Socialism

This paper discusses some key points in the philosophical, political and economic thought of the famous Indian Muslim poet Dr. Mohammad Iqbal. Iqbal sought to reform the Muslim identity and the wider Islamic world in order to deal with the Western challenge. He was deeply perturbed by the ideological domination of the East by the West in the political, cultural and social spheres. His political and economic perceptions, as indicated in his poems, seek to revive the self-confidence and creativity in the Muslim Ummah (Community). Iqbal exhorts the Muslims to realise their identity and selfhood (Khudi) to confront the Western challenge. Iqbal’s politico-economic thought is tinged with his dislike of capitalism and colonial rule. As an anti-dote to these elements, Iqbal speaks positively of socialism and its main proponents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century although he rejects the atheistic form of socialism. Iqbal also purposes a reconstruction of Islamic thought in order to make it compatible with the demands of the modern world. All in all, Iqbal’s philosophy reveals an eclectic mixture of Islamic modernism, anti-imperialism, pan-Islamism and a desire for a socially equitable society within an Islamic framework. 

Ali Shariati (Ph.D.) is a thinker who has tried to describe and introduce Islam in the context of socialism with sociological approaches and utilizing historical data and minimal philosophical views. In this endeavor, justice was a central concept shaping the ideal society of Shariati, called the Middle Ummah (Middle Community). By manipulating conventional socialism, using its various modes, and also incorporating Islamic beliefs into its structure, he tried to use socialism as a context for introducing Islamic vision to build an ideal religious society. In this religious ideal society characterized to be a dual-rooted one named “Classless Monotheistic Society”, justice was the spirit governing it, which tuned it with the system of creation. On the path to build a theory of justice shaping a classless monotheistic society, Shariati passes through the four stages of theorizing; however, contradictions appear in the stages more elaborated by him and a great deal of ambiguity is also seen where he has chosen to give brief explanations. Thus, Shariati’s theory of justice is an incomplete theory containing many innate contradictions and ambiguities. The flaw in Shariati’s justice theory is so serious that the authors claim that what is inherited from Shariati is not a coherent theory of justice; rather, it is an initial design of a theory of justice in the context of Islamic socialism.