The Islamic Social Vision: A Roadmap for the well-being of individuals and communities

Our second pillar investigates the community insofar as it shapes and is shaped by individual, communal, and institutional relations. We contend that the Islamic legal-ethical thought is fundamentally relational not individualistic. The domain of praxis (mu’āmala) occupies the heart of Islamic jurisprudence and practical wisdom. These relations are not merely instrumental arrangements between self-interested individuals or communities; they are moral and covenantal bonds that constitute persons and communities as much as they connect and complete them. The concept of umma in Islam designates a community guided by the Prophetic instructions for moral, social and spiritual flourishing. As such, the Islamic tradition developed systematic frameworks for evaluating communal health, and this theme invites you to examine what a healthy community means.

The concept of nested communities better explain the complexities of the layered communal experiences of Muslims today, where one belongs to multiple communities that may and may not connect or cohere with one another. The incoherence of these communities creates what might be called cognitive dissonance: the psychological tension a person may experience when belonging to nested communities that carry conflicting values, norms, or expectations. For example: expectations from national affiliation vs. Islamic ummatic affiliation. Our relationships are not supposed to be reduced to material interactions and beneficial cooperations in the modern world, thereby causing social isolation, loneliness, and anxiety.

Historical and Theological Foundations

In this thematic lens, we examine how the different schools of law, ethics, politics, and governance developed a sophisticated body of thought on human relations across the Islamic history and intellectual contexts

• Theorising nested communities: how could the relationships between parent and child, scholar and student, ruler and citizen, merchant and customer, manager and employee, etc. carry ethical commitments and orient us towards a shared pursuit of well-being and felicity that transcends individual benefits.
• The concept of communal witness (shahada): what it means for a community to bear witness to truth before humanity, and what this demands of both its internal life and its external relations
• Companionship (suhba), mentorship (tarbiya), and scholarly discipline (ta’līm) in the classical tradition: their conditions, roles, and spiritual dimensions
• The Islamic traditions of productive arts as necessary skills and crafts that cultivate human stewardship and bring a balance between intellectual and applied disciplines.
• The development of the concept of wilaya and mu’amala across the classical legal schools: how the ethical dimensions of human dealings developed and refined within the jurisprudential tradition
• The development and institution of the guilds as moral and economic communities serving families and societies.
• What are the successful models and typologies of ‘institutions’ in our Muslim history and how they were run and sustained.
• The development of the waqf, the madrasa, and the mosque as institutions that embodied particular accounts of authority, trust, and communal obligation.
• The normative ordering of nested communities: how Islamic thought conceptualises the proper relationship between the household, the local community, the political community, and the umma when their claims conflict

Contemporary Applications and Challenges

The dominant currents of late modernity have progressively narrowed the terms in which human life is understood. The human being is increasingly conceived as a neuro-economic agent; relations are reduced to their material and transactional dimensions; community dissolves into voluntary association. In this thematic lens, we critically engage the classical Islamic frameworks for social relations with these dominant modern conceptions. We encourage submissions for developmental workshop and training within this thematic lens.

• The role of structured religious and intellectual institutions: the mosque, the circle of learning (halaqa), and the gathering (majlis) as examples of creating and sustaining relational bonds and habits of virtue in societies
• Models for supporting different individuals in building and sustaining human relations that are constitutive of their flourishing via Islamic pastoral care and counselling.
• How do we thrive collectively? What are the Islamicaly grounded models of unity through complementary roles where all contribute to each other’s social, spiritual, and physical needs.
• Cognitive dissonance, value conflict, and identity fragmentation in the experience of Muslims navigating nested communities with incompatible normative demands: Islamic frameworks for understanding and addressing this condition
• Institutional renewal in Muslim communities: what Islamic principles of communal life imply for rebuilding the mosque, the school, the welfare institution, and other communal structures in conditions of institutional decline
• The politics of communal identity: citizenship, minority status, and the question of what forms of political belonging and civic participation Islamic principles can endorse, inhabit, or constructively reform
• Digital communities and virtual belonging and their impact on Muslim identity, communal spaces, and the perception of the self
• Zakat and Sadaqa as social responsibilities: how to use them to deal with contemporary challenges such as unemployment; Islamic models of giving and organisation of communal spaces.
• Uncovering Islamic concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion: how can we apply them to current times benefitting social cohesion principles in Muslim minority and majority institutions?

The human being has an origin (mabdaʾ) in God and a destination (maʿād) towards God. Its wellbeing (ʿāfiya), completeness (kamāl), and felicity (saʿāda) depend upon living in alignment with this arc. Together, the three concepts articulate an Islamic model of human flourishing that accords with the broader Islamic social vision. Wellbeing refers to the comprehensive soundness of soul, body, and social relations. Completeness is defined as the full actualisation of human capacities through the acquisition of sound knowledge and the cultivation of good characters. Felicity denotes the soul’s ultimate orientation towards the Divine, characterised by a state of inner peace and nearness to God. These are not sequential stages, but rather complementary dimensions of a single, integrated vision of human thriving.

Although the Islamic intellectual tradition does not present a single formalised model of wellbeing, three interrelated frameworks may be brought together to illuminate how one lives in alignment with one’s origin and ultimate end. The first is the framework of the objectives of Islamic law (maqāṣid al-sharīʿa), which articulates a multi-dimensional conception of wellbeing embedded within the structure of the law. This includes the preservation of intellect (ḥifẓ al-ʿaql), or intellectual wellbeing, preservation of the self (ḥifẓ al-nafs), its body and dignity, financial well-being, or preservation of wealth (ḥifẓ al-māl), communal and familial well-being, or preservation of religion (ḥifẓ al-dīn), and lineage (ḥifẓ al-nasl).

The second framework is the ethical and spiritual framework, grounded in the disciplines of self-training (riyāḍat al-nafs) and moral refinement (tahdhīb al-akhlāq). Both aim at developing human capacities and guiding the individual towards completeness using various methods that take into account every person’s specific qualities, needs, and capacities. The third framework is the holistic health model found in Prophetic and classical medicine (al-ṭibb al-nabawī and ḥikma), which emphasises the interdependence of physical and spiritual health, recognising that spiritual maladies may manifest in bodily illness and vice versa.

Together, these frameworks offer a coherent and integrative account of human wellbeing that aligns the individual’s life, the communal life, with their spiritual origin and ultimate end.

As this pillar is significantly relevant to our current realities, we highly encourage contributions that bring these tradition's resources into rigorous dialogue with present-day challenges, and we also highly welcome proposals for developmental workshop and trainings for this thematic lens.

Historical and Theological Foundations

• The prophetic concept of 'afiya in the hadith corpus and prophetic medicine across physical health, social peace, and spiritual flourishing
• The concept of completeness ‘kamal’ in Islamic virtue ethics in dialogue with Aristotelian and Platonic ethics; as well as mystical thought.
• Muslim scholars’ integration of ʿāfiya, kamāl, and saʿāda within a single framework that holds together the purification of the heart (tazkiyat al-nafs), the acquisition of knowledge, and the orientation of action (Ghazālī and Ișfahānī as examples)
• How do different theological, philosophical and spiritual schools understand the relationship between ʿāfiya, kamāl, and saʿāda?
• The maqāṣid al-sharīʿa as a theory of communal and individual wellbeing: how the classical five objectives (preservation of religion, life, intellect, lineage, and wealth) constitute an embedded architecture of flourishing.
• The concept of fiṭra (primordial human nature) as a grounding for Islamic wellbeing theory: how does the idea of an innate orientation toward God structure the tradition's account of flourishing?
• Kamal, gender, and whose completion the tradition has historically theorised: classical debates on women's rational and spiritual capacities and the resources the tradition contains for a more equitable account of human flourishing
• The systematic approaches to the body–soul nexus and the Islamic models for holistic health

Contemporary Applications and Challenges

• ʿĀfiya and mental health: Examining how the tradition’s integrative view of physical, psychological, relational, and spiritual soundness both aligns with and challenges contemporary clinical models.
• Islamic wellbeing institutions: Evaluating current models of healthcare, counselling, and community support—what they achieve, where they fall short, and what the tradition still demands.
• Saʿāda and the crisis of meaning: Exploring how the Islamic account of ultimate felicity, grounded in an eschatological framework (maʿād), responds to modern experiences of meaninglessness.
• Digital culture and wellbeing: Assessing how algorithmic environments and attention economies disrupt embodied, relational conceptions of ʿāfiya.
• Measuring wellbeing Islamically: Investigating the possibilities and limits of developing indicators rooted in ʿāfiya, kamāl, and saʿāda.
• Social determinants of ʿāfiya: Analyzing how poverty, discrimination, and social fragmentation undermine wellbeing, and the implications for Islamic social ethics and policy.
• Training care practitioners: Defining the competencies and formation required for Muslim chaplains, counsellors, and spiritual caregivers within a tradition-rooted framework.
• Ecology and ʿāfiya: Understanding environmental degradation as a threat to human wellbeing through concepts such as ḥimā and isrāf, and their contemporary relevance.
• Zakat and waqf as wellbeing infrastructures: Reconsidering classical institutions of redistribution and endowment as foundations for communal flourishing today.
• Fiṭra and modern alienation: Interpreting the innate human orientation toward God as a response to contemporary experiences of rootlessness and spiritual dislocation.
• Identifying theological and ethical resources for addressing depression and existential crisis within responsible therapeutic frameworks.