Equality in Islam

07/07/2010| IslamWeb

Islam not only recognizes absolute equality between people irrespective of any distinction of color, race or nationality, but makes it an important and significant principle, a reality. The Almighty God has laid down in the Holy Quran (what means):  {O mankind, we have created you from a male and female.} [Quran 49:13] In other words all human beings are brothers to one another.

They all are the descendants from one father and one mother. {And we set you up as nations and tribes so that you may be able to recognize each other.} [Quran 49:13] This means that the division of human beings into nations, races, groups and tribes is for the sake of distinction, so that people of one race or tribe may meet and be acquainted with the people belonging to another race or tribe and cooperate with one another.

This division of the human race is neither meant for one nation to take pride in its superiority over others nor is it meant for one nation to treat another with contempt or disgrace, or regard them as a mean and degraded race and usurp their rights.

{Indeed, the noblest among you before Allah are the most heedful of you.} [Quran 49:13] In other words, the superiority of one man over another is only on the basis of God-consciousness, purity of character and high morals, and not on the basis of color, race, language or nationality, and even this superiority based on piety and pure conduct does not justify that such people should play lord or assume airs of superiority over other human beings. Assuming airs of superiority is in itself a reprehensible vice which no God-fearing and pious man can ever dream of perpetrating. Nor does the righteous have more privileged rights over others, because this runs counter to human equality, which has been laid down in the beginning of this verse as a general principle. From the moral point of view, goodness and virtue is in all cases better than vice and evil.

This has been exemplified by the Prophet in one of his sayings thus: "No Arab has any superiority over a non-Arab, nor does a non-Arab have any superiority over an Arab. Nor does a white man have any superiority over a black man, or the black man any superiority over the white man. You are all the children of Aadam (Adam), and Aadam was created from clay." [Al-Bayhaqi and Al-Bazzaar] In this manner Islam established equality for the entire human race and struck at the very root of all distinctions based on color, race, language or nationality. According to Islam, Allah has given man this right of equality as a birthright. Therefore no man should be discriminated against on the ground of the color of his skin, his place of birth, the race or the nation in which he was born.

Malcolm X, the famous African-American leader in America, who had launched a bitter struggle against the white people of America in order to win civil rights for his black compatriots, when he went to perform the pilgrimage and saw how the Muslims of Asia, Africa, Europe, America and those of different races, languages and colors of skin were wearing the same dress and were hurrying towards God's House - the Ka'bah - and offering prayers standing in one row and there was no distinction of any kind between them, he then realized that this was the solution to the problem of color and race, and not what he had been trying to seek or achieve in America so far.

Today, a number of non-Muslim thinkers, who are free from blind prejudice, openly admit that no other religion or way of life has solved this problem with the same degree of success with which Islam has done so.