Linda Darling suggests that social justice in the Ottoman Empire emanated from an earlier ‘circle of justice’, a paradigm that dominated earlier political thinking, taking its final shape in the sixteenth century. According to the circle of justice, a ruler having a divine blessing or appointment had the duty to protect the state from enemies both external and internal, for which he required a military force. To maintain that force, the ruler had to tax economic activity. To ensure high taxation, the ruler needed to secure basic economic infrastructure such as irrigation for agriculture, roads and markets, as well as to ensure legal justice, including protecting producers (peasants) from the elites. Islamic thinkers objected to the exaltation of the ruler but, nevertheless, accepted the circle of justice. According to this concept, if any part of the system malfunctioned, it threatened the entire system, and it therefore required close cooperation between ruler and ruled to maintain its equilibrium.

According to Darling, ‘the new concepts of nationhood and citizenship did not replace, but were added to, older concepts of interdependency and justice between rulers and people’. She further argues that while the use of the circle of justice disappeared from political discourse in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire, some aspect of this concept remained embodied in modern Middle Eastern politics, namely ‘the expectation that the state is responsible to provide the means of protection, prosperity, and social justice or to compensate for their lack’. Darling continues: ‘In the modern monarchies and republics that developed after World War I, condemnations of violations by indigenous elites or foreign rulers and demands for just rule from national governments echoed the Circle's definition of justice’. While the circle of justice might have had an implicit impact on a later notion of social justice, Darling's analysis does not account for social and economic changes and their impact on the de facto content of the latter term. Beyond the overall responsibility of rulers, the exact meaning of social justice in a fast-changing economy and society in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East is quite vague.