms for injustices, that are independent of changes at head of state or whatever it may be, those are valid Islamic notions and there are things that we can draw from in our deen.

Economic Justice in Islam

So does Islam have unique paradigms? One of the topics that's gonna be covered by sister Noor Subhani inshallah is a paper, "Does Islam Need Saving?" which analyzes human rights from an Islamic perspective versus a secular perspective. And it's based on the UN Charter of Human Rights. I'm gonna be talking about here just briefly another UN document that's less known.

But the UN also authored a document on social justice in the year 2004. So it was actually titled "Social Justice in an Open World, The Role of the United Nations."

And from the introduction, it was very clear that what was most dominant in the discussion of social justice was economic injustice. Now, is there any deen, any religion in the world as strict on economic transaction as the religion of Islam? No. And Islam rooted all of its prohibitions and permissions in economic transaction in the concept of justice.

So when usury, riba is discussed and its prohibition, it's because of the injustice, the inherent injustice of riba, of gharar, which is an overuse of speculation used to exploit people, which is usually in insurance contracts and things of that sort. So the strictness of Islam on the soundness of an economic transaction is always rooted in a sense of justice.

(Sahih Muslim 101) Whoever deceives is not from amongst us.

That if you're selling a product, you don't put the rotten part in a way that it's hidden and only put the useful looking part of the grain. That you should always disclose what the flaws of your product are, so that you're not wronging the person that you're selling to.

That you don't make false oaths when you're buying and selling. Most of Islam's discussion on adl, in our day to day, on justice in our day to day, also deals with economics.

[The lecture continues with extensive discussion on economic inequality, redistribution of wealth, and the Islamic balance between personal incentive and social justice]

The Quranic Principle of Human Equality