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Social Justice



Every society has its own hierarchy of wrongs. The worst thing in the Liberal system may be bad in Islam but not the worst thing in the world. The worst error in Islam may not even a problem in Liberalism. Part of iman is to react according to the level of error that Allah placed on an action, not society. That’s the meaning of the hadith about love something for the sake of Allah or hating something for His sake only.


Again, it’s the same idea of trying to live by two different cosmological, epistemological, and moral systems. It’s a guaranteed failure that will bread nothing but tension and cognitive dissonance. It’s crossing two electric wires that don’t go together. If nothing bad happens, you just got lucky. But eventually, do the math, and you’re going to have to pick one system to live by, which includes what we get upset about.


We all only have so much energy every day, so we have to pick our battles and triage. What will be the basis of our triaging?


Society may expect you to be outraged by a certain thing, whereas Sharia says it’s actually okay. Or vice-versa. So now we have this awkward burden on our shoulders. The right thing to do is to educate. To explain from where our guidance derives. (This is a good test for “tolerance” too.)


There are these moments of forced communal outrage. That idea itself is fine, *if* the morals being upheld were the Truth. When you don’t believe something is true or false, you owe it to yourself to explain it to people rather than bare the burden of carrying two distinct systems.

There are so many examples but I don’t want them to derail the discussion because these things get emotionally charged. The principle is simply that even our outrage and our disavowal of things or people are guided by the Sharia.

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