It is plain truism to conceive justice as to give somebody
his just share, his natural deserts, his justly acquired claims. It is opposed
to injustice, which means depriving somebody of his just share, denying
somebody of just claim, oppressing and repressing somebody unjustly. Both these
positive and negative situations inevitably carry moral and ethical
connotation. For the reason why justice does not apply to any species of
animals save and except human being since others lack freedom of will, freedom
of choice and the power of discrimination between good and evil through diverse
animal species may share rational calculation and general intelligence with
humankind. Thus, justice is the distinctive capability of human being. First of
all, we come across the concept of justice in the Old Testament of the holy
Bible in the form of Righteousness (sadaqu) and the selfsame concept
runs through the New Testament down to the holy Quran (adl). This
Semitic Abrahamic religious cultural civilizational justice is ascribed in its
all round perfection to the supreme lord, the one and unique Jehovah, God,
Allah as the Jews, Christians and Muslims call Him respectively. And, at the
same time, justice is demanded of men and women in accordance with his or her
capacity in all mutual dealings and in his or her prayerful submission to the
supreme lord, which has been tagged with religious faith in the all
powerfulness of the supreme lord and resurrection of human beings after death
on the Day of Final judgment by the supreme lord and award of appropriate
reward and punishment to men and women for their good or bad motive and action.
In the Western tradition on the other hand, we find the
great Greek philosopher Plato considering in the first instance the role of
justice in human life in more than one millennium later than the O.T. in the 4th
century B.C. (Before Christ), in his famous dialogue of the Republic. He
acknowledges the pivotal role of justice in the functioning of the human soul
(Nous) and as such its being the fundamental element of human life. Plato
begins his discourse by saying that justice is ‘to give everybody his due’. But
as it carries the implication of rendering equal rights to master and slave
alike and thereby jeopardizing the Athenian democracy of a minority of citizen
class, he reeled back to legal right. On the other hand he seems to have
postulated ‘due’ as meaning morally fair and moral good. But unlike due,
‘right’ can be applied to rendering to somebody merely the legal deserts. This
Platonic declension of the concept of justice turning its moral connotation of
due to the secularist legal right, suited well with the imperial designs of the
Roman Empire, which was also ruled by the
citizens with the forced labour of slaves and serfs. The Romans adopted the
justice of legal rights as the foundation stone of the empire.
The post Renaissance Christian West accepted Roman law
epitomized by the concept of ‘giving everybody his right’ as the basis of
modern Western civilization, which was paganistic and secular in orientation
and stood wide apart from the divinely inspired Semitic prophetic intention and
moral denotation of justice. Consequently, the Western modern civilization was
skeptical to religion and spiritual values from the very birth. It creates a
wide gulf between the modern Christian west and Islamic east, the latter being
insistent upon unstinted faith in the unity and lordship of Allah and religious-moral-spiritual
values of the scripture. The Platonic declension of the meaning of justice
combined with the Greek-Roman paganistic secularism in conjunction with the
post-renaissance Darwinian theory of ‘natural selection’ of species and Adam
Smithian ‘usurious interest’ based capitalism eked out a brand naturalistic
secularism in the West, which is spiritually, socially and economically
repugnant to Islam. The Western Christian’s gross deviation from the original
standpoint of justice as ‘rendering due’ to the declensional meaning of ‘giving
legal right’, has created an unbridgeable chasm between them and the Muslims,
which needs be properly analysed and clearly understood by both sides.
Judging justice from the Muslim point of view, the
naturalist and secular juridical meaning implied by rendering rights, whether
fundamental, humanitarian or liberalistic freedom oriented as adopted or
adopted by the pagan Roman imperialism and the capitalist secular modern West,
to say the least, amount to a perversion of justice pure and simple. This
reminds us resonant Quranic warning: ‘When you judge between the people, judge
with justice (adl),’ rejecting thereby any deviation or laxity in the
dispensation of justice. It also amounts to outright rejection of Roman
contention of the blindness of the goddess of law. Furthermore, to uproot such
contention of blindness and laxity, the holy Quran exhorts: ‘Verily Allah
commands you to do justice mingled with mercy (bi’l adl wa’l-ihsan)’,
preferring thereby clemency to harshness in the dispensation of justice.
A gaping divide between the Western Christianity and Islam,
which is presently surfacing world-wide with considerable anguish and ferocity
by clever maneuvering of the western media in collusion with surreptitious scum
of Western Diplomacy, resides partly (i) in the respective cosmological
theories of western science and Islam and partly, (ii) in the nature of the
respective Christian and Muslim religious faith relating to the truth of the
mission of Isa Masih/Jesus Christ; and in addition (iii) in the open and / or
covered ambition of the capitalist Western Christians to grabbing the natural
wealth of the Muslim lands.
Forrest Cookson, says: “Muslim world and West have a deep,
probably irreconcilable, difference in establishing the most sacred constraints
on social behavior. Claims made or constraint or acceptance and demand for
apology, given and accepted (pertaining to cartoons) are really irrelevant”...
To the Muslim all of life is shaped down and guided by God’s teaching as
represented in the holy Qur’an... “The implication of this faith is the
extension of the religion into everyday activities of family, into relation
with other persons, into the political sphere and finally, the rules of market.
Human rights, freedom of speech and freedom of religion derives from the holy
Quran itself.” “The secular West has a completely different view. Liberal
democracy is built on a view of religion that believes in God as an abstract
intellectual entity.” Freedom of speech is a fundamental principle of Western
secular society.
This is the general attitude of the secular democratic West
towards God, religion, prophets and related sacrosanct objects. In view of the
Qur’anic direction: “O you who embraced faith! If any erring person (fasiq)
brings to you detrimental news, thoroughly scrutinize it; lest you should
inflict upon people harm out of ignorance, whereupon you get up repentant upon
what you have committed! (Hujrat, 49:6).”
A minute examination of the above attitude, which is typical
of the Renaissance bound Protestant Christians, brings into perspicuity an
evolutionary metamorphosis in the texture of the Christian faith that has
created an unbridgeable spiritual chasm between the Christian and Islamic
faith, even though to prove their metal the case of both needs be genetically
referred to the Semitic Abrahamic conviction of faith in One Omnipotent God,
the Supreme Lord of the universe.
Commensurate with the above mentioned Platonic declension of
the meaning of ‘justice’ from rendering ‘due’ to giving ‘right’ and thereby
taking it out of the hands of the divine authority and entrusting it to the
legislative power of the human authority, dragging justice from divine
prerogative down to humanism, in the arena of Christian faith, the original
Creator, Sustainer, Providence of the Universe, the Omnipotent Supreme Lord,
God, has been reduced to ‘Intelligent Designer’ (I.D.) of the creation. Not
only that, the secular West and its liberal democracy have reduced God into an
ABSTRACT intellectual entity, that is to say, to an IDEA or CONCEPT of God that
is nothing concrete or really objectively meaningful.
Thus the Christian faith of God, according to this secular
political version, amounts to a belief in the abstract idea of God. As such,
the distance between the modern Christian faith and the Muslim faith of living
Allah, tend to stand a world apart, so that, it is plainly stated, that, in
discussing abstract issues including religion anything goes. Nevertheless, in
the secular West religion must not be deemed to have become unimportant. It is
still very much important in the life of the people. But secularism has
uprooted it from the socio-economical-political sphere of life. The modern West
inclines to interpret individualism as ‘homomansura’ meaning human values and
human success as the measure of all things.
Modern West secularism refers to exclusively in economical
and political sphere of life. It is essentially expressed as ‘secularization’
of society meaning “the act or process of removing the influence or the power
that religion has over something”; “the secularization of society and
education” and by secularism: the belief that religion should not be involved
in the organization of society, education etc. (Oxford Dictionary).
The secular West is thus firmly set on the three fundamental
principles of (a) Freedom of speech and press, (b) Freedom of religion and
conscience and (c) Constitutional Secular Democracy.
The differences in views over the recent ‘Cartoon
Controversy’ are deep and fundamental. The aggrieved Muslims are
essentially stating their worldview and the west is stating theirs. These are
truly different and cannot be reconciled. These are indeed very valuable tips
for Muslims to understand the point of view of the West. Rudyard Kipling
(1865-1936), Nobel prize winner of 1907, had pronounced the world famous
observation about a hundred years ago that, “The East is East and the West is
West, the twain shall never meet”. The contemporary Eastern Muslim sage Iqbal
cautioned : “O’ people of the East don’t judge the red lips of western girls as
the sign of health! O’ people of the West, don’t regard the world as a shop of
God!” Keeping aside the inexorable inner conflict of capitalism, there is
seemingly a covert hint in the above quotations of an over-confident feeling of
overwhelming superiority complex of experimental science oriented secular
democratic West in their technologically acquired ability to dominate the rest
of the world.
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