The Application of the Words Justice and Civilization and the Relation between them in the Qur’ān

Justice and civilization as two phenomena related to humankind’s social life, are among the subjects of interest to the elites of communities since earlie times to the present. Although justice-seeking has been one of the public wishes in human communities and has caused protest movements among the common people and intellectual challenges among the thinkers, the civilization-seeking and civilization-thinking has been brought up specifically among the elites.
The problem raised by the present research is to study the application of the words justice and civilization and their evaluative comparison between these two in the Qur’ān. The findings of this research are briefly included into the following four statement: 1. A relation of absolute generality and peculiarity is maintained between the two words in lexical and connotative terms and a relation of generality and peculiarity in some respect in terms of two social phenomena. 2. In the Qur’ān, the word justice is frequently used because of its being commonly understood and the word civilization is less frequently used because of its being understood by the elite, although the referents of the concept civilization have been frequently utilized. 3. Using the phrasal pattern of human rights in the verses of the first three years of the Prophetic Mission (bi‘that) has been a source of profound awareness for the addressees concerning justice as well as its correlated concept, i.e., civilization. 4. The relation between civilization and justice in the Qur’ān is of the procreative-incremental type; that is to say, the appearance of civilization has been a ground for procreation of a hierarchy of justice and justice-seeking has been effective on the quality of civilization; and this interaction between these two social phenomena has been perpetual in human communities.