Divine Justice and the Human Order

By: Azizah al-Hibri, Esq.

The Qur’anic worldview is a seamless web of ideas that begins with tawhid (the belief in a single God) and permeates various aspects of Qur’anic teaching from creation and the nature of the universe to ethics, social relations, and commercial and constitutional matters. By ignoring the systematic worldview of the Qur’an, we risk impoverishing, even distorting, the various concepts that govern the Qur’anic approach to specific areas of human existence. Yet many of us, including some Muslim, believe that we can understand the Qur’an by discussing it one verse or passage at a time. This essay will argue that there is a unified worldview that permeates the Qur’an, and that makes it a seamless web of ideas, so that each verse cannot be properly understand without reference to others. In one sense, this is not a new argument, because ancient jurists have already stated that passages in the Qur’an explain each other.