Islamic ethical norms and the Islamic view of human rights and social justice are topics deeply misunderstood in the contemporary world. This is due, first, to the fact that discussions of these issues are scattered throughout the Quran, and a full understanding of the Quranic perspective can only be gained by considering the various Quranic statements on this topic as a whole and in relation to one another. Second, the Quran dictates clear rules and laws concerning certain social issues, but it establishes only ethical guidelines and principles of a more general nature regarding others.
The impact, or at least the ideal impact, of these more general ethical principles on the character and functioning of Islamic society is often overlooked. Third, Quranic social norms are sometimes assumed to be adequately reflected in the current laws, customs, and practices found in widely differing Islamic countries; this is not always the case, and such an assumption sometimes tends to obscure the perspective of the Quran in its purest form on these issues. Finally and most important, Islamic ethics and social norms are often judged in relation to modern Western notions of ethics and human rights, which in recent centuries have been dominated philosophically by secular and individualistic perspectives and have come, in the last century, to be seen in the West as synonymous with “universal” ethical norms or “universal” standards of human rights.
Although Islamic ethical norms have much in common with those of Christianity and other traditional cultures, they also differ profoundly in certain key aspects from the secular formulation of these norms in the contemporary West.
General Quranic Principles Governing Islamic Social Ethics
One can identify five interrelated principles governing Quranic social ethics: The first is the significance of the religious community, or ummah. The Quran envisions the ummah as a collective of individual believers and has nothing explicit to say about the governance of the community or who has the right to authority over it. Although the Quran enjoins believers to obey those in authority among them (4:59), it never specifies the criteria for such authority or the mechanisms by which such an authority should be chosen and exercise power.1 These matters are discussed to some extent in the Ḥadīth literature. The Quran does, however, encourage believers to determine their affairs by consultation among themselves (42:38) and even directs the Prophet Muhammad to consult with his followers in certain matters (shāwirhum fi’l-amr; 3:159). Thus, the Quranic conception of the ummah is primarily that of a collective of believing individuals who have moral obligations to the community as a whole and to each of its members as well as to themselves. The good of the whole and the good of the individual are not seen as competing interests that need to be opposed to each other, but as mutually reinforcing concerns.
The Quran explicitly states that all believing men and women are protectors (awliyāʾ) of one another (9:71) and thus bear substantial moral responsibility toward fellow believers. Importantly, according to 9:71, both men and women share in this moral responsibility toward fellow believers and the ummah. Each individual has the duty to uphold the moral standards of the community, and the community has the collective responsibility to enforce these standards. Ideally, the moral health of individuals contributes to the moral health of society, while the moral integrity of society encourages and provides fertile ground for the proper moral and spiritual development of each of its members. This principle can be derived from the Quran’s charge to both individuals and the collective community that they enjoin right and forbid wrong (3:104, 110; 9:71). It is also apparent in the harsh punishments the Quran ordains for crimes considered to be particularly damaging to the spiritual integrity of the community as a whole, such as theft, which undermines respect for property and disregards Divinely ordained means of establishing economic justice (see 5:38), and flagrant sexual offenses that are openly witnessed and thereby undermine the sanctity of the marital bond and the family (see 4:15–16, 25; 24:2–3). That public and corporal punishments are ordained not for private “sins,” but for crimes that represent serious violations of community trust and integrity indicates the graver threat that such public crimes are considered to pose tothe moral and physical well-being of the community as a whole.
The second important principle of Quranic social ethics is justice. Concern for the just treatment of all members of society and even other creatures—with an emphasis on justice toward those often disadvantaged in society, such as women, orphans, and slaves—is a recurrent theme of Quranic social and ethical statements. The administration of justice in the earthly realm rests largely upon truthful human testimony, which is the duty of each believer before God. The Quran enjoins believers:
O you who believe! Be steadfast maintainers of justice, witnesses for God, though it be against yourselves, or your parents and kinsfolk, and whether it be someone rich or poor, for God is nearer unto both. So follow not your caprice, that you may act justly. If you distort or turn away, truly God is Aware of whatsoever you do. (4:135)
The need for truthful testimony must override all personal concerns, including those for oneself and one’s family, something that seems to stand in contradiction to the right of individuals in the United States, for example, to refuse to testify against themselves or their spouses to avoid self incrimination. In the Quran, the administration of justice in society outweighs the right to self protection. Both concealing testimony (2:283) and bearing false witness are considered serious sins, and the Quran specifies the harsh punishment of eighty lashes for all false or unsubstantiated accusations of sexual misconduct made against women in particular (24:4–5). In establishing this strong sanction, the Quran is concerned with several matters: (1) avoiding malicious and thoughtless slander that creates suspicion and weakens family and social trust; (2) limiting frivolous and/or disturbing public accusations by allowing only those that are supported by substantial evidence; and protecting those members of society, namely women, who might be most unjustly vulnerable to such slander.2
Administering justice and upholding moral standards are fundamental obligations for the community, but so too is the maintenance of social harmony and peaceful relations among its members—the third important principle of Islamic social ethics. The Quranic concern with maintaining harmonious relations within the community and settling disputes as quickly and amicably as possible can be seen in a number of Quranic prescriptions. For example, married couples who are unable to resolve their disputes are encouraged to involve their respective family members in the attempt to reconcile their differences and avoid divorce (4:35); a man wishing to divorce his wife should attempt reconciliation twice, with periods of separation in between, before finalizing the divorce (2:226–29); and should a divorce occur, the couple is encouraged to separate with mutual respect and without hostility (2:231).
Similarly, the Quran recommends that when a dispute over some matter arises between believers, the community should attempt to reconcile the two parties. If the dispute devolves into violence, the community is urged to repel the aggressive party through force, but only until that party concedes, at which point efforts at reconciliation are to begin anew (49:9). Elsewhere the Quran encourages those entitled to compensation for injury or loss to forgo the payments,3 in the interest of avoiding bitterness and resentment among various parties of believers and encouraging good and amicable relations, even in difficult situations. The importance of maintaining social harmony is reflected in Quranic passages that enjoin believers to repel evil by that which is better (23:96) as well as to resist engaging in ignorant or vain conversation and to respond to it merely with the greeting of Peace (25:63).
The fourth principle that undergirds Quranic social ethics is its notion of essential human equality before God and His laws, meaning that all human beings have the same opportunity to realize their moral and spiritual potential. The Quran is quite clear that those distinctions often given so much weight in human society—race, gender, wealth, social class—are meaningless with regard to a person’s spiritual worth and that it is only the latter that God takes into account. Some human beings will inevitably actualize more of their spiritual and intellectual potential than others, and the Quran states that those who have made substantial sacrifices for their faith (4:95; 9:20) as well as those who have achieved high levels of religious devotion or knowledge (39:9; 9:109) enjoy a higher standing than those who have not. But the Quran makes it clear that outward or superficial human differences, such as those of race or ethnicity, are the result of Divine Providence (49:13) and not a basis of nobility or superiority. All strictly religious responsibilities and opportunities—such as the possibility of achieving spiritual excellence or attaining Paradise—are identical across social boundaries and for both men and women; one passage goes to great lengths to emphasize this latter point:
For submitting men and submitting women, believing men and believing women, devout men and devout women, truthful men and truthful women, patient men and patient women, humble men and humble women, charitable men and charitable women, men who fast and women who fast, men who guard their private parts and women who guard [their private parts], men who remember God often and women who remember [God often], God has prepared forgiveness and a great reward. (33:35)
Differences in social or economic standing are also meaningless from the religious point of view in God’s Judgment, and the Quran is careful to enunciate the duty believers have toward all human life. The Quran chastises the Prophet Muhammad himself for being so concerned about persuading the rich and powerful Makkans of the truth of his message that he disregarded a poor, old blind man seeking his guidance (80:1–12). Orphans, who held relatively low status in pre-Islamic Makkan society, are presented in the Quran as individuals with rights that must be protected, and the Quran stresses the duty Muslims have toward the care and proper treatment of orphans. It is one’s status as a believer and as a person of piety that alone determines true worth. For example, the Quran enjoins Muslim men who cannot afford to take a free, believing woman as a wife to take a believing slave woman instead, insisting that the latter is a far better choice than a free woman who is a disbeliever. Moreover, should a man take a believing slave woman as a wife, he must marry her according to all the rights and obligations incumbent upon marriage to any free woman, including seeking the permission of her family and giving her her proper bridewealth, since she is a believer like himself (4:25). The fifth principle of Islamic social ethics is the balancing of rights and responsibilities. Contemporary Western thought assumes the rights of all individuals to be identical and is primarily concerned with establishing and defending individual rights without an equal or corresponding concern for individual responsibilities; the Quranic perspective takes both into consideration. In Islam, the fulfillment of individual responsibilities can be said to precede and determine individual rights, insofar as rights and responsibilities are ideally proportionate to one another and, moreover, responsibilities come before rights. For example, the Quran stipulates, as mentioned above, that truthful witness is the responsibility of each believer toward the community and before God. Should an individual fail to live up to this responsibility by giving false testimony, he or she forfeits the right to offer testimony in the future (24:4–5).4 Although everyone is equal before God insofar as they are held to the same moral and spiritual standards according to the Quran, differences in the fulfillment of individual responsibilities as well as differences in the nature of individual responsibilities as determined by social and economic position, age, and gender affect the nature and extent of one’s rights in society. The clearest example of this principle is in the case of marital rights and duties. Although men and women are spiritually equal before God, they do not bear identical social responsibilities or enjoy identical rights in marriage. Since the Quran and Islamic Law assert that a man is solely financially liable for his wife, children, and indeed his extended family, he is considered to bear a greater share of responsibility in the marriage and family affairs generally. Thus his rights over his family and his wife are understood to be proportionally greater than those his wife enjoys over him, although they are in no way absolute. Rather, the Quran makes it clear that women have rights over their husbands as their husbands do over them, but that the rights of the husband are a degree over them (2:228). Since the wife’s duties are considered to be less burdensome—being legally limited to providing sexual relations for the husband, although it is also understood that she will also care for any children born to the couple, and some schools of law also include managing the home among her responsibilities—her rights, for example, to divorce, are proportionally less extensive, but never denied altogether.
Although the rights and responsibilities of men and women are not quantitatively equal, they are considered to be complementary. Thus there are some things both husbands and wives can expect or demand from one another—fidelity, intimacy, children, and the preservation of one another’s honor, for example—but they each also enjoy certain unilateral rights in relation to the other. The wife has the religious and legal right to demand of her husband adequate financial support for herself and her children —a right he does not have in relation to her, even if her own wealth exceeds his own; the husband may obtain a unilateral divorce without cause (although this is legally discouraged)5—a right that she does not enjoy in relation to him.
Source: The Study Quran by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
