MAN’S superiority over creation lies in his faculty of creative knowledge, ie, the capacity to discover the laws of, and thus achieve mastery over, nature, or, in Quranic terminology, “to know the names of all things”, and then use this mastery under the human initiative to create a just political world order. Endowed with choice and charged with responsibility, man is a bearer of ‘Trust’ under whose weight the entire universe chafed. He assumed the task which the heavens, despite their heights, the earth despite its vastness, and the mountains, despite their firmness, shrank from undertaking.
This task involves fulfilling the primordial covenant: to establish a just world order, since the challenge God gave man at creation was to create a sociopolitical order that reflects the equality all people share in the eyes of God. It was to orient the forces of history towards a just social order rather than to compromise with them under the cover of secularism. Hence, for Islam, politics is through and through a moral endeavour to accomplish the task. The Quranic idea of ‘fauz’ (success) or ‘khusran’ (failure) is rooted in executing the same task, since it is the quality of the political process through which civilisations rise and fall.
The Quran, in its coherent unity, shows that it is a troika of religious, political, and mercantile elites that manoeuvres the materials of history towards their vested interests. And when exploitation reaches its critical point, the whole of society or civilisation is mowed down. When the Quran talks about the death of individuals like Pharaoh, Qarun and Haman, it is showing the self-destructiveness of the way of life of a society or civilisation. The remedy lies in building a just sociopolitical order, since societies built on unbelief may survive, but unjust ones may not.
Now, because injustice is often rooted in socioeconomic disequilibrium and grave fiscal malpractices can lead to socioeconomic suicide (4:29-32), the Quran makes monotheism-based socioeconomic reforms the linchpin of its moral programme. Therefore, Islam, since its very inception, was socio-politically geared to uproot the corrupt socioeconomic structures of Persia and Byzantium and to build anew, to inject fresh blood into the veins of a decrepit and decadent humanity.
In Islam politics is through and through a moral endeavour.
Islam views power as a means to an end, not an end in itself, as prayer and zakat are instruments of socioeconomic equality. Implementing them in letter and spirit required political power, so the Prophet (PBUH) felt duty-bound to build a state based on an ethical sociopolitical order.
Hence, man is a moral political being with ibada as his purpose of creation — which means to know the will of God and implement it in life, and to restore moral order in individual and social life to redeem the balance of history.
The Quran constituted an egalitarian community, with equal rights for all to participate in or lead the execution of the task through shura, or mutual consultation. The community’s internal conduct was based on active goodwill and cooperation with no trace of elitism. Externally, it kept inviting the religious others to share the burden of building a world moral order. It fared well and was blessed with political control of Arabia, eventually expanding into parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe.
However, later, with the onset and patronage of dictatorship, Sufism Hellenised almost every bit of the faith. In the long run, this development resulted in the colonisation of Muslim Asia and Africa by Western po-wers. At this critical juncture, Syed Jamal al-Din Afghani rediscovered the Quran’s moral political vision. He proposed building an Islamic republic across a wide region of Central Asia and the Muslim-majority areas of northwest India to realise Islam’s sociopolitical ideals. He amply fired the imagination of Iqbal and Ali Shariati. The former conceived the idea of Pakistan, and the latter paved the way for the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Today, the Muslim world has either succumbed to secular structures or theocratic modes. The realisation of the Quran’s moral political vision that seeks just socioeconomic and democratic organisation of society seems like a distant dream.
The Quran hardly demands military conquests which could stand in the way of the prospects of the socio-democratic organisation of society. What the vision needs is a tract of land with a just political order whose fragrance may be smelt in the world around and which, in the long run, is destined to create a just world order. Does such a realisation prevail anywhere in the Muslim world?
The writer is an academic.
Published in Dawn, September 11th, 2026
