MAN’S superiority over creation lies in his faculty of creative knowledge, ie, the capacity to discover the laws of, and thus achieve mastery over, nature, or, in Quranic terminology, “to know the names of all things”, and then use this mastery under the human initiative to create a just political world order. Endowed with choice and charged with responsibility, man is a bearer of ‘Trust’ under whose weight the entire universe chafed. He assumed the task which the heavens, despite their heights, the earth despite its vastness, and the mountains, despite their firmness, shrank from undertaking.

This task involves fulfilling the primordial covenant: to establish a just world order, since the challenge God gave man at creation was to create a sociopolitical order that reflects the equality all people share in the eyes of God. It was to orient the forces of history towards a just social order rather than to compromise with them under the cover of secularism. Hence, for Islam, politics is through and through a moral endeavour to accomplish the task. The Quranic idea of ‘fauz’ (success) or ‘khusran’ (failure) is rooted in executing the same task, since it is the quality of the........

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