A World of Inequalities

Christian and Muslim Perspectives

Lucinda Mosher, Lucinda Mosher

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781626168107
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

In this volume, leading Christian and Muslim scholars respond to the global crisis of inequality by demanding and modeling interreligious dialogue. Essays explore the roots of these realities, how they are treated in Christian and Muslim traditions and texts, and how the two faiths can work together to address inequality.

PART ONE

Overviews

Unjust Inequality as a Challenge for Contemporary Islam

OVAMIR ANJUM

I have been asked to offer as a Muslim a diagnosis of the challenge of the many inequalities that afflict our world. I shall, therefore, reflect on the challenges and paradoxes rather than attempting to articulate cures. Let me begin by stating that Muslims have often failed to uphold the teachings of justice and compassion to which God has called us through the teachings of his beloved Prophet Muhammad, upon him be peace and blessings. God sent the Prophet as nothing but “Rahma to all the worlds.” One of my students taught me that Rahma is not fully captured by its common English translation, mercy, as the latter connotes primarily forgiveness for the guilty; a better alternative is compassion, which emphasizes the concern for the weak. As a community of God called to compassion and justice, we have a long way to go. It goes without saying that Muslim states in the world today suffer from most grievous injustices, many of which are self-inflicted. My relevant claim here is that these injustices are inflicted and sustained not in spite of the normative culture but as a result of it; these normative cultures, diverse as they may be, are in varying degrees informed by Islamic tradition.

Equally evident, however, is the fact that as economically peripheral peoples of the world, the biggest sin of Muslims as a whole appears to be weakness. From colonialism to neoliberalism, foreign forces have contributed to the destruction of traditional Muslim institutions, which has wrought incalculable damage to the Muslims’ ability to confront the tremendously rapid economic and social transformations that have ensued—and those transformations have left them with a deeply defensive posture of fearful conservatism rather than having encouraged a principled critique of and engagement with them. But this material and structural analysis offers only a partial explanation to us believers, to whom God can do all things if we keep our promise to Him; therefore, we see all problems ultimately in moral terms as part of our faith. Yet often this recognition of our own failure turns into spiritualized fatalism and abdication of responsibility—which, I believe, can be averted through a critical appraisal of the problem at hand.

Let me proceed by sharing a couple of profound paradoxes of our time that should concern any thinking about religion and inequality. First, there is the obvious paradox of religion and inequality in the modern world—one that is not unique to Islam. The data show, and it does not take too much imagination to heuristically confirm, what the opening line of a recent volume on the subject declaims: “Religion is one of the strongest and most persistent correlates of social and economic inequalities.”¹ Research in Western Christianity (and Indian Hinduism, for instance) shows the rise in religiosity as neoliberalism increases inequality.

Although I am not aware of research focusing on Muslim-majority countries, I suspect that the conclusions would be comparable. This phenomenon is explained either through the relative power theory (the rich support religion for a number of reasons, and their support for it attracts the poor; religion may also contribute by deflating pressures for redistribution) or the less-favored deprivation theory (religion provides comfort to the economically disadvantaged). An alternative explanation may be that the success of the modern state as the agency of redistribution and management leads to decline in the role of religion in small, modernized, homogeneous societies. This dovetails well with the notion many anthropologists have posited: that the modern state is a secular and secularizing agent. Regardless, it seems clear that religious intelligentsia have much to worry about: whereas our normative teachings call for renunciation and otherworldliness that should presumably mitigate inequalities, their effective impact in the modern world may be quite the opposite.

The second paradox is the curious relationship between the Left liberal demand for total and uncompromising equality in exactly the same age and encouraged by the same forces of neoliberalism that have generated some of the greatest inequalities and injustices of our time and have resurrected the radical right.

A third paradox is one of defining justice, as Muslims are often called to hurry up and imitate before the next wave of conceptual transformation and a new set of definitions hits. Injustice or unjust inequality, no doubt, is at the heart of some of the key issues the world is facing today—crises where Muslims are in the eye of the storm. As victims as well as perpetrators, Muslims are violently confronted with the question of justice. Yet a settlement of what constitutes justice remains elusive, as modern aspirations are deeply chimerical. How radically these definitions and aspirations change from one decade to the next in our age of accelerated change can be appreciated if we trace the transformation of justice debates over the last couple of decades: from the equality versus freedom debate of the Cold War to the near triumph of individualism and capitalism in the neoliberal age, when the crucial questions become those of personal sexual choice, gender pronouns, and gender pay gap. These changing norms are not primarily the result of some nefarious conspiracy. Nevertheless, in this drama, the Anglo-American economic and political swings have been inordinately influential in deciding for the global cosmopolitan culture what justice ought to mean and what kind of inequalities are worth opposing and which ones are inevitable, tolerable, even desirable. More precisely, even as the notion of justice has in the modern period been equated to the notion of equality, still the progressive liberals possess no moral criterion to differentiate between tolerable and intolerable inequalities, thus letting the market force and brute power to silently draw lines in the sand. Like hierarchy, equality comes with costs. The rise of liberal democratic equality has been accompanied by if not facilitated by modern individualism and has greatly eroded familial and communal forms of life—institutions our religious traditions consider crucial for righteous life. The resurrection of the new Far Right to prominence across the West indicates the anemic state of these institutions.

Justice and Mercy

Allow me now to turn to the Islamic scripture. The Qurʾan call us to be just—first and foremost—in the most intimate sense, even against ourselves and our kith and kin:

O you who believe! Be staunch in justice, witnesses for God, even though it be against yourselves or [your] parents or [your] kindred, whether [the case be of] a rich man or a poor man, for God is nearer unto both [them ye are]. So follow not passion lest you lapse [from truth] and if you lapse or fall away, then lo! God is ever informed of what ye do. (Q. 4:135)²

Elsewhere, a similar verse emphasizes justice even against your enemy, and not just any enemy but your religious persecutor. “And let not your hatred of a folk who [once] stopped your going to the holy sanctuary seduce you to transgress” (Q. 5:2).

But justice is still second to the virtue that we are most frequently reminded of in the Qurʾan: that of rahma, mercy and compassion. The Qurʾan has God saying, “My mercy encompasses all things” (Q. 7:156). A Prophetic tradition has it, “When God created the heavens and the earth, he wrote his slogan on His throne, ‘My mercy has overwhelmed my wrath.’ ”³ In contrast to justice (al-adl) and fairness or equal distribution (al-qist), plain equality is a concept that does not find direct expression in the Qurʾan—nor is it a cardinal virtue in an unqualified sense.

Nobility in Piety and Faith Alone

A basic equality of all humans as humans can be deduced from a number of teachings, such as the verse:

O people! Lo! We have created you from a male and a female, and have made you nations and tribes that ye may know one another. Lo! the noblest of you, in the sight of God, is the most pious. Lo! God is All-Knowing, Aware. (Q. 49:13)

Here the import is to reject inequality based in race, tribe, and lineage generally. Yet, even here, a criterion for inequality is posited—namely, taqwa: nobility is not absent, but it comes from piety, being mindful of God, and fear of God.⁴

Gender In/equality

Men and women are, according to the Qurʾan, allies and partners of each other, awliya’. It posits no difference in their religious status, aspirations, and virtues, and it strongly suggests equality in these respects.

Lo! For Muslim men and Muslim women, for believing men and believing women, for devout men and devout women, for truthful men and truthful women, for perseverant men and perseverant women, for men who devoutly humble themselves and women who devoutly humble themselves, for men who give in charity and women who give in charity, for men who fast and women who fast, for men who guard their chastity and women who guard their chastity, and for men who praise God abundantly and women who praise God abundantly: for them has God prepared forgiveness and great reward. (Q. 33:35)

The Qurʾan also conspicuously notes that in the story of creation, both Adam and Eve ate of the tree and both were forgiven; the Qurʾan goes out of its way to use a dual verbal form to emphasize this point (Q. 20:121). Yet some hadith accounts seem to give a different bent to this story and reproduce the biblical narrative. One hadith also suggests, at least in an apparent sense, that women are deficient in religion and intellect.⁵

When discussing the marital institution, however, the Qurʾan unequivocally declares that “they [women] have rights similar to those [of men] over them, and men are a degree above them” (Q. 2:228), and “men have authority over women, owing to what they spend on them, and owing to God’s grace to some over others” (Q. 4:34). The same verse allows men to discipline their disobedient wives by warning, abandoning them in beds, and even striking them; the hadith reports express the Prophet’s dislike of striking and qualify that permission by prohibiting the striking of face or striking so hard that it leaves a mark. The Qurʾan also limits polygamy to four wives, if a man can be just among them; if he cannot, then only one. The women’s share in inheritance, in itself a radical move—as women had been often deemed property rather than property owners—is nonetheless half that of men in most classes of heirs. The Qurʾan also deems one man’s testimony equivalent to that of two women in certain cases (Q. 2:282).

The juristic tradition received this Qurʾanic model more or less faithfully; yet its attempt to formalize and standardize sometimes accentuated the inequality more than what scripture allowed—and on occasion in obvious contradiction to the prophetic teachings.⁶ Careful readers of the Qurʾan even in the premodern period found this problematic. For instance, Ibn Taymiyya, a particularly close and independent reader of the Qurʾan and hadith, argued that women were religious equals of men, that the hadith suggesting deficiency of women was in fact a reference to the particular issue that menstruating women may not pray or fast (the Prophet was using this fact only rhetorically, perhaps to encourage them to be more generous than men), and that their testimony was deemed half only in the special case of certain transactions conducted outside the court. Yet certain obvious differences were undeniable: all prophets, the Qurʾan declared, had been men. Some in later tradition did balance that by observing that no women had ever been tyrants or hadith fabricators.

A remarkable verse in the Qurʾan, just before 4:34, anticipates the reaction one might have in response to the inequality that is later posited:

And wish not the thing in which God has made some of you excel others. Unto men a share from that which they have earned, and unto women a share from that which they have earned. But ask God of His bounty. Lo! God is ever Knower of all things. (Q. 4:32)

In contrast to these verses that establish a social hierarchy along with spiritual equality, most other Qurʾanic verses concerning women are dedicated to warning men against abusing the authority they are given in matters of marriage, divorce, custody, and female children.

Wealth Inequality and Mitigative Measures

Unlike gender inequality at the social level, which is carefully justified and regulated, economic inequality is treated as undesirable but to an extent unavoidable. Moreover, a number of means are devised to mitigate it. Inequality in wealth is tolerated only as a natural result of divinely ordained diversity of human circumstances. God gives some more than others, but only to test them, and vehemently denies any superiority on that basis. As earlier prophets had been, the Prophet Muhammad is warned never to let the poverty of his devout early followers be a cause for looking down on them or passing over them in favor of the affluent. Among the believers, the disparity must be mitigated through charity and alms and other means such as most strident prohibition of usury. The inheritance laws of the Qurʾan similarly function to distribute the wealth such that it normally becomes split up and redistributed from one generation to the next. These staples of Islamic law were intended to and did in fact historically militate against accumulation of wealth under normal conditions and hence prevented excessive accumulation, a condition that was to be crucial in the later rise of modern capitalism.

Yet, if one posits the human invention of private property as the foundation of all later inequality and even capitalism, as leftist historians often do, then that foundation is remarkably preserved in the Qurʾan: the right to own and freely engage in trade is unequivocally preserved, and theft is severely punished. Islamic law thus created a strong free market and private property, which engendered worldwide trade networks spanning in particular the Indian Ocean world yet prevented the rise of modern predatory capitalism.

Inequality in Status: Slavery

The Qurʾan offers no justification, unlike in the previous two cases, for slavery, although its tolerance of slavery is comparable to the tolerance of poverty. Slaves are spoken of nearly always in the context of freein...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Participants
• Introduction
• Part One: Overviews
• Part Two: Muslims and Christians Facing the Reality of Inequality
• Part Three: Inequality, The Bible, and the Christian Tradition
• Part Four: Inequality, The Qurʾan, and the Hadith
• Part Five: Possibilities and Obstacles Toward a Common Ethic of Equality
• Part Six: Reflections
• Subject Index
• Scriptural Citation Index
• About the Editor