Injustice in Contemporary Islamic Theology: Explanation, Punishment and the Hereafter

Abstract

Since the 1980s, a theology of injustice has gained prominence in Islamic thought as a large body of literature has been written on the subject. One of the main tenets of this theology is the punishment of injustice in the afterlife, which emphasizes how unjust individuals will endure different punishments, including suffering in darkness on the Day of Resurrection. Some theologians use the divine punishment of unjust individuals in the hereafter as a rhetorical method of dissuasion from injustice in conjunction with warnings against the injustices that Muslims are currently facing or committing. Taking an ethical and normative stand, other theologians prohibit injustice, including violence against innocent people. Other Muslim theologians adopt an analytical perspective, developing concepts to understand the causes, effects, and ways to prevent injustice, including via God’s love. All theologians agree that God will punish the unjust on Earth and in the hereafter. This article discusses how injustice is explained in modern Muslim theology and closely examines and critically analyzes twelve contemporary theological Muslim texts in Arabic that have been produced in recent decades. In addition, I will place these modern theological discussions within the context of the development of modern Islamic thought and in relation to the ongoing discussions about theodicy, ethics, and the imagery of (after) death in modern society. This article argues that the theology of injustice has two purposes: it calls the unjust to accept responsibility and promises the victim delayed justice and retribution. I conclude that the punitive stance on injustice can be explained by the ongoing political and social struggles in the Muslim world as well as the spreading of traditionalist Islamic theology.

1. Introduction

A great deal of scholarly work on justice in Islam (‘adl) was published, and some seminal monographs have been extremely helpful in understanding the ethical and theological stances of Muslims on justice (Khadduri 1984; Shepard 1996; Rosen 2000; Kamali 2002; Masud et al. 2006; Ciftci 2021; Baker 2022). However, when it comes to the topic of injustice (ẓulm), there is a critical lack of academic studies. The few publications that are now available focus on the Quranic discourse regarding injustice as a violation of societal and divine standards and boundaries (Cragg 1959; Izutsu 2002; Reeber 2004; Christiansen 2020). This article aims to close the gap on understanding injustice in contemporary Islamic theology; it contextualizes and conducts a text analysis of twelve selected texts (books or short pieces) written by different Muslim theologians and intellectuals in the Arab world, focusing on divine punishment in the afterlife as salvation, offering soteriological hope to the victims of injustice and consolation that God punishes the unjust in the herein as well.

This Islamic literature can be said to develop a theology of injustice because it puts God at the center of the causes and consequences of unjust acts. According to this Islamic theology of injustice, the latter starts with disbelief in God, an act that violates God’s unity and status as the only true divinity worth of worshiping. Then, if one refuses to follow God’s path, he or she commits injustice against the self. Treating others unfairly also transgresses God’s rules, which maintain justice and balance on earth. In this life as well as in the hereafter, God is the one who ultimately punishes the unjust. The Islamic theology of injustice envisages injustice as a distinct topic from justice, developing a discursive framework that addresses the causes and effects of injustice in a reasonably coherent and independent manner. For this reason, we intend to study this literature as a genre of its own, with its structure and particular focus.

My main contention in this article is that the theology of injustice has two purposes: 1. it encourages the unjust to accept moral and legal accountability; and 2. it provides the victim with delayed justice and retribution. This double function can be explained by the dual meaning of ẓulm as wronging (in the moral sense) and oppression (in the more political sense) experienced by individuals or communities (Agrama 2012, p. 212). In light of this remark, a theology of injustice should be interpreted as a religious reaction to what Muslim scholars believe to be oppression and wrongdoing in the modern Muslim world. In other words, this theology is both an eschatological hope to comfort the victims of injustice and a critique of a social and political conditions in Muslim societies.

I did not ground my study in medieval theological sources because my area of investigation here is the modern theology of injustice, which still requires research and understanding of its functions. However, in order to prepare the reader for the discussion that follows, I provide a succinct overview of Islamic scripture and medieval theology on injustice. The issues and conditions around injustice that medieval theologians engaged in are outside the scope of this essay and require research of its own. In this article, my contribution to studies on injustice in Islamic thought consists of understanding the issues and settings of contemporary Muslim theologians as well as framing and analyzing contemporary Islamic literature on injustice..

In this paper, it is difficult to present a thorough bibliographic review of studies on injustice as they developed in the sociological study of religion. For a start, it will take us far from the focus of this study, which is theology and the hereafter. Nonetheless, there are significant secular discourses on injustice, and social sciences have emerged to examine them in a wide range of Muslim societies and cultures. If we simply looked at the monographs that were written about social and political injustice in the Muslim world, a dozen volumes were published. The main topics of discussion include human rights abuses and rentier capitalism as causes of injustice and inequality in Pakistan (Gill 1999; Ahmed 2016), political repression of the opposition in Indonesia (Watson 2006), torture in Iranian prisons (Bahari and Molloy 2012), and social disparity in Chad (Ngomibé 2020). Thus, one can observe that these monographs mostly appeared in the last 20 years and that their focus is laid on human rights violations, whether they be social, political, or economic.

In discussing the issue of injustice, this paper follows a historical–thematic structure, starting with classical Islam although it concentrates on modern Islam. Its thematic structuring revolves around making a distinction between divine punishment in the hereafter and divine punishment in the here and now at the hands of people. I analyze some twelve contemporary theological Muslim texts in Arabic that have been produced in recent decades. In terms of methodology, I adopt an intellectual history approach (arranging the material according to the historical development of Islamic theology in relation to contexts of its discursive production) as well as text analysis to understand the arguments put forward by Musim theologians. I focus on their justification of divine punishment of injustice as a guiding line while reading and analyzing their works. I selected these texts in a way that reflects diversity (as the authors belong to various countries in North Africa, the Levant, The Gulf and Egypt). Moreover, I chose the authors who are sufficiently reputable to serve as a representative sample of Islamic thought. In order to stay in line with the theme of the Special Issue on injustice and the afterlife (which this article is part of) I concentrated my discussion on the Islamic perspectives on the retribution of the unjust. To provide a more thorough grasp of the subject, I nevertheless added brief explanations of the causes and effects of injustice that went beyond the element of punishment.

2. Injustice in Islamic Scripture and Medieval Islamic Theology

Before examining injustice (ẓulm) in modern Islamic theology, we should review the origins and evolution of this concept in Islamic scripture as the latter continues to be the primary source of Muslim theologians today. Despite adapting their content to meet the demands of the times and evolving in a different context, modern theologians nonetheless extensively draw from the terminology, reasoning, and authoritative discourses of Islamic texts. The Quran and hadith texts, before kalām theologians (especially the Mu‘tazilites) made justice and injustice a central topic of Islamic theology, have extensively discussed this topic. The Quran, in particular, offers a rich material on injustice that has inspired, and still does, many theologians. The Quran defines injustice as action that transgresses God’s bounds or stepping beyond the boundaries of right action, using usually the term of ẓulm for injustice. An unjust person is one who does wrong to others or to himself or to God by sinning, opposing divine will, or ascribing partners to God. In the Quran, although its primary meaning is transgression, injustice can take the form of indecency, disobedience, insolence, tyranny, disbelief, falsehood or major sins. Injustice is less a lack of justice than an active resistance of God’s guidance. The Quran promises that the unjust people will be punished, or will be damned to hell, because they did not recognize God’s prophets (Brockopp 2003, pp. 69–71). The term of ẓulm is formative (mentioned 289 times in the Quran) in the whole Quranic and Islamic vocabulary relating to evil and sin, to the psychology of temptation, and to the moral order (Cragg 1959, p. 196). The Quran also forbids injustice and reprimands assisting the unjust, illustrating the typical unjust with the biblical Pharaoh and the peoples of Lot and Noah (Bt Hamid 2004, pp. 29–53). The Quran also develops a moral psychology of injustice towards oneself as deviating from the right path (Hourani 1977) as well as a consistent rhetorical strategy to discourage from injustice (Christiansen 2020).

For Izutsu, who has studied the concept of injustice, ẓulm in the Quran in great detail, this term falls under the semantic field of disbelief, kufr. According to him, injustice is one of the Quran’s most derogatory terms. The Quran endorsed the moral definition of injustice as acting in a way that infringes upon the rights of others. In the Quranic perspective, God establishes the boundaries that humans must respect; injustice is, thus, going beyond these rules and boundaries and doing something one has no right to do (Izutsu 2002, p. 164). God’s punishment, which can strike the unjust even before the Day of Judgment, is a central theme in the Quran’s discourse on injustice. The many remnants of old towns are considered to be visible signs of God’s terrible wrath (Izutsu 2002, p. 165). Moreover, disbelief, kufr is frequently used interchangeably with injustice, ẓulm. Therefore, someone who mockingly listens to Revelation and refers to the Prophet as a poet or magician may be called unjust rather than a disbeliever. Religious skepticism that debates or disputes about God and His Revelation, crying lies to God’s signs, and saying lies (against God) are likewise condemned as unjust deeds (Izutsu 2002, pp. 169–70).

The Quranic strong condemnation of injustice is paralleled in the hadith literature which developed in the 8th and 9th centuries as more than 80 Prophetic traditions forbid injustice were transmitted (al-Kūmī 1992). The Prophetic traditions also emphasize injustice as a major sin with serious consequences. The most blatant forms of injustice include violating people’s rights, associating another deity with God, injustice committed by rulers against their subjects, injustice towards women, and injustice towards workers, homicide, theft, fraud, all forms of plunder, all forms of unlawful appropriation, misappropriation of orphans’ property, treason and breach of trust, unjust offense, iniquity, complicity, blindly defending the unjust, unfaithfulness to commitments, perfidy and deceit, corrupting judges, false testimony, dissembling, insulting, mistreating the poor and the orphan, mockery, disdainful gestures, espionage, backbiting and slander, complicit credulity, defamation, harming others, and indifference to public harm (Reeber 2004, p. 86). The Prophetic traditions also state that the unjust will be severely punished on the Day of Judgment; this in no way means that God would remain indifferent to the unjust before the end of the judgment. While they are still alive, He inflicts a heavy punishment on them since God hears the supplications of the oppressed, and they are answered before all others (Reeber 2004, p. 87).

It is necessary to note here that some schools of Muslim theology, especially the Mu‘tazila, which rests its theology on five premises, consider divine justice (‘adl) to be a principle of belief. For example, al-Qāḍī ‘Abd al-Jabbār (d. 1025), a key Mu‘tazili theologian argues that knowing that injustice is wrong and blameworthy is necessary knowledge acquired by human reason, and that reasonable people should not disagree on this matter. For him, injustice is a voluntary choice made by individuals and therefore deserves punishment (al-Qāḍī ‘Abd al-Jabbār 1965, pp. 18–19). In al-Qāḍī ‘Abd al-Jabbār’s Mu‘tazili system, harm to rights is constitutive of injustice and desert and of the moral qualities of evilness; the harm inflicted on another is unjust because it constitutes a violation of the other’s rights (Vasalou 2008, pp. 59–60). Moreover, al-Qāḍī ‘Abd al-Jabbār defines injustice as every harm that does not involve a profit that outweighs it, does not avert a harm that is greater than it and is not deserved (Heemskerk 2000, p. 124; Elkaisy-Friemuth 2006, p. 69).

Beside the Mu‘tazila, other schools of Islamic theology such as the Kharijites, the Twelver Shia, and the Zaydi Shia also consider divine justice to be a principle of belief closely related to their perception of political legitimacy and not only a matter of Islamic ethics. Sunni theology also discussed divine justice as part of belief in predestination. Though they disagree on what justice means, Muslim theologians made justice a key element in their discourses on the issues of evil, the nature of acts, moral obligations, reason, God’s will, human endeavor and acquisition, the beaty and love of God (Khadduri 1984, pp. 39–77). The Māturīdīs (a Sunni school of theology) argued that “God’s wisdom and knowledgeable, purposeful competency is essentially equivalent to His justice although the latter may not be commensurate with shifting, relative, and culture-specific human conceptions of the just” (Winter 2025).

In Islamic ethics, the moral philosopher Miskawayh (d. 1030) authored a work in the definition of ẓulm (Miskawayh 2017). The jurist al-Juwaynī (d. 1085) wrote his influential Ghiyāth al-umam fī iltiyāth al-ẓulam to assist the Muslim states in avoiding injustice although this work was probably written by a much later Muslim jurist (Siddiqui 2019). Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), a Sunni Ḥanbalī theologian, wrote a treatise to explain the meaning that God forbids himself from committing injustice (Ibn Taymiyya 1992). The historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), in North Africa, has formulated a sociological law by which he considers injustice as a factor of destruction of civilizations (Ibn Khaldūn 1981, vol. 1, p. 356). In late medieval Islam, and in Western Africa, Aḥmad Bābā al-Tunbuktī (d. 1627) wrote a text on how staying away from unjust rulers brings blessings and wards off calamity (al-Tunbuktī 2011). In sum, in medieval Islamic thought, injustice was seen as transgression of divine and moral orders that can be committed by individuals, states and people, and can have religious as well as political and social meanings, often intertwined.

Moreover, Muslim states created an office to correct the injustices committed by its officials (dīwān al-maẓālim) albeit this office could also be involved in injustice (Fuess 2009). Theoretically, victims of injustice may file petitions in which they expressed their discontent with the despicable conduct of those in positions of authority as well as the unfairness that resulted from their actions. Muslim political thinkers emphasized this office as a way to correct the injustices committed by the state officials in the Abbasid era (Rahmani 2017; Tillier 2015). The way this institution operated, however, lacked a clear definition of its jurisdiction, was far less clear and most likely less structured than what was stated in the literature. Still, the institution adopted a procedure whereby state representatives heard and responded to petitions and complaints submitted by subjects. As a result, this not only benefited those whose rights were violated, but also gave the government a tool to manage and regulate its own employees (Van Berkel 2015).

Islamic political theorists have long held that justice, ‘adl is a quality of good governance while tyranny, ẓulm is the characteristic of bad governance. The idea of ẓulm blends together the meanings of usurpation and tyranny. Thus, a tyrant is someone who rules against Islamic law whereas a usurper is someone who rules without legitimacy, or without the right to do so with a connotation of unfair, oppressive, and illegitimate governance (Lewis 2010, p. 135). Even if ẓulm has evolved as a political term in later Medieval Islam, it still has some Quranic connotations, such as “misdeed,” “wrongdoing,” and “injustice.” Jawr is another word that is used interchangeably with ẓulm in Islamic political thought with the primary meaning of deviation, straying from the path and wrongful or unjust treatment. In a widespread messianic belief among Sunnis and Shiites, a mahdī, a divinely guided one, is described as someone who will fill at the end of times the earth with justice as it is now filled with injustice (Lewis 1988, p. 155).

All schools of Islamic theology had their say on injustice. However, the Mu’tazila paid a particular attention to the link between the belief in God’s unity and his divine justice. Islamic scriptures also addressed injustice in relation to belief. Islamic law and institutions considered crossing the lines of justice and rights worthy of punishment and developed measures to lessen the impact of oppression. Muslim literature and jurists have formulated a decisive ethical critique of injustice. The modern discussion of injustice in religious literature owes much to this medieval critique of social and political injustice accompanied by the eschatological hope it promised for the victims. In a sense, this medieval literature is relevant to the contemporary development of Muslim societies and thought because of the current struggle to eradicate oppression and wrongdoing (Haque 1996, p. 40). That said, contemporary Islamic thinkers and scholars are interested in developing their own theology of injustice.

3. A Contemporary Theology of Injustice

As we have stated in the introduction, Muslim theologians and thinkers begin their discussion of injustice with the premise that God forbade injustice to Himself. They, then, go on to discuss how injustice is a tendency of human nature, warning against injustice, the forms of injustice, and how God punishes it. Thus, because it starts and ends with God, we refer to this specific modern Islamic discourse on ẓulm as a theology of injustice. In 1984, Muṣṭafā Mashhūr (1921–2002), a prominent Egyptian ideologue and leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, released the first Islamic monograph on injustice in modern times. He had been imprisoned in Egypt for decades (between 1948 and 1971), particularly during Nasser’s rule, as part of the repressions of the Muslim Brotherhood movement. This provides a specific context for the emergence of this Islamic literature, which is the so-called Islamic awakening brought about by the rise of Islamism and the retraditionalization of Muslim societies in protest against authoritarianism in the Arab world and beyond.

Mashhūr’s Qaḍiyyat al-ẓulm fī ḍaw’ al-kitāb wa-l-sunna (The Question of Injustice in Light of the Quran and Prophetic Tradition) became a foundational and structural work of this theology of injustice. Mashhūr divides the world into unjust people and victims of injustice. He argues that injustice will be punished with darkness on the Day of Resurrection. Today, he asserts wherever a person turns, he sees various and diverse forms of injustice. Yet, he states, we should pity the oppressors more than we pity the oppressed. The punishment of the oppressors is more severe and lasting in the afterlife than what the oppressed are exposed to in this world (Mashhūr 1984, p. 3). Mashhūr describes in detail the tortures he and the members of the Muslim Brotherhood suffered in prison (Mashhūr 1984, pp. 30–31). He criticizes the unjust regimes, especially in Egypt, and how weak soldiers and policemen help the regime commit wrongdoings against the Islamist activists, especially in conducting torture against the members of the Muslim Brotherhood (Mashhūr 1984, pp. 29–37). He asserts that injustice ultimately will end (Mashhūr 1984, p. 40). As for the victims of injustice, they ask them for faith and patience. Injustice will be punished in the hereafter, as the unjust will suffer in the darkness of hell (Mashhūr 1984, p. 49). He calls the victims to take care of themselves and return to God without accepting injustice (Mashhūr 1984, pp. 53–71).

Mashhūr’s work has succeeded in incorporating prophetic and Quranic discourse on injustice into a framework of opposing political repression. He specifically assigned a dual role to divine retribution for injustice. On the one hand, Arab authoritarian regimes are “pharaoized” and warned of the impending destruction in the herein and the hereafter by divine wrath should they continue repression and discard repentance. For the victims of persecution, Islamists and Muslims in general, however, divine chastisement is a salvation, giving them hope that their sacrifices are not in vain and that they will be rewarded without the need for immediate action or bloodshed. Divine punishment has been specifically adopted as the central component of this theology in later Islamic literature.

3.1. Divine Punishment in the Herein at the Hands of Humans

Muslim theologians agree that divine punishment of the unjust takes three forms: 1. divine punishment through other powerful states or individuals. 2. Direct divine punishment in the herein. 3. Divine punishment in the hereafter. However, they diverge in the type of divine punishment they emphasize. Let us begin with the first form of punishment. The prominent Egyptian scholar and preacher Muḥammad Mutawallī al-Sha‘rāwī (1911–1998) asserts in his much spread book Injustice and the Unjust (published in Arabic as al-Ẓulm wa-l-ẓālimūn in 2001, edited several times and translated into English in 2002) that God does not wrong by even the weight of an atom, and that the Prophet Muḥammad is free of wrongdoing or injustice. People can commit injustice towards themselves when they satisfy their immediate appetites in a way that will result in their enduring wretchedness (al-Sha‘rāwī 2002, pp. 26–35). He considers one of the great calamities in this world is that people seek the help of the unjust, and assist them in spite of their injustice, feeling inclination, satisfaction, love and mercy, and friendship towards the unjust (al-Sha‘rāwī 2002, p. 36). He maintains that injustice is a reason for destruction which does not occur spontaneously, but through a pre-eternal decree from God against those who brought about corruption in the earth. God takes revenge on the unjust by using other unjust people as His sword on earth to punish the unjust (al-Sha‘rāwī 2002, p. 38). Before divine punishment in the hereafter, the punishment of wrongdoers in this world is necessary, argues al-Sha‘rāwī for “if all punishment were to be deferred to the Next World then injustice would spread among people. It would worsen throughout all existence… That is why there must be repayment in this world: in order to draw people’s attention to the fact God sustains existence and that the punishment of wrongdoers in this world is a warning and a lesson for others” (al-Sha‘rāwī 2002, p. 43).

The Palestinian Muḥammad Ibrāhīm Aḥmad Sayf, in his Inkār al-ẓulm fī ḍaw’ al-kitāb wa-l-sunna (Denying Injustice according to the Quran and Prophetic Tradition) initially a work presented for his master’s degree in Islamic theology at Al-Najah National University, Nablus, Palestine, addresses injustice in terms of its causes and consequences, with focus on the latter. As the first cause of injustice in human societies, he highlights “the class division, which has pervaded society and continues to do so, with some segments of society feeling superior, powerful, controlling, dominating, and materially and socially superior to others… This has led to the emergence of what is called racial discrimination, a sense of racial superiority, and the domination and enslavement of whites over blacks for a long period of time, spearheaded by America, and later by European countries and others” (Sayf 2007, pp. 16–18). For Sayf, the second cause of injustice is “the weakness of religious restraint among oppressors, which has led them to not fear the Lord of the Worlds… some of them have doubted divine justice, and, even more so, have loved this world, attached to it, prioritizing it over the Hereafter. They have even hated the Hereafter, allowing their own desires to control them, leading them to love injustice and not accept God’s decree and destiny (Sayf 2007, pp. 19–24). Compared to other Muslim theologians on injustice, this blended social-ethical explanation of injustice is unique to Sayf, especially the way he discusses how a sense of superiority based on race or class leads to injustice.

In terms of consequences, according to Sayf, the unjust will suffer in the herein and the hereafter. The punishment of the oppressor in this world, Sayf states, “is a lack of security and stability, and they are in constant fear. God will inflict upon the oppressors the natural disasters such as hurricanes, heavy rains, winds, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, insects, and so on… Before they depart from this world, they will suffer the severe throes of death… they will have a bad end in this world and intense pain that they had not anticipated” (Sayf 2007, pp. 66–76). As for the Hereafter, “the unjust will have a bad home and a bad end. Every time their skins are cooked, God will replace them with other skins so that they may taste the torment, with life and no death… And if they ask for a mitigation of the torment, they are rebuked, and it increases for them… on the Day of Resurrection the unjust will regret their deeds, will be shackled and chained, seeking help from the people of Paradise and crying out for relief from the torment” (Sayf 2007, pp. 77–102). In contrast, “God will take justice for the oppressed and reward them for their patience with the best reward in the Gardens of Bliss… And the Muslim who has been wronged in this world and has not been able to obtain or attain his rights despite his struggle and sacrifices of money, life, and children, can rest assured that even if his rights are lost in this world, they will not be lost in the Hereafter” (Sayf 2007, pp. 103–18).

In particular, as claimed by the Algerian Islamic scholar Nūra Bin Ḥasan in her al-Ẓulm fī ḍaw’ al-Qur’ān al-Karīm (Injustice in Light of the Noble Quran), presented first as a PhD thesis at the University of Batna in Algeria in 2009, unjust states fall terribly and end up being uprooted. When unjust rulers commit injustice, harming people’s rights and humiliating their dignities, they become accustomed to the life of humiliation and weakness which makes the states weak and unfit for survival, and helps the enemies in overtaking these states and destroying them (Bin Ḥasan 2009, p. 246). Unjust rulers also lead to corruption, laziness, migration, and social disintegration. This makes the state unable to collect taxes and financial resources, which opens the door for other states to dominate it through wars, which ultimately affect the population. Thus, social, economic, or political injustice is directly a cause of the decline of states and destruction of countries (Bin Ḥasan 2009, p. 249). She adds that the spread of injustice in Arab and Muslim countries, by both individuals and states, is one of the main reasons of the backwardness, weakness, and defeats of these states, which brought them under the dominance of their enemies. Unless these states rush to fix injustice, they will fall and be destroyed (Bin Ḥasan 2009, p. 250).

The Saudi Salafi scholar ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd al-Suḥaybānī in his Wa-mādhā ba‘da al-ẓulm? Aḥdāth tārīkhiyya hāmma wa-qiṣaṣ wāqi‘iyya ‘an nihāyat al-ẓulm (What Happens after Injustice? Important Historical Events and Real Stories about the End of injustice) published in 2013 (in the aftermath of the Arab Spring) asserts that contemplating the fate of the oppressors and the destruction they suffer is a lesson for every stubborn tyrant; a terrible fate befell those tyrants who possessed power, wealth, and the means of survival and dominance because God took them all after they had long tempted and harmed people; the power of God is the real power, and anything other than that is weak and feeble, no matter how high and mighty it is, no matter how tyrannical and arrogant it is, and no matter how many means of oppression, tyranny, and torture it possesses (al-Suḥaybānī 2013, pp. 5–6). The historical figures he analyzes as examples of the fate of the unjust include Qārūn (biblical Korah) and Pharaoh, the Arabian and Jewish opponents of the Prophet Muḥammad in Mecca and Medina, some Umayyad Caliphs and rulers, extreme Shiites and some Mamluk sultans (al-Suḥaybānī 2013, pp. 9–140). In these cases, the punishment they received was at the hands of humans that God used to punish injustice.

This discourse on how to punish injustice can be interpreted as an appeal for moral and legal accountability. Probably, the goal of mobilizing God’s role in punishing the powerful is to remind the oppressors that there is always a more powerful entity that can destroy them. Thus, the unjust ought to accept responsibility for their actions and make amends, or else they will suffer the repercussions. Additionally, this calls to combat injustice and thus provides justification and motivation for action and engagement. By the same token, Muslim participation in civil rights movements is acceptable and even commendable if injustice is such a crime that God punished in a dramatic and devastating fashion (Slater 2025, p. 38). Thus, this Islamic theological discourse is an appeal to accountability for the unjust as well as call to action for Muslims in general in order to address injustice.

3.2. Divine Punishment in the Hereafter: Injustice Will Be Darkness on the Day of Resurrection

Following the Prophetic tradition, which states that injustice will turn into darkness on the Day of Resurrection, al-ẓulm ẓulumāt yawma al-qiyāma (the word injustice, ẓulm is derived from the same root ẓ-l-m as darkness, ẓulumāt) (Al-Bukhārī 1993, vol. 2, p. 864), hundreds of books, booklets, articles, and sermons have nurtured a theological discourse on this particular motif. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān b. ‘Abdallāh Āl-Sanad, the Saudi Salafi scholar, argues that injustice will not be lost before God, and the oppressor will be punished for it on the Day of Resurrection and will be suffering in darkness (Āl-Sanad 1974). ‘Alī Ḥāmid ‘Abd al-Raḥīm, an Egyptian Muslim scholar, states that doing injustice to one’s self (by committing sins and transgressions), or to the others (by violating their rights) will be punished with darkness on the Judgement Day (‘Abd al-Raḥīm 1995). The Saudi Salafi scholar Nāyif b. Aḥmad al-Ḥamad adds that God punishes the unjust person in the following ways: 1. He shall have no friend or an intercessor, 2. God may postpone his punishment but will never let him go, 3. God will be his opponent on the Day of Judgment, 4. God will unveil his secrets on the Day of Judgment, 5. God threatens him to dwell in hellfire, and 6. God will punish him on the Day of Judgment (al-Ḥamad 2011). The Syrian traditionalist scholar Rāwiya Nūr al-Dīn ‘Itr argues that prohibiting abuse, harm, and injustice includes all kinds of injustice that a person can cause, great and small, and that God has revealed in clear terms His threat to the unjust and wicked people with severe punishment and humiliation on the Judgment Day (‘Itr 2022).

According to the Yemeni Salafist Fayṣal al-Ḥāshidī, who was previously a member of the Muslim Brotherhood before leaving them and joining the circle of the Salafist Muqbil al-Wādi‘ī in Yemen, injustice is inherent in human nature. It can take several forms, the first of which is injustice to oneself, which occurs when someone rejects God or identifies other deities with him (al-Ḥāshidī 2020, p. 21). Being unfair to others is akin to being unfair to oneself. Injustice might include backbiting, gossip, slander, obscene speech, false testimony, falsely accusing a chaste person, mocking, and revealing a secret, as well as persecuting others for practicing Islam. Murder, all forms of sorcery, ruling against sharia, stealing land from others, usury, treachery and betrayal, deceit, not paying the rightful, and cruelty towards children are some more severe forms of injustice (al-Ḥāshidī 2020, pp. 29–66). A Muslim’s responsibility is to counsel and dissuade the oppressor and to stand by the oppressed. In principle, eliminating injustice (with hands, speech, or heart) depends on the state’s ability and can be done by individuals if the public authorities fail to assume this duty. As long as the victim of injustice does not violate the law, the unjust bears full responsibility (al-Ḥāshidī 2020, pp. 67–90). God hears the cries of the afflicted without exception and regardless of the oppressed people’s moral standing and will wreak devastation and destroy the oppressor. Examples of the punishment of the oppressor comprise God’s revenge on the oppressor on the day of Judgment, suffering in darkness, God’s respite for the oppressor, God will be the oppressor’s opponent, God will disgrace the oppressor, the unjust will dwell in the Hellfire, and the oppressor will live in the wrath of God and His anger (al-Ḥāshidī 2020, pp. 91–103).

As an eschatological hope, the promise of delayed justice and retribution aids the victims of injustice in patiently enduring their pain. Probably, the purpose of the vivid depictions of the punishment that awaits the unjust in the hereafter—darkness, agony, and perpetual suffering—is to serve as a warning to those who manage to avoid punishment in this life. This theology of injustice also assists the victims in maintaining their orthodox beliefs. That is, by promising that the unjust will meet their punishment, the victims will continue to believe in God and that the world he made is good. The victims of injustice, at least in the eschatological world, will see God the just judge redressing the suffering they endured in the herein.

These beliefs oppose the thesis of Kershnar on the injustice of hell. Kershnar contends that since humans are either incapable of causing endless harm or are not accountable for it, they do not deserve to go to hell. Furthermore, hell cannot be justified based on a person’s character because humans do not have unendingly terrible traits. God may not (or possibly cannot) send people to hell because they do not deserve it and he may not (or cannot) impose unfair penalties (Kershnar 2005, p. 103). However, for Muslim theologians, people should be punished in hell for their actions since they focus on unfair deeds rather than human nature. While some crimes are serious enough to warrant life in hell, others are just deserving of a certain degree of punishment.

4. Discussion: Context and Rationale

There is a pattern to be seen in the production of this theology of injustice. First, Saudi and Egyptian authors particularly dominated the making and diffusion of these discourses, which can be explained by the role the two countries played in the so-called Islamization or Islamic awakening that occurred in the 1970s; this movement, which was championed by Saudi Salafism and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood with financial support from Gulf countries, established a flourishing Islamic discursive space. In terms of the period of intellectual production, most pieces were published in the 1980s and 1990s when Islamization had reached its zenith (Lacroix 2011; Haddad 1987). In addition, various crises emerged in this time frame, which Islamism used as arguments for the injustice suffered by Muslims, including wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, and Chechnya, the Intifada in Palestine, and the repression by authoritarian regimes in the Arab world (Egypt, Algeria, and Syria, among others). This trend weakened a bit in the 2000s onward, perhaps because in the post 9/11 period support for Islamism has weakened, including among Gulf states, and the production has also declined. This discourse was rejuvenated in the 2010s through social media and found a new niche, which costs less and spreads fast and wide, and the same ideas were reworked into sermons broadcast through Islamic channels on YouTube, Facebook, and other social media outlets.

Although theology is arch-dominant, ethics still occupies a position in this discourse, allowing Muslim theologians to express their views on what constitutes a just society and the norms an individual or a community ought to follow. Injustice is mostly understood as a violation of God’s laws and order and the covenant he established with humanity. Injustice not only challenges God’s power but also throws the human moral order out of balance. Normally, rights are due, and divine order is established so that everyone should enjoy fair rights. That is why God forbade himself from doing injustice, in contrast to man, who is inherently unjust. God, being the source of justice, his power ensures that wrongdoing is never tolerated. Muslim theologians we studied here also assert the ethical dimension of self-correction whereby individuals prevent self-harm and injustice toward others. Ethics also intervene in the solution to injustice, which is seen through making this wrong right by paying God’s and man’s due rights. Muslim theologians insist on tawba, repentance, as ceasing all unjust acts before asking God for forgiveness and compensating the victims of injustice. Finally, by issuing terrible warnings about the fate of the unjust in the hereafter, through various images of torture, Muslim theologians wish to dissuade people from committing the acts of injustice.

Since, in many ways, injustice is the omission of justice, we may learn a great deal about Muslim views of justice from their discourses on ẓulm. After all, injustice results from leaving out the institutions, laws, or deeds of justice (Miller 2017). Furthermore, justice is achieved when any harm to others (injustice) is eliminated. Insofar as ẓulm is the transgression of norms and laws, respecting them leads to just agents and acts that benefit the whole community through sustaining systematic justice as well as fair treatment of individuals. By encouraging people to fear God and the punishment in the afterlife before doing injustice, Islamic ethics and theology aim to promote justice and the granting of everyone’s due rights. To create a more equitable society, injustice is thus outlawed and discouraged. Warnings about divine punishment are especially directed towards the powerful; tyrants should support just policies unless they wish to be punished with the same weapon of power they use against others. Thus, the Muslim discourses on injustice might be explained as negative justice, in which one “refrains from hurting our neighbor” (Carrasco 2023, p. 201)

Hasan Kösebalaban, a Turkish political scientist, makes the case that Muslim societies perceive marginalization and systemic injustice, committed both by their own states and by foreign powers, as the root causes of political instability and war in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world. The Muslim sense of civilizational injustice is sustained by a combination of interconnected elements, including political fragmentation, a democratic crisis, and isolation from the international system. Kösebalaban believes that Western theories of international relations were developed within a statist and materialist framework and are not well suited to explain the role of this civilizational injustice. In contrast to these Western perspectives, Muslim thinkers believe that justice, not order, is the cornerstone of a sustainable global peace. Thus, contrary to Western realism which maintains that justice cannot exist in the absence of order, the Muslim tradition views an incorrect order as a form of injustice (Kösebalaban 2014, pp. 19–42).

Many Muslims who believe they are treated unfairly endorse permissive attitudes towards violence and skeptic ones towards peace. Islamic movements (revivalism, reformism, and fundamentalism) emerged as socioreligious movements that propelled marginalized leaders into political dissidence as they sought to reclaim the space that the expanding Western powers had colonized, impoverished and redefined. Western powers’ post-colonial hegemony over the Middle East provided fundamentalists with justifications to invoke, redefine, and resurrect jihad (Lawrence 2013, pp. 134–41). Thus, injustice hinders the emergence of long needed and anticipated peace processes while promoting violent regimes and movements to use injustice as a pretext (van den Bos 2018). Regarding peace, a few Muslim countries demand a fair resolution to issues like The Israeli–Palestinian conflict but failing to achieve any result, pacifism in the Muslim world encounters a great deal of skepticism.

Recently, Alexander Bogomolov argued that like the leftists did with the term “oppression,” Islamist ideologues adopted Marxist ideology and transformed the notion of innate human injustice, ẓulm from a religious ethics concept into an ideological term that was specific to a particular historical period and political conditions. They strengthened ẓulm’s religious overtones while also making it the best Arabic equivalent of oppression (in the Marxist sense) (Bogomolov 2016, p. 26). During the 25 January revolution in Egypt (2011), collocations of ẓulm (injustice, oppression, and wrong) were widely used in Egyptian political discourse as an object falling from the sky, i.e., an area beyond human control, which conveys a sense of injustice as an unpredictable and deadly force (Bogomolov 2016, p. 9). Egyptian writers considered injustice to be the main cause of the 25 January revolution, pointing to ẓulm (wronging, injustice, oppression) as a notion that encompasses a wide spectrum of human experiences within its sphere of reference, including the moral and psychological anguish of individuals who believe they have been wronged, as well as a wide range of social and political injustices. In particular, protesters vented their anger at being subjected to political or social injustice of the Mubarak regime (Bogomolov 2016, p. 36).

Overall, in Muslim societies, a theology of injustice can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can both feed and foster revolutionary political discourse contributing to a context of social and political transformation, as in the case of the uprisings in the Arab Spring and the Iranian revolution in 1979 (and in the Iranian Green Movement in 2009). Religious discourse that denounces injustice becomes pertinent and has an instant impact on public opinion against authoritarianism and tyranny in many Arab and Muslim countries as elites or rulers perpetrate systemic abuses. Secular groups and young people also mobilize ideas that have religious overtones because they speak to their audiences’ imaginations and histories, in which theology is still significant. On the other hand, an eschatological theology of injustice can also delay the punishment of the unjust and redirect the public toward the Day of Judgment, thereby reducing social and political injustice to apocalyptic hyperbole. Tyranny can benefit from such religious discourse and tolerate it as long as it does not materialize in political action.

One of the main features of this theology of injustice is that it astutely combines the political and the ethical. On the one hand, it calls the unjust to moral accountability and consolidate critical ethics on transgressing the norms, injustice, wrongdoing, and suffering of individuals. At the same time, it inspires Muslims to take action against injustice and put a stop to it in the public sphere. Without directly generating an Islamic ethical or political theory on opposing the oppression of rulers in the Muslim world, the idea of God as a punisher of the unjust allows for an indirect condemnation of the tyrants. A theology of injustice permits an implicit critique without the dangers associated with such explicit discourses. Thus, the religious discourses on injustice were mobilized in various recent revolutions in the Middle East, especially in Syria (Al-Khalili 2023, p. 45).

5. Conclusions

This article showed that a modern Islamic theology of injustice developed in recent decades, with a focus on divine punishment of the unjust, which could manifest itself in the destruction of the unjust by other unjust people, direct divine punishment through natural disasters, or divine punishment on the Day of Judgment, especially the punishment of everlasting darkness. Even if it is firmly rooted in the apocalyptic imaginary of the Quran and the prophetic traditions, this theology is pertinent to modern Muslim ethics and politics. It promotes a set of norms for what constitutes just individuals, societies, states and international relations. Additionally, this theological discourse was relevant to the Arab uprisings, particularly in Egypt and Syria, where various political movements utilized this theology to oppose authoritarianism and tyranny. Yet, an eschatological theology of injustice can redirect the public toward the Day of Judgment, reducing political and social injustice to apocalyptic images, and postpone resistance against injustice. This article shows that the theology of injustice serves two functions: it demands accountability from the unjust and assures the victim of postponed justice and retribution. It, thereby, helped to clarify the ethical–political purposes and assertions of contemporary Muslim theologians, as well as their tacit exhortation to resist oppression.