Some people seem to think that Islam produces social justice and that we may take the lessons of this part of the religion and work them out in society. But this is a skewed vision and will ultimately lead to exasperation, despair, it may even lead to a shaking of faith. Why so? No single part of Islam can stand on its own, each being a piece of a larger puzzle, the bricks of a house supporting one another. We may, from segments, discern a shape, a texture and even the edges of that segment , glossing an idea of the bigger picture. But the whole vision in all its glory emerges as something unique from its parts, something solid, self-supporting, a framework within which to act, to live, to experience.
Islam does not produce social justice; likewise it is no guarantor of peace either internal or national or otherwise, for it is social justice, it is peace. It is not a sub-category of these other terms or concepts but it is the conceptual framework which we must recover and measure everything else by – it is the source from which we should be taking our definitions and not the subject of those definitions. We really have it the wrong way round!
When hard questions are asked, ‘So you have your right to practice this part of your religion, yet what has been the result, bombs and barricades!?’ the answers, if there are any, come up short leaving us with apologetics ‘lip-sync’d’ to pleas of ‘unfair’, ‘bias’, ‘misrepresentation’. Taking Islam without just one of its structural components leaves a picture incomplete, like Mona Lisa without her smile, the ‘magic’ cannot be fully realised or experienced no matter the power of our imagination. So how can we be expected to perform miracles if we haven’t created the opportunities to muster our mysteries? A carpenter no matter how skilled cannot take an oak tree and with her bare hands make a chair. She may take a branch or two or three but the oak will stand tall, unmoved with little discernable transformation, and the carpenter has proved nothing of her skill, nothing that is but wood for the fire.
Don’t get me wrong, idealism is a waiting game we can never win and a perfect expression of Islam is a fairy tale for our times. We should take what we can and do as much as we must, knowing that this is expedience. It is true of Islam more than anything else that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Bits of Islam produce nothing of lasting importance but from its completed even if imperfect picture emerges unspeakable beauty, unrivaled clarity and unquestionable sense. Only then is it reasonable to ask hard questions, only then can answers be mustered on demand, only then can we see the social justice we might claim, and only then can we experience the peace we all crave.
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