THE QUEST FOR THE CONCEPT OF INTERGENERATIONAL JUSTICE IN AL-GHAZALI’S PHILOSOPHY

SELVI GENÇ

ABSTRACT

Catastrophes such as geographical disasters, the loss of lives, injustice-cruelty, wars,
poverty and inadequacy of natural sources increased in the new century. The existence
of these problems has led people to question whether or not justice exits. Then the term
justice is expanded as intergenerational justice which has become one of important topics
to seek for the answers of all these questions. The basic definition of intergenerational
justice is the ‘justice between distant generations’. Al-Ghazali, one of the most important
thinkers in Islamic World, discussed these issues and states that lying, cruelty,
unfairness are vile and believes in the necessity of justice. Intergenerational justice is not
directly mentioned as a concept in his works and he does not come up with a particular
definition. But we can say that the meaning of this concept comes from the sources of
his opinions. We see that he refers it in terms of meaning with some elements that are
the trust (amanah) and the savings (iktisaad). So it is assumed in this paper that the
concept is not contemporary concept and how it is mentioned ages ago with only these
two elements by al-Ghazali who lives on the sources of Islam - Quran and Hadith.