The fact that human beings are compelled to live together and, consequently, to establish cities has made the question of how communal life can be organized in a manner that serves the well-being of all inhabitants one of the central concerns of thinkers and philosophers throughout history. A rich and extensive body of literature has emerged around this question. From Aristotle and Plato to al-Farabi and Ibn Sina (Avicenna), from al-Ghazali and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi to Ibn Bajjah and Ibn Khaldun, and continuing to the present day, profound discussions have been devoted to this issue. Within the Islamic intellectual tradition, these discussions largely took shape around the concepts of the "al-insan al-kamil" (the perfect human) and the "al-madinah al-fadilah" (the virtuous city), with al-Farabi providing the foundational framework for this tradition. The volume "Justice in Islamic Thought," edited by Turkish scholars Ömer Türker and Yunus Kaplan, examines this question and the debates surrounding it from a remarkably broad perspective.
One of the book's most compelling features is its treatment of justice not merely as the foundation of political order, but as the constitutive principle that begins with human existence itself and extends to the entire social order. From this perspective, the "perfect human" and the "virtuous city" are not two independent ideals within Islamic thought. Rather, the perfect human embodies justice as a personal virtue and a way of being, while the virtuous city represents the institutionalized and social manifestation of justice. Accordingly, a city can become virtuous only through the flourishing of just individuals, just as human beings can more readily attain their perfection within a city founded upon justice.
The concept of justice employed here is far broader than the predominantly legal or political understanding that has prevailed in the modern era. In the classical tradition, justice is first and foremost an ontological principle that expresses the order of being itself. The order within the human soul, the order of the family, the order of the city, and ultimately the order of the cosmos are all understood as manifestations of the same underlying principle of justice operating at different levels of reality. Accordingly, ethics, politics and metaphysics are not regarded as separate disciplines, but as distinct expressions of a single, unified order of truth.
Within this framework, beginning with Plato, the pursuit of human happiness was grounded in the idea that the human soul possesses three principal faculties: reason, the outward-directed spirited faculty and the inward-directed appetitive faculty, encompassing desire and pleasure. Each of these faculties achieves its proper state through moderation, understood as attaining and sustaining the mean between excess and deficiency. From this balanced condition emerge the virtues of wisdom, courage and temperance. Since the mean within each faculty is intrinsically related to justice, and justice is realized through the harmonious functioning of all three faculties together, justice ultimately appears as the comprehensive or universal virtue that sustains the other virtues. A person who transforms all three faculties into the virtues of wisdom, courage and temperance through the realization of justice becomes, at the human level, the most just of human beings – the perfect human.
Accordingly, individual happiness is achieved through the just ordering of the faculties of the soul. Yet the framework developed in the classical tradition does not end with the individual. Human beings necessarily live in cities and establish relationships with others. How, then, is happiness realized within communal life? At this point, the discussion expands beyond the individual to encompass household management and, ultimately, the domains of the state and politics. In "Akhlaq-i Nasiri," the seminal ethical treatise of al-Ṭusi – which profoundly shaped both the structure and the intellectual orientation of later works on ethics – moral philosophy is organized around precisely these three interconnected spheres: the individual, the household and the polity. Within this framework, ethics and justice are inseparable.
Although in contemporary discourse justice is often confined to the public or legal sphere, in the classical tradition it encompasses the entirety of both private and public life, embracing everything hidden as well as manifest. Indeed, justice occupies such a central place that, as the book observes, one comes away from reading the "siyasatnamas" ("mirrors for princes") with the impression that "the religion of the state is justice." In other words, Islamic thought does not regard justice as belonging to a single domain. The same principle is manifested as moral virtue within the human soul, as order within the family, as political governance within the city, and ultimately as cosmic harmony within the order of being itself. For this reason, classical literature on ethics treats individual morality, household administration, and political philosophy not as independent disciplines but as progressively expanding circles of a single, comprehensive conception of justice.
As the individual chapters of the book demonstrate, the central discussions revolve around how justice can be realized and sustained not only within the faculties of the human soul but also in household management, political life and governance, all understood as different manifestations of the cardinal virtue of justice. Just as every individual living in the city is expected to strive continuously to establish justice among the faculties of the soul, the same commitment must also guide one's relationships within the family and with the wider community. Accordingly, whether one is an ordinary citizen or occupies a position of political authority, every member of the city bears responsibility and is expected to pursue the ideal of becoming the perfect human. Justice must find expression in every relationship, attitude, decision and action. As al-Ghazali emphasizes, justice is manifested in the sphere of action. Consequently, ethics, insofar as it is inseparably bound to justice, likewise belongs to the domain of action. Put differently, neither ethics nor justice is merely a matter of knowledge or rhetorical discourse; rather, both are fundamentally matters of character, disposition and lived practice.
Such a city is precisely what al-Farabi calls the virtuous city, and he maintains that it is within this city that human beings can attain supreme happiness. The relationship, therefore, is not one-directional. Just as virtuous individuals collectively give rise to a city founded upon justice, a city established on justice, in turn, nurtures the emergence of new virtuous individuals. From education and law to commerce and family life, all social institutions contribute to an environment that fosters the moral development of the individual. In this sense, the virtuous city is not merely the product of virtuous people; it is also the moral habitat in which such people are formed and multiplied. Al-Ghazali advances a similar view, arguing that justice within the individual, the family and society constitutes an integrated whole rather than separate spheres. Each influences and reinforces the others, and only when justice is realized across all three domains can human beings attain supreme happiness at the levels of the individual, the family and the community. Accordingly, while wisdom, courage and temperance represent the perfection of specific human faculties, justice functions as the higher principle that harmonizes these virtues and integrates them into a coherent moral whole. Likewise, the family, the city and the state become truly virtuous not simply because each possesses sound institutions in isolation, but because the relationships among them are ordered by justice. From this perspective, justice is the constitutive principle that makes possible the proper order of the individual, society and existence itself.
The virtuous city is, therefore, a city in which justice is realized at every level of existence. Just as the relationship between the perfect human and the virtuous city is constituted through justice, so too is the relationship between the virtuous city and the cosmos. According to Ibn Arabi, "al-Haqq" (the Real) is the principle that necessitates the creation of the universe. God knows what every being deserves in its state of non-existence and brings it into existence in accordance with that due. Consequently, absolute will is inherently and perfectly just; injustice can arise only within the human realm. Classical Muslim scholars likewise explain the interdependence of the elements that sustain a city through the principle of justice. For example, in "Akhlaq-i Ala'i," Kınalızade Ali likens the world to a garden and the state to the wall that protects it. He relates the strength of the state to its army, while emphasizing that an army cannot exist without wealth, wealth cannot be produced without the people, and the people remain loyal to the ruler only through justice. Similarly, Koçi Bey argues that the survival of the army depends upon the treasury, the treasury depends upon the productive labor of the subjects and the prosperity and commitment of the subjects ultimately rest upon the establishment of justice.
On the other hand, justice also makes it possible for the virtuous city to be connected to the metaphysical realm. In this respect, just as the perfect human is understood as the reflection or shadow of God, the virtuous city is conceived as the reflection of the metaphysical order. Accordingly, just as the metaphysical realm is characterized by harmony and order, truly flourishing cities in the human world can be established only insofar as they reflect that same order. To put it another way, while the supralunar realm is governed by the divine name "al-Adl" (the Just), the very principle that connects this transcendent order to the sublunary world is justice itself, as the manifestation of that divine name. Justice thus serves as the keystone that enables the sublunary world to remain in contact with the higher metaphysical order. When justice disappears, this point of contact is severed, and the sublunary realm ceases to mirror the metaphysical world, becoming instead vulnerable to oppression, disorder and chaos.
As al-Hujwiri explains, justice consists in placing everything in its proper place, whereas to place something anywhere other than its rightful place is injustice. Such injustice is not confined to the courtroom or the administration of law; rather, depending on the context, it may arise in every sphere of human life. Justice, therefore, signifies the proper ordering of things within their rightful place and course, while disorder and uncertainty arise whenever this order is disrupted by injustice. Injustice interrupts the natural harmony of existence by displacing things from the positions they are meant to occupy.
Justice is regarded as so fundamental that scholars such as al-Ghazali considered just political leadership sufficient for preserving the order of worldly affairs and, by extension, the stability of the religious order. For this reason, he maintained that even a non-Muslim ruler could legitimately govern if he ruled with justice. In short, although many matters may admit compromise, justice does not. It is precisely for this reason that Ibn Sina reformulated al-Farabi's virtuous city as the "just city." Where justice is absent, injustice prevails; and injustice, understood as the displacement of things from their proper place, undermines the predictability of the order they are meant to follow, disturbs the natural course of existence and thereby increases uncertainty. In such a city, the possibility of attaining the virtues through moral purification is diminished, and the path toward becoming the perfect human becomes considerably more difficult.
Needless to say, within the virtuous city the most critical locus of justice – both in terms of its intensity and its far-reaching consequences – is the soul of the ruler or sovereign. Since the ruler is expected to have advanced significantly on the path toward becoming the perfect human, morality, and therefore justice, must first be realized within the ruler's own character. The well-known maxim, "People follow the religion of their rulers," points to the profound and pervasive influence of those who govern, for the qualities of the ruler are reflected in the qualities of the people. It is for this reason that al-Ghazali maintains that a ruler cannot truly be just while those closest to him remain unjust.
In sum, the book "Justice in Islamic Thought" invites readers to reconsider justice not merely as a matter of law or political administration, but as the constitutive principle that begins with human existence and extends through the family, the city, politics and ultimately the entire cosmic order. From this perspective, the virtuous city is not simply a city endowed with just institutions; it is a living moral order in which individuals striving toward the ideal of the perfect human mutually cultivate one another's virtues, where the justice of the ruler is reflected in society, and the justice of society, in turn, nurtures the moral development of the individual.
Justice, therefore, is not merely the protection of rights, but the proper placement of everything in its rightful position and the ordering of every relationship according to its appropriate measure. Perhaps the book's most significant contribution lies in challenging the contemporary tendency to reduce justice to legal and political discourse, reminding us instead that justice is the fundamental principle that sustains the human person, society and civilization alike. This holistic vision, in which the perfect human and the virtuous city continually shape one another, offers not only a deeper understanding of the Islamic intellectual tradition but also a powerful conceptual framework for rethinking the moral and social crises of the contemporary world.
