Q: What's wrong with the world? How can one find justice and forgiveness?

Despite the cotton candy image of justice and moral principles which all religions espouse, I have to admit that I'm a realist.

Open a newspaper, and turn on the TV; it's obvious that many people, including Muslims, are acting in direct violation of the same tenets to which they claim to adhere. The world's got problems: racism, genocide, poverty, terrorism and pollution. The list is pretty long.

I'm not in a position to claim the world is getting worse, but I think we all agree things aren't peachy keen.

A lot of problems stem from injustice, which often rears its head whenever a party has power over another: a dictator crushing dissent, global corporations exploiting indigenous populations and the killing of innocent people to make a point.

Muslims, like most people, are big on justice. In fact, some Muslim scholars would argue that the main reason God sent prophets to mankind is to establish justice.

There are numerous places in the Quran where people are ordered to be just, even if it's against our family members and us.

The Quran states, "O ye who believe! Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to God, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be (against) rich or poor: for Allah can best protect both. Follow not the lusts (of your hearts), lest ye swerve, and if ye distort (justice) or decline to do justice, verily God is well-acquainted with all that ye do" (4:135).

To pre-Islamic Arabia, this was a radical shift from the rampant tribalism, which valued kinship above everything else. It was not uncommon for an entire tribe to go to war to defend the honor of one of their members, even when they knew that person had committed wrong. Islam is pretty clear that that is unacceptable.

But where do we get our concept of justice? For Muslims the main sources are the Quran and Sunnah, which are composed of the actions and sayings of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.

But the term injustice can be used for anything that violates or harms what one Muslim scholar called the five essentials of life: physical, genealogical, material, mental and spiritual.

There are topics that God does not mention explicitly, like excessive carbon emissions. But Muslims believe that we can use the brains that God gives us to logically determine a just course of action. For example, air pollutants, which can be harmful, are analogous to water pollutants, which are referenced in classical texts.

Racism, and its extreme expression, genocide, is clearly a case of when the victims are unjustly persecuted based on arbitrary characteristics. Muslims know this from the following saying of Muhammad:

"All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over a black, nor does a black have any superiority over a white — except by piety and good action," from The Farwell Sermon.

We must continue to strive for justice, by speaking out and working for change. The hypocrites are just one more manifestation of injustice, which needs to be countered. If our goal is always to eradicate injustice, whether we succeed or not becomes irrelevant, because we ourselves will not become perpetuators of injustice.

[Reach contributing writer

Zakariya Dehlawi at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]