The Unfinished Revolution: Justice as a Living, Absolute, and Radical Value in the Quran
By V.A. Mohamad Ashrof, New Age Islam
28 March 2026
This paper argues that justice (ʿadl and qisṭ) in the Quran is not a secondary legal category but the ontological pillar of creation, the teleological horizon of prophethood, and the absolute ethical mandate for humanity. Employing a Quranic hermeneutical methodology—principally derived from Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd’s contextual reading—this study navigates justice across its cosmic, ethical, socio-economic, juridical, gendered, political, and eschatological dimensions. Against the backdrop of Orientalist reductionism and internal authoritarian exegesis, the paper contends that the Quran presents an “unfinished revolution”: a trajectory toward total equity that classical and modern interpreters alike are obliged to continue. Drawing on the classical philosophy of al-Raghib al-Iṣfahani, the feminist hermeneutics of Mahjabeen Dhala, the liberation theology of Farid Esack, and the theodicy of Said Nursi, this study demonstrates that the demand for absolute justice in the Quran is simultaneously a divine command, a spiritual imperative, and a revolutionary summons for every generation.
Prolegomena: The Mizan of Existence
Justice in the Quran cannot be adequately apprehended through the lens of a closed, literalist hermeneutic. It demands, as Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd insists, an engagement with the Quran as a “living phenomenon”—a text whose meanings are perpetually renewed through the creative encounter between its divine origin and its human recipients (Abu Zayd 2001). To speak of justice as an “absolute value” is to claim that it is not contingent upon political expediency, cultural norms, or the self-interest of the powerful. Rather, it is inscribed into the very architecture of the cosmos, embedded in the primordial covenant (ʿal-mithaq) between the Creator and the human soul (Quran 7:172), and made the central criterion of moral accountability in this world and the next.
The Quranic discourse on justice must also be situated against the failure of its alternatives. The Western philosophical tradition, since the Enlightenment, has developed a conception of justice increasingly centred on the individual rights-bearing subject, often severing justice from any metaphysical or spiritual foundation. The Islamic tradition, by contrast, as al-Raghib al-Iṣfahani recognized nearly a millennium ago, insists that for a society to be truly just, it requires not merely “laws of justice” but “people of justice”: human beings whose inner lives are regulated by reason and piety. This integration of personal virtue with social equity is the defining characteristic of the Quranic project, and it is this integration that renders justice, in the Quranic sense, genuinely absolute.
The present paper proceeds through eight interconnected domains: the ontological and metaphysical foundations of justice; the lexical and semantic architecture of equity; the ethics of the soul; the mandate for social and distributive justice; the principles of rectificatory justice; the litmus test of gender justice; the structure of political justice; and the eschatological completion of the divine balance. Together, these dimensions compose a unified vision of justice as what might be called the “gravity” that holds the Quranic universe together.
Justice as a Cosmic Principle
At the deepest level, the Quran presents justice not as a human construction but as a divine attribute. God is al-ʿAdl, The Just, and the universe is the theatre in which that attribute is displayed. The Quran declares: “And the heaven He raised and imposed the balance, that you not transgress within the balance. And establish weight in justice and do not make deficient the balance” (55:7–9). This passage is remarkable for its cosmological ambition: justice is the “balance” (mizan) upon which the entire created order rests. To act unjustly is not merely to violate a social norm; it is to introduce a dissonance into the cosmic harmony established by the Creator (Lakhani et al. 2013).
M. Ali Lakhani and Reza Shah-Kazemi describe this as the “sacred foundation” of justice: it is not constructed from below by social contract but descends from above as a reflection of the Divine Names. The Quran reinforces this with its command: “O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm in justice, witnesses for God” (4:135). Here, the injunction to justice is simultaneously a command to reflect the divine nature in human conduct. Justice is thus not merely a civic virtue; it is an act of theological witness.
The concept of the Mizan also encompasses the natural world. Al-Iṣfahani observes that “the heavens and the earth have been established through justice” and that any excess or deficiency in the cosmic order would shatter its perfect equilibrium. This extends the ethical import of justice beyond the human domain: environmental exploitation, the reckless consumption of natural resources, and the destruction of ecological balance are, in the Quranic frame, acts of ẓulm (injustice) against the cosmic Mizan. The universal scope of justice in the Quran is further underlined in the Quran: “And do not let the hatred of a people prevent you from being just” (5:8). Justice is not particularist; it transcends tribal, national, and religious allegiances.
The Quran’s grounding of justice in the fiṭrah (primordial human nature) and in the eternal covenant provides what might be termed a “double foundation” for the absolute nature of equity. On the one hand, justice is a divine decree, a command from outside the human. On the other, it is inscribed within: the human soul, having testified to God’s Lordship before birth, carries an innate recognition of justice as the structure of its own being (Quran 7:172; Abu Zayd 2001). This is why, as al-Iṣfahani astutely notes, even the unjust admire justice in others: their own corrupted nature has not entirely extinguished the light of fiṭrah.
ʿAdl, Qisṭ, and the Anatomy of Injustice
The Quranic vocabulary of justice is among the most sophisticated ethical lexicons in any sacred text. The two primary terms—ʿadl and qisṭ—are often treated as synonyms in popular discourse, but classical and contemporary scholarship has demonstrated that they inhabit distinct but complementary semantic fields.
ʿAdl, derived from the root ʿa-d-l (to be equal, to straighten, to be temperate), refers principally to an interior quality: the moral rectitude of the soul, its orientation toward the mean, its refusal of excess and deficiency. It is the justice of character, the “justice of the self,” which the Quran invokes when it commands judgment between people (4:58) and when it demands upright witnesses (65:2). Ramon Harvey has argued persuasively that ʿadl in the Quran is primarily a virtue term: it describes a person whose inner constitution is aligned with truth (Harvey, p.19–22).
Qisṭ, by contrast, refers to the concrete, external application of equity in the socio-economic domain: the fair weighing of goods, the impartial distribution of rights, the structural arrangements of society. When the Quran declares that “My Lord commands to justice” using qisṭ (7:29), it is often in contexts involving commercial transactions, market fairness, and the treatment of orphans. Harvey’s analysis reveals that the Quranic project is to unite the inner ʿadl of the believing soul with the outer qisṭ of the just society (Harvey, p.19–22). One without the other is incomplete: a society with just laws but unjust people, or just people within unjust structures, remains in a state of partial ẓulm.
The understanding of justice is deepened by attending to its antithesis. The term ẓulm (wrongdoing or injustice) carries the primary meaning of “putting something in its improper place.” Al-Iṣfahani provides a memorable geometrical illustration: justice is a point at the centre of a circle; any displacement from that centre, whether toward excess or deficiency, constitutes ẓulm. The Quran identifies three principal axes of injustice: between the human being and God (the rejection of faith, 4:168); among human beings (oppression and usurpation, 4:10); and between the human being and the self (moral dissolution, 7:160). This tripartite structure is crucial: it reveals that injustice is never merely “external.” Every act of oppression simultaneously damages the soul of the oppressor.
A related term, jawr, denotes a “straying from the right path” (ṣiraṭ al-mustaqim). Toshihiko Izutsu’s seminal analysis of Quranic ethical vocabulary demonstrates that the transition from the pre-Islamic concept of muruʾah (tribal manliness) to the Quranic ideal of ʿadl was a radical moral transformation: The Quran replaced the solidarity of the clan with the responsibility of the person, declaring that “no burdened soul shall bear the burden of another” (31:32). This was, in Izutsu’s formulation, the birth of “universal personhood” in the Arabian moral imagination (Izutsu, p.23).
The Justice of the Soul: Ethical Foundations
The Quranic insistence that justice is first and foremost a “condition of the soul” sets it apart from both ancient Greek civic virtue and modern contractarian ethics. Drawing on a spiritualized version of the Platonic tripartite psychology, al-Iṣfahani argues that the human soul is composed of three faculties: the rational (ʿaql), the concupiscent (shahwa), and the irascible (ghaḍb). Ethical justice emerges precisely when the rational faculty governs the other two. When reason prevails, the four cardinal virtues—wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice—arise in harmony.
Of these virtues, justice is the “metaphorical crown,” as al-Iṣfahani calls it, because it is not merely an excellence of one faculty but the right ordering of the whole person in relation to God, to others, and to the community. While wisdom, temperance, and courage can, in principle, serve vicious ends, justice cannot: an unjust act is by definition a violation of right order, regardless of the capacity it employs.
Central to this ethical architecture is the concept of ẓulm al-nafs: injustice toward the self. The Quran repeatedly returns to this idea, insisting that those who disobey God ultimately harm no one but themselves: “They harmed Us not, but they used to do injustice to themselves” (7:160). Naquib al-Attas, in his commentary on Surah al-Nisaʾ, develops this into a rich account of the “self-injustice” that occurs when the carnal soul usurps the sovereignty of reason (al-Attas, p.65–68). Greed, lust, anger, and pride are not merely character defects; they are ontological violations, a failure to inhabit one’s own nature rightly. The person who cannot be just to themselves—who is enslaved to desire—cannot be trusted to be just to others.
Al-Iṣfahani further identifies five dimensions across which ethical justice must be practiced: between the human being and the Creator (in the acknowledgment of Tawhid); between the faculties of the soul (subjecting desire to reason); toward those who came before (honouring ancestral wisdom and praying for forebears); toward contemporaries (honouring rights in contracts and social life); and toward the wider community (exercising sound judgment in leadership). The most just person, in this schema, is the one who first extends justice outward to all others and only then turns it inward to the self. Conversely, the most unjust is the one who transgresses against their own soul, since this violation inevitably spreads outward to family and society alike.
The relationship between justice (ʿadl) and piety (taqwa) is explicitly drawn in Surah Al-Maʾida: “Do justice, for this is nearer to piety” (5:8). Taqwa, the God-consciousness that functions as a continuous self-restraint mechanism, is the interior foundation from which the external demand for justice springs. Abu Zayd emphasizes that this requires genuine “human agency and responsibility”: the individual must actively and repeatedly choose righteousness over personal bias, tribal loyalty, or the impulse toward revenge (Abu Zayd 2001). Justice, in this sense, is not an achievement but a practice—a daily discipline of the soul.
Social and Distributive Justice: The Economic Mandate
The Quran’s vision of justice does not remain confined to the interior life of the believer; it erupts with remarkable force into the socio-economic realm. The principle of distributive justice in the Quranic framework is grounded in the unity of the human family: “O mankind, surely We have created you from a male and a female and made you tribes and nations that you might know one another. Surely the noblest of you in the sight of God is the one who is the most pious among you” (49:13). This verse functions as a liberatory charter against all forms of racial, national, and class-based hierarchy, asserting that the only legitimate basis for human distinction is taqwa (piety), not accident of birth or accumulation of wealth (Esack 1997).
The Quran’s most direct intervention in the economic domain concerns the hoarding and concentration of wealth. The primary socio-economic injunction is stated in Surah Al-Ḥashr: wealth must not “concentrate in the hands of the rich among you” (59:7). Al-Iṣfahani interprets this as a structural principle: currency that is hoarded is like a ruler who is locked away, unable to govern—it ceases to perform its social function of sustaining the livelihoods of the community. The Quran couples this with a stark warning against the accumulation of gold and silver without social contribution (9:34), making the condemnation of hoarding a matter not merely of social policy but of spiritual peril.
The mechanism for realizing distributive justice is Zakat (obligatory alms), which Sayyid Qutb identifies as a fundamental instrument of social justice precisely because it transforms redistribution from a voluntary act of charity into a religious obligation (Quṭb 1964). Unlike secular taxation, which may be remitted resentfully, the Islamic system anchors the transfer of wealth in a spirituality of purification: by giving, the wealthy purify both their wealth and their souls. This integration of the economic and the spiritual is one of the Quran’s most distinctive contributions to justice theory.
The Quran acknowledges that differences in material provision exist— “God has favoured some of you over others in the provision of means” (16:71)—but classical scholars, including Yasien Mohamed, insist that these differences constitute “spiritual trials” rather than justifications for exploitation (Mohamed 2006). The Quranic ideal is not mere equality of outcome but the redress of the “inequality of environment”: ensuring that every human being begins from an equal starting point of dignity, opportunity, and access to the basic necessities of life. In this respect, as Syed Nawab Haider Naqvi has argued, the Quranic position goes beyond the Rawlsian “Difference Principle,” which permits inequalities only when they benefit the least advantaged, by making such redistribution a mandatory spiritual obligation rather than a rational social contract (Naqvi, p.85).
Muhammad Asad’s commentary on Surah An-Nisaʾ further sharpens the demand for justice in commercial relations, noting that the Quran prohibits the devouring of another’s possessions even by apparently mutual consent, if that consent was extracted under conditions of desperation or economic duress (Asad, p.108; Quran 4:29). True justice in the marketplace requires that the stronger party actively refuses to exploit the vulnerability of the weaker—an ethical demand that anticipates modern critiques of “unfair terms” in contract law but grounds them in a theology of human dignity rather than merely in consumer-protection legislation.
Rectificatory Justice: Crime, Punishment, and the Ethics of Rehabilitation
While distributive justice concerns the fair allocation of resources, rectificatory justice concerns the repair of the social fabric after a transgression has torn it. Al-Iṣfahani, following Aristotle’s distinction between distributive and corrective justice but spiritualizing it profoundly, describes rectificatory justice as a “situational value”: it aims to restore an equality that has been disrupted by a specific injurious act. The Quranic demand for rectificatory justice begins with the insistence on impartiality in the judicial process: “God commands you to deliver the trusts to keepers worthy of them; and when you judge between people, that you judge with justice” (4:58).
Naquib al-Attas’s commentary on this verse insists that the “keepers of trust” (ahl) must be selected on the basis of moral integrity and cognitive competence, not political power or wealth (al-Attas, p.8). The Quranic vision of rectificatory justice fails the moment that authority is granted to those who are incapable of “ruling over their own souls.” This requirement that the judge be virtuous, and not merely legally trained, reflects the Quran’s deep integration of ethical character with institutional function: the law cannot be more just than the persons who administer it.
The most contested dimension of Quranic rectificatory justice is Qiṣaṣ (equivalential retaliation). Hermeneutically, the Qiṣaṣ principle is widely misread as a celebration of violence; in fact, it functions as a restriction on the tribal custom of unlimited blood revenge. The Quran’s declaration that punishment must be equivalent to the offence— “a life for a life, an eye for an eye” (5:45)—was a revolutionary limitation in the context of pre-Islamic Arabia, where a single killing could trigger the slaughter of an entire lineage. Al-Iṣfahani notes that legal justice in this form is “the least of morality,” the bare minimum required to prevent social chaos. It is a floor, not a ceiling.
Critically, the same verse that establishes Qiṣaṣ immediately opens the door to something higher: “But whoever forgoes it charitably, it would be an atonement for him” (5:45). The Quran here introduces the principle of Iḥsan (benevolence), which al-Iṣfahani illustrates through the image of two people sharing an apple: justice is giving each person their half; Iḥsan is when one person freely gives their share to the other. The first is legally required; the second is spiritually superior. This distinction between the floor of law and the ceiling of grace is the Quran’s most original contribution to the philosophy of punishment (Kamali, p.154). It insists that the legal system must nurture the soul rather than merely sanction the body.
A progressive and humanistic reading of these texts, as advanced by Farid Esack, recognizes that many offenders are themselves “victims of circumstance”: products of systemic poverty, unequal education, and structural violence. Abu Zayd’s contextual hermeneutic suggests that Quranic judges must weigh not only the act but the circumstances that produced it—duress, desperation, systemic disadvantage (Abu Zayd 2001). This reading anticipates modern criminological arguments for restorative justice and community-based rehabilitation. The goal of rectificatory justice in the Quranic vision is ultimately reconciliation: the offender’s remorse and the victim’s peace, within a community restored to the wholeness of the Mizan.
Gender Justice: The Litmus Test of the Absolute
If justice in the Quran is truly absolute, its application to gender relations constitutes its most demanding and politically charged test. For too much of Islamic intellectual history, patriarchal interpretive frameworks have effectively subordinated the Quranic trajectory toward gender equity to the cultural assumptions of seventh-century Arabian society—and have then frozen those cultural assumptions as if they were divine revelation. A rigorous hermeneutical analysis reveals that this procedure inverts the proper relationship between the text and its temporal context.
The Quranic basis for gender justice is ontological before it is juridical. The text states: “O mankind, fear your Lord, who created you from one soul (nafs waḥidah) and created from it its mate and dispersed from both of them many men and women” (4:1). Mahjabeen Dhala argues that this verse establishes a primordial parity: since both sexes originate from the same undivided soul, they possess equal inherent dignity and moral agency (Dhala 2014). There is no hierarchy of origin; there is no theological basis for the subordination of one sex to another at the level of being. The Quran further reinforces this with its enumeration of spiritual virtues: believing men and believing women receive identical divine rewards for identical acts of righteousness (33:35). In the divine economy, gender is irrelevant to spiritual standing; only taqwa matters.
Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd provides the essential methodological key for unlocking the contemporary significance of these texts through his concept of the historicity of meaning (tarikhiyyat al-dalalah). He distinguishes rigorously between a verse’s “meaning”—its sense in the original seventh-century context—and its “significance”—it is imperative for contemporary society. Applied to the question of gender, this distinction proves transformative. The Quranic reforms concerning women—inheritance rights (4:11–12), the prohibition of female infanticide, the recognition of women’s independent legal personhood—were genuinely revolutionary relative to the norms of pre-Islamic Arabia. But Abu Zayd insists that these reforms constitute the starting point, not the destination, of the Quranic gender project. The trajectory of the text moves toward full equity; the task of every generation is to continue that movement (Abu Zayd 2001).
This hermeneutical principle is nowhere more consequential than in the interpretation of Quwamah (Quran 4:34), a verse whose standard translation— “men are in charge of women”—has been used to justify male dominance in marriage, law, and public life. Abu Zayd’s contextual reading notes that the Quranic rationale for quwamah was explicitly social and economic: men bore financial responsibility for women in a society where women had no independent access to income or property. In a contemporary context where women are educated, economically independent, and in many societies hold positions of public leadership, the “significance” of the verse shifts fundamentally: it becomes a mandate for mutual responsibility and partnership (wilayah) rather than for dominance (Abu Zayd 2001). The case of polygamy is similarly illuminating: The Quranic permission for up to four wives was a social welfare measure in the aftermath of the Battle of Uhud, designed to protect orphans and widows, and it was explicitly conditioned on the near-impossible standard of perfect justice between co-wives. When read together with Q 4:129—which states that a man can never truly do justice between multiple wives—the Quranic direction is unambiguously toward monogamy as the only fully just marital arrangement (Abu Zayd 2001).
Ahmed E. Souaiaia’s analysis adds a further dimension: the human-constructed legal systems of the classical period were codified predominantly by male scholars in patriarchal social contexts, and they inevitably incorporated the biases of those contexts. To conflate this humanly constructed legal tradition with the divine Quranic text is, in Souaiaia’s view, a category error with serious ethical consequences (Souaiaia 2015). The demand for gender justice is not an external imposition on Islam from Western modernity; it is the internal logic of the Quranic commitment to ʿadl and qisṭ, liberated from the accretions of patriarchal exegesis.
Political Justice: Shura, Accountability, and the Rejection of Tyranny
Justice in the political realm is, in the Quranic vision, nothing less than the extension of the divine Mizan to the relationship between rulers and the ruled. Political power, in this framework, is a trust (amanah), not a privilege; a service, not a sovereignty. The Quran’s most systematic political concept is shura (mutual consultation), which it describes not as an optional leadership technique but as a constitutive characteristic of the believing community: the believers are those “whose affair is determined by mutual consultation among themselves” (42:38). Sabri Ciftci argues that the word amr in this verse—rendered as “affair”—encompasses the full range of collective decision-making, including governance, and thus establishes a participatory framework that denies any individual or group the exclusive right to determine the common good (Ciftci 2020).
Abu Zayd’s hermeneutical reading of shura is especially significant here. He refuses to freeze the concept in its seventh-century Meccan or Medinan institutional form and instead asks what its significance must be in contexts shaped by mass literacy, democratic theory, and global communication. The principle remains constant—the governed must have genuine agency over those who govern them—while its institutional expression must adapt to the demands of each historical moment (Abu Zayd 2001). This is the basis for a genuinely Islamic argument for democratic governance, the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary, and the accountability of executives: not because these are Western inventions to be imported into Islam, but because they are necessary contemporary expressions of the Quranic demand for shura and amanah.
Al-Iṣfahani’s maxim is decisive in this context: “He who cannot rule over his own soul is not suitable to rule over others”. Political justice fails not only because of defective institutions but because of the character defects of those who inhabit them. The Quran’s archetype of political tyranny is Pharaoh—the figure who declared “I am your highest lord” (79:24)—and the Quranic narrative is unambiguous: the claim to absolute, unaccountable power is the ultimate political sin. Every authoritarian regime, every theocratic monopoly on interpretation, every leader who silences dissent in the name of God, participates in the Pharaonic logic that the Quran condemns.
The political extension of justice also encompasses religious pluralism. The Quran is explicit that justice must be extended even to those who do not share the faith: “God does not forbid you from those who do not fight you because of religion... that you be kind to them and act justly toward them” (60:8). Farid Esack’s liberation theology insists that a truly just political order must protect the rights of marginalized communities and religious minorities with the same qisṭ extended to the Muslim majority (Esack 1997). The absolute nature of justice in the Quran is precisely its non-sectarian character: it does not permit a double standard in which justice is owed to fellow believers but not to the “other.”
Theodicy and Eschatological Justice: The Eternal Accountability
The Quranic insistence on the absolute nature of justice inevitably generates the problem of theodicy: if God is al-ʿAdl, why does injustice flourish in the temporal world? The Quran’s answer is both philosophical and eschatological. On the philosophical level, it insists that God does not commit injustice, “even as much as an atom’s weight” (4:40), and that all suffering in this world is either a trial, an atonement, or a consequence of human deviation from the Mizan. Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi’s study of the Turkish Islamic thinker Said Nursi—one of the twentieth century’s most profound Quranic theodicists—develops this point with remarkable depth.
Nursi argued that the apparent imbalances and sufferings of this world are “spiritual trials” designed to awaken the human fiṭrah. But he also insisted, with logical rigor, that since this world is finite and its justice is inevitably incomplete, the concept of absolute justice would be rendered meaningless unless there were a domain in which all accounts are finally settled (Abu-Rabi 2008). If the murderer escapes justice in this life and the saint dies in poverty, and if the afterlife does not rectify this, then justice is nothing more than a useful social fiction. The logical necessity of eschatological justice is, in Nursi’s analysis, one of the strongest rational arguments for the existence of the afterlife.
The Quran presents the Day of Judgment as the moment of the Mizan’s ultimate deployment: “We shall set up scales of justice for the Day of Judgment, so that not a soul will be dealt with unjustly in the least” (21:47). Al-Iṣfahani observes that while human justice is relative and prone to error—limited by incomplete knowledge, bias, and the finitude of human perception—eschatological justice is absolute because it is founded on perfect, omniscient knowledge. There is no miscarriage of justice in the divine court.
Abu Zayd adds a psychologically profound dimension to this: The Day of Judgment is also a day of “radical transparency,” when “man will be a witness against himself” (75:14). Eschatological justice, in this reading, is the ultimate confrontation of the soul with its own fiṭrah. The punishment is not an arbitrary external penalty; it is the ontological consequence of having lived in contradiction to the truth of one’s own being. The soul that has persistently chosen injustice has, in effect, chosen its own ruin.
The eschatological dimension of justice carries profound implications for contemporary ethical and political life. The belief in eternal accountability removes the moral despair that often accompanies the witness of systemic injustice: the empire that has escaped earthly judgment, the patriarch who has never faced consequences, the oligarch who has died in comfort—all will face the divine Balance. This is not a consolation that licenses passivity; it is a promise that sustains the energy of the justice-seeker across the long arcs of historical struggle. As Farid Esack notes, the eschatological promise of justice is the ultimate “good news” for the mustadʿafun (the oppressed): their suffering will be acknowledged and their oppressors will be held to account (Esack 1997).
Toward People of Justice
The paper has traced the concept of justice in the Quran across eight interconnected dimensions, from its cosmic foundations in the divine Mizan to its eschatological completion in the eternal scales of the Day of Judgment. What emerges is a vision of justice as simultaneously a cosmic principle, an ethical imperative, a social mandate, a political criterion, and a spiritual discipline. It is, in every sense, the “gravity” of the Quranic moral universe: the force that holds all things in their proper places and draws the deviant back toward the centre.
The thesis of this paper—that justice in the Quran constitutes an “unfinished revolution”—is not a concession to secular progressivism or Western modernity. It is a claim derived from the internal logic of the Quranic text itself. Abu Zayd’s distinction between the historical meaning and the contemporary significance of the text reveals that the Quran is not a museum piece but a living summons. The reforms it introduced in seventh-century Arabia were, by the standards of that time, revolutionary. But the trajectory of those reforms—toward the full ontological equality of all human beings, the accountability of all rulers, the dignity of the poor, the liberation of the oppressed, the justice of gender relations—was never meant to stop at the horizon of the first Islamic century. Every generation is called to continue the revolution.
Three fundamental pillars support the absolute nature of Quranic justice and ensure that it cannot be relativized by politics, custom, or convenience. The first is the divine command: justice is not a human construction but a divine decree, the reason the messengers were sent (57:25), the attribute of the God who “does not do injustice even as an atom’s weight” (4:40). The second is the preservation of human dignity (karamah): the absolute nature of equity is the only guarantee that the mustadʿafun will not be sacrificed to the interests of the powerful. The third is cosmic and social equilibrium: from the ecological Mizan to the economic mandate of Zakat to the political mandate of Shura, justice is the immune system of human civilization, protecting it from the self-destruction that ẓulm always ultimately produces.
The future of Islamic hermeneutics, as the Abu Zayd legacy suggests, lies in the courage to continue this revolution. This requires a willingness to distinguish between the sacred Quranic text and the humanly constructed exegetical traditions that have sometimes domesticated its radicalism in the service of power. It requires the reclamation of human agency and moral responsibility as Quranic values, not concessions to secularism. It requires a non-sectarian solidarity with all who are oppressed, regardless of faith, gender, race, or nation. And it requires, above all, the cultivation of “people of justice”: human beings who begin with the inner discipline of ʿadl al-nafs (justice of the self) and allow that inner rectitude to overflow into the institutions, economies, and political orders they inhabit.
The final call of the Quran is not to legal compliance but to a kind of ontological courage: “O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm in justice, witnesses for God, even if it be against yourselves” (4:135). To be a witness for justice against oneself—against one’s own tribe, one’s own class, one’s own gender, one’s own nation—is the most demanding and the most transformative act that the Quran asks of the believing person. It is, in the deepest sense, the unfinished revolution.
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V.A. Mohamad Ashrof is an independent Indian scholar specializing in Islamic humanism. With a deep commitment to advancing Quranic hermeneutics that prioritize human well-being, peace, and progress, his work aims to foster a just society, encourage critical thinking, and promote inclusive discourse and peaceful coexistence. He is dedicated to creating pathways for meaningful social change and intellectual growth through his scholarship.
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