Degree
BS (Social Sciences & Liberal Arts)
Faculty / School
School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS)
Department
Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts
Date of Award
Spring 2025
Date of Submission
2025-07-30
Advisor
Dr. Abdul Wahab Suri
Project Type
SSLA Culminating Experience
Access Type
Restricted Access
Keywords
Political Liberalism, Justice as Fairness, Ibn e Taymiyya, Political theology, Comparative Political Theory
Abstract
The “Theory of Justice” by John Rawls has played an important role in defining and shaping the notion of liberal democracies in the contemporary world. However, in pluralistic societies, especially within Muslim majority spaces, there have been debates about political legitimacy and its derivation. This thesis will explore the Theory of Justice by John Rawls in depth as well as the foundations and limits of Rawls’s political conception of justice within the context of pluralistic societies, especially Islamic. Rawls asserts that justice should be political rather than metaphysical, that rights should take priority over the conceptions of the good, and that the state must remain an anti-perfectionist state among competing moral doctrines. These assertions are derived from his conception of ‘justice as fairness’ and aim to establish political legitimacy in morally diverse societies.
In the first chapter, we will investigate how Rawls derives his two principles of justice, the principle of equal basic liberties and the difference principle through the original position and the veil of ignorance. This will lead us to understand how Rawls justifies these principles in the second chapter that lead to his political conception of justice and support his three theoretical claims: political not metaphysical, the priority of the right over the good, and the anti-perfectionist state.
The third chapter engages with the metaphysical foundations of justice as understood in one strand of Islamic political thought—specifically, through the ethical and political writings of Ibn Taymiyyah. His critique contests Rawls’s liberal assertions from a theologically grounded framework that affirms the interdependence of moral obligation, divine law, and political order. While Ibn Taymiyyah does not represent all Islamic thought, his perspective provides a coherent and historically embedded counterpoint to Rawls’s anti-metaphysical model.
The final chapter turns to the liberal communitarian critique of Rawls, drawing on the work of Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Walzer. These thinkers challenge the abstraction of justice from substantive moral sources and critique the Rawlsian framework for overlooking the socially constituted nature of the self. In doing so, they contest the priority of the right over the good from within the liberal tradition itself. Together, the third and fourth chapters interrogate whether Rawls’s conception of political legitimacy can accommodate the full moral and metaphysical commitments that many citizens, secular and religious alike, bring into public life.
Pages
50
Recommended Citation
Abdul Hai, A. (2025). Rethinking Justice as Fairness: A Taymiyyan Critique of Rawlsian Political Liberalism (Unpublished undergraduate project). Institute of Business Administration, Pakistan. Retrieved from https://ir.iba.edu.pk/sslace/379
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