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2 - Egalitarianism in Islamic Thought and Praxis

from Egalitarianism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2022

By
Asma Afsaruddin
Edited by
Marcel van der Linden
Marcel van der Linden
Affiliation:
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
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Summary

Egalitarianism is a high ideal within Islamic thought. Apart from monotheism, the proclamation of the equality of all human beings in the eyes of God is understood to be one of the most distinctive features of Islam, which strikingly sets it apart from pre-Islamic (Jāhilī) Arab society. Extant sources inform us that Arabs in the pre-Islamic period recognized many cleavages in their society based on tribal membership, kinship, and gender. The pagan inhabitants of Mecca, where Islam began, took great exception to the idea of egalitarianism, in addition to monotheism, espoused by Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd Allāh, the prophet of Islam.

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Chapter
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The Cambridge History of Socialism , pp. 56 - 78
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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References

Further Reading

Fadl, Abou El, Reasoning with God: Reclaiming Shari‘ah in the Modern Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).Google Scholar
Esposito, John, Islam: The Straight Path (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Fadel, Mohammad, ‘Two women, one man: knowledge, power and gender in medieval Sunni legal thought’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 29 (1997), pp. 185–204.Google Scholar
Hodgson, Marshall, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Izutsu, Toshihiko, Ethico-Religious Concepts in the Qur’ān (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1966).Google Scholar
Khalil, Mohammad Hassan, Islam and the Fate of Others: The Salvation Question (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Kurzman, Charles (ed.), Modernist Islam: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
Lapidus, Ira, A History of Islamic Societies, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Lings, Martin, Muhammad: His Life Based on Earliest Sources (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1991).Google Scholar
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, et al., The Study Qur’ān: A New Translation and Commentary (New York: HarperOne, 2015).Google Scholar

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