Learning Justice

One of the highlights of the Aussie literary calendar is the Crime & Justice Festival held in Melbourne at the gorgeous Abbotsford Convent in July. This year I was lucky enough to go along and participate in two events.

On Saturday 18 July, I joined Jude Bourguignon to chat about ideas of justice. We decided before the session that we wouldn't try to get too esoteric and stick to simple stuff. No doubt those attending and expecting some profound insights would have been bored out of their brains.

For me, learning about justice was an essential part of my journey into and then out of what some people call “radical Islam”. Hence at my first Muslim camp in 1985, I wanted to fight for justice in Afghanistan and expressed my wish to the imam of the camp. He tried to talk me out of the idea. I learned from our discussion that justice isn’t always what it seems.

To properly recognise what justice is and how you can contribute to its establishment, you need to understand the unjust situation. You also need to understand your own limitations and the consequences of your joining the fight for yourself, those around you and the cause itself.

We also need to understand that a situation isn’t just unjust when it happens to us. When it happens to others, we must show solidarity with them. My mother set this example (at pp 34-35) to me when I was young. As soon as she heard that Catholic school kids were getting teased in our neighbourhood, she went and befriended all the Catholics in our street! It was her simple way of showing solidarity with a fellow oppressed minority, even if most people living in our street were Catholic.

Sometimes justice can be rough. My own mother’s regime of linguistic fascism (at pp65-66) wasn’t something I terribly enjoyed. Her use of a car cassette player to torture her kids with Bollywood songs wasn’t the highlight of my childhood.

Justice also involves understanding other people’s limitations and why they cannot always follow the rules in exactly the manner you deem appropriate. I was perhaps one of the biggest hijab messengers when I was in my late-teens, always lecturing and hectoring the women of my family to cover their heads. But I had to learn (at pp198-200 and 241-242) that people have their reasons for doing what they do.

There is also spiritual justice which I learned during my early exposure to orthodox Islamic spirituality. I learned from Imam Rabbani Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindhi about the concept of wahdat ash-shuhud, the idea that as you rise up to various spiritual levels, you reach a stage where you feel immersed in God. At this stage, everything around you and even inside you looks divine. It’s like sticking a torch in the path of the sun and trying to separate the torch’s light. Sirhindhi said that this state of spirituality was not the highest level of proximity to God. Rather, there was an even higher level than that which arose when you returned to earth and devoted your life to service to others (at pp290-1).

Service to others must not be limited to those who agree with you and believe in the same things you do. We all have an innate sense of justice. I learned that the Prophet Muhammad was a key player in the establishment of the Hilf al-Fudul or Alliance for Virtue (at p273) designed to defend the rights of merchants in his city who had no access to the system of tribal justice as they didn’t belong to and have access to the support of a powerful tribe. The alliance would advocate on behalf of such people.

In a separate session, I joined a young Melbourne philosopher to talk about tolerance. I'll write about that later when I get a chance. Now here's a totally pointless photograph of someone taking a totally pointless photograph.