Do they? Why not: 'Purify the institutions - and the heart will follow?' But a just order is impossible without collective purity of heart. True enough; but a pure individual heart is no bulwark against an unjust order. Cragg's dispute with Islamic verdicts on the relationship between social power and individual conscience is, as part of a larger debate, rather topical these days. It is as well to broaden perspectives here, if only briefly. For the current debate on social justice is also bedevilled by the same question about the correct balance between the reform of individual hearts and the structural changes that, variously, presuppose such a reform or are themselves the cause of it. There is a kind of Christian approach to problems of social injustice which identifies the correct procedure with a change of individual hearts - along with the attendant hope that the world will change in consequence. And there is the opposed strategy, popular with Marxists, of laying one's bet on changing structures and then hoping for a change in the individual's heart - the latter usually being considered superfluous in a structurally perfect world. Both views, expressed here very crudely but not unfairly, are mistaken. Clearly, we need to change both men's hearts and the power structures that lodge and perpetuate injustice. It is this reasoning, no doubt, that was impressed upon the Prophet as he set out to establish the foundation of the Medinan polity.
-The Final Imperative: An Islamic Theology of Liberation
, pg. 61
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