Peace and Justice

The other obstacle to attaining justice is that people are obsessed with the concept of ideal justice. Because ideal justice is not achievable, what people get is, according to them, less than their requirement. Therefore, even after getting it, they think they have not achieved enough. The fact is that, in this world, a person can only have working justice, and not ideal justice. This is why even when people are in the category of the haves, they think that they are in the have-nots category. Thus, the solution to the problem is to allay people’s feelings of unrest, rather than their sense of injustice. There is a record in history of violence breaking out because people feel injustice has been done to them. But the reality is that they consider that whatever they get is less than what they demand. So, they continue to feel a sense of injustice, although they do have whatever justice it was possible for them to have. The way to bring an end to violence is to remove people’s sense of injustice instead of urging them to engage in a struggle to achieve justice. Working justice is possible in all situations, whereas ideal justice is not. The Constitution of the International Labour Organization affirms, ‘Universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice.’1 But this assumption is unrealistic. The truth is that peace can be established only by the acceptance of the status quo. The religious equivalent of status quo is qanaa‘at, that is,