The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

equality

Islam has often been described as an egalitarian religion that in principle does not recognize racial, ethnic, or hereditary distinctions. The nomadic egalitarianism of the Arabs, in which the Arab leader was first among equals, contributed to the ideal, found in the formative period of Islamic political thought from the mid-seventh to mid-ninth century, that all Muslims were equal in moral worth and had the right to speak out and advise others.

This egalitarianism, however, applied only to Arabs in the early formative period and was later subsumed by the ideal of benevolent absolutism that characterized the caliph’s court. Early Muslims saw themselves as both Arabs and Muslims, and conversion was not encouraged until about the eighth century. Non-Arab Muslims were given a second-class status, and the sense of a multinational Islamic community did not develop until the early part of the Abbasid period (750–1250).

While classical Islamic jurisprudence insisted that all free Muslim men were on the same level before God, this did not necessarily extend to equality in everyday life, and class distinctions grew with the consolidation of the Abbasid Empire. The Islamic ideal of equality, however, depended upon being Muslim, free, and male: normative classical Sunni Islam accepted legal, political, and social inequalities between masters and slaves, men and women, and Muslims and non-Muslims. Slavery was recognized although its practice was moderated. Legally, slaves were persons with civil and criminal rights but also were the property of their owners.

The inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims was based on the concept of the dhimma, essentially a contract through which the Muslim community accorded protection to Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and in some cases other non-Muslims, on the condition that they paid the jizya (a poll tax), acknowledged the domination of Islam, and agreed to certain legal and social inequalities. Women were subject to unequal marital, divorce, and inheritance rights, although they could inherit and independently own property.

The extent of such inequalities and exclusion from the polity varied. Perhaps the most restricted were women, who by the Abbasid period were largely isolated from the public sphere. Military slaves (e.g., the Mamluks, 1250–1517), by contrast, frequently exercised power. While in theory non-Muslims had restricted political responsibility and were exempt from the duty put upon Muslims “to command right and forbid wrong,” in practice non-Muslims were often employed in government service because of their administrative expertise.

The Ottoman reforms of the mid- to late 19th century partially resolved the legal inequality of non-Muslims and of slaves, but family law was left relatively untouched. The legal equality of slaves was established in 1887, although slavery was not abolished in most states of the Arabian Peninsula until as late as the second half of the 20th century. The Ottoman Constitution of 1876 affirmed equality among people of different faiths. The current constitutional commitment to equality between Muslims and non-Muslims and to men and women varies from one Muslim country to another.

The principle of equality (musāwā) features strongly in contemporary Islamic political thought. While the Arab socialism of many Arab countries in the 1950s and 1960s was largely secular, socialism more recently has been a prominent theme within Islamic thought. The Egyptian Islamist theoretician Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) denounced unjustifiable social inequalities and immorally gained wealth. The Muslim Brotherhood member Muhammad al-Ghazali (1917–96) connected the lack of social justice in postwar Egyptian society with what he saw as a retreat from Islam, for which he partly blamed the ‘ulama’ (religious scholars) of Azhar University. Mustafa al-Siba‘i (1915–64), former head of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, also wrote on Islamic socialism.

While some contemporary thinkers reject the principle of equality—either between Muslims and non-Muslims or between men and women—as a Western imported principle that is incompatible with classical normative Sunni Islam, the concept of equality figures prominently in contemporary Islamic political thought in part because Western polemic against Islam has given so much attention to these issues.

Many modernists argue that the Qur’an sanctions equality between men and women and between Muslims and non-Muslims and that such equality is an expression of the values of a “true” Islam. A common position is that the legal and political discrimination that non-Muslims received in the classical Islamic period was not necessarily a reflection of the true Islam. The so-called Constitution of Medina, an agreement (dating from about 622) between Muhammad and the Jews, who, as monotheists, were distinguished from other nonbelievers at the time, the Arab polytheists, is invoked as a precedent for establishing equality between Muslims and non-Muslims despite religious differences. This thinking has had considerable influence on political activists within the Islamic world. Notwithstanding skepticism concerning sincerity and details, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has recently argued for the compatibility of Islamic law with the principle of Egyptian nationality whereby all citizens, Muslims and non-Muslims, enjoy equal rights.

Many contemporary feminists argue that the true values of Islam are compatible with gender equality and make a distinction between the egalitarian nature of Islam in terms of its ethical vision as stated in the Qur’an (e.g., in 33:35) and the discrimination against women sanctioned by classical Islamic jurisprudence. Taking a contextual approach to the Qur’an and building on the ideas of Fazlur Rahman (d. 1988), Amina Wadud argues that equality between men and women can be established through the notion that the Qur’an established a trajectory of reform and that while the restrictions against women were appropriate for the context of pre-Islamic Arabia, they were not meant to be interpreted as a timeless exposition of Islamic values. Few would, it is argued, state that because slavery is condoned by the Qur’an, it should be legal today. Many other discussions within contemporary Islamic thought on gender take the position that Islam sanctions an understanding that men and women are equal but different: equal in terms of their value before God and their spirituality but different in terms of the social roles that Islamic law stipulates.

See also minorities; women