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By MAHMOOD SANGLAY
Prof Ebrahim Moosa asks whether humanitarian compassion can become a substitute for justice. He draws on his own experience in apartheid South Africa, Karbala and Islamic political theology to confront power, accountability and responsibility.
What does Gaza reveal about the world we have built — and about the moral imagination of Muslims living in that world?
That is the unsettling question at the heart of Professor Ebrahim Moosa’s scholarly paper, “Gaza and Muslim Political Theology: Three Meditations on Justice, Extermination, and the Humanitarian Order”, published open access in Political Theology in 2026. Moosa, an internationally recognised scholar of Islamic thought who grew up in Cape Town and experienced apartheid as a political journalist, argues that Gaza has forced him to reconsider not Islam itself, but how Muslims understand justice, power, suffering and political responsibility.
His argument matters beyond the academy because it asks a question that ordinary Muslims confront every day when watching Gaza: Is it enough to feel compassion for victims while leaving untouched the political structures producing their suffering?
Moosa’s answer is no.
From humanitarian concern to justice
For almost three years, the world has watched the destruction of Gaza while governments, international agencies and courts have responded with statements, humanitarian assistance, legal proceedings and diplomatic initiatives. Moosa argues that this response exposes a profound contradiction.
The international system has become extraordinarily good at administering compassion, but much less capable of interrupting power.
In simpler terms, the world can count the dead, deliver aid, document suffering and express concern — while doing little to change the structures that continue producing the suffering. This distinction is crucial.
Humanitarianism asks: How can we help people who are suffering? Justice asks the more uncomfortable question: Why are they suffering, who is responsible, and what must change so that the injustice ends?
For Moosa, Gaza demonstrates what happens when the first question overwhelms the second. The dead are counted, the wounded treated and the displaced fed, but the political and military structures responsible for the destruction remain largely intact.
That argument has particular resonance for South Africans. Our own experience of apartheid demonstrates that charity could never have dismantled apartheid. Feeding families impoverished by apartheid would have been necessary and humane, but it could never substitute for ending the system that produced their impoverishment.
That history also sharpens the question of perspective. Having grown up under apartheid, Moosa saw first-hand how law, power and bureaucracy could normalise injustice. Muslim Views asked what that South African experience enables him to see in Gaza today that he might otherwise have missed.
A South African education in justice
Moosa’s thinking about Gaza is deeply shaped by his experiences in apartheid South Africa.
As a young journalist, he witnessed political violence at close quarters. He recalls the 1985 funeral of Ebrahim Carelse in Cape Town, where an undercover policeman, Constable JJ Farmer, was discovered among mourners. Farmer drew his firearm and shot one of the mourners. The enraged crowd attacked him and Maulana Farid Esack intervened, physically shielding Farmer from the crowd. Farmer was killed, nevertheless.
For Moosa, the incident embodies an important distinction: justice is not the same thing as vengeance. The policeman represented an unjust system. The mourners had legitimate reasons for their anger. Yet killing the policeman cannot be considered a morally or rationally justifiable act of vengeance for the murder of Carelse. The policeman and the system were at fault. Yet there remains a distinction between the policeman brought to justice and killing him.
This becomes an important thread in Moosa’s argument about Gaza. Opposing oppression does not mean abandoning moral restraints. The pursuit of justice must not be undermined by an unrestrained impulse for vengeance.
Because Moosa witnessed that confrontation himself, the memory carries more than historical weight. We asked what the moment taught him about the difference between justice and revenge — and whether Gaza has changed the way he now understands that lesson.
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His experience with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) deepened the question.
Moosa admires the TRC but asks whether reconciliation can itself become a way of postponing justice. If perpetrators confess but victims do not receive adequate restitution, and if symbolic healing becomes more prominent than material repair, reconciliation risks becoming a substitute for justice. That is an important warning for Palestine.
Calls for “peace” and “reconciliation” can sound morally unimpeachable. But peace without justice can simply stabilise an unjust status quo.
South Africa’s transition gave the world a powerful language of truth and reconciliation. Moosa’s critique, however, raises a more incisive question: what would genuine justice for Palestinians require beyond a political settlement that merely stops, or pauses, the violence?
The disturbing history behind a single word
The most intellectually provocative part of Moosa’s argument concerns a word that appears in the literature of the Holocaust: Muselmann, a term used in Nazi concentration camps for prisoners reduced by starvation and exhaustion to an almost lifeless state. Moosa was struck by the fact that the word derives from “Muslim”.
He does not claim that there is a direct historical line from European theological ideas about Islam to the Nazi extermination camps. Instead, he asks a subtler question: How did the figure of the “Muslim” become available as a metaphor for submission, lifelessness and diminished humanity?
He traces this question through elements of European intellectual history, including the writings of thinkers such as Kant and Hegel, who constructed Islam as a religion of passive obedience rather than moral autonomy. The significance for Gaza is profound.
Moosa argues that dehumanisation does not begin with bombs. It begins with language and imagination. Once hospitals can be described primarily as “military infrastructure”, universities as security threats and entire neighbourhoods as legitimate targets, the vocabulary itself helps transform human beings into objects of military calculation.
This is why language matters. Before a population can be destroyed physically, it can be made morally expendable.
Moosa is careful not to equate Gaza with Auschwitz. He explicitly rejects simplistic historical analogies. His point is instead about continuity in the way human beings can be represented as lives whose destruction somehow does not count in the same moral universe as other lives.
Karbala and the meaning of submission
The most distinctly Islamic dimension of Moosa’s argument comes through his reflection on Karbala.
If the European caricature of the Muslim imagines submission as passive resignation, Moosa turns to Imam Hussain as its opposite.
Imam Hussain’s refusal to submit to unjust political authority demonstrates that Islam — submission to God — does not mean submission to human tyranny. This is a powerful theological distinction.
For Moosa, Islam’s political ethic does not begin with the question, Who has sovereignty? It begins with the question, Who is accountable? That shifts the emphasis from power to responsibility.
The Quranic command to uphold justice, together with the Islamic concept of zulm — injustice or wrongdoing — means that neutrality in the face of oppression is not necessarily morally neutral. Moosa draws on al-Ghazali and other Muslim thinkers to argue that those with the ability to intervene bear responsibility for doing so.
Read against apartheid South Africa, this argument turns a theological idea into a pressing political question. Muslims under apartheid had to decide how to respond to an unjust state. We therefore asked what Imam Hussain’s refusal to submit to injustice tells Muslims today about the limits of obedience to political authority.
This has uncomfortable implications not only for Western governments but also for Muslim-majority states.
Moosa notes the involvement of some Muslim governments in political and military relationships with Israel and says the theological implications of this deserve separate consideration.
Justice before forgiveness
Perhaps Moosa’s most consequential argument concerns reconciliation. Islam does not reject mercy. Quite the contrary: ihsan, forgiveness and the overcoming of hatred are central Islamic virtues. But Moosa insists that forgiveness cannot be demanded from victims as a shortcut around justice.
True reconciliation requires restitution, compensation, accountability and the restoration of rights. Otherwise, calls for forgiveness can become another mechanism through which the powerful escape responsibility. This is where his South African experience becomes directly relevant to Palestine.
A post-apartheid society learned that truth matters, confession matters and reconciliation matters. But so too do land, economic justice, restitution and the material repair of historical wrongs. The lesson for Gaza is therefore stark: a ceasefire may stop killing, but it does not by itself produce justice.
What Gaza asks of Muslims
Moosa ultimately argues that political theology is not about forcing religion into politics. It is about asking the deeper moral questions that ordinary political language cannot answer.
International law can tell us whether an action violates a legal rule. Diplomacy can negotiate agreements. Humanitarian agencies can alleviate suffering. But political theology asks something more fundamental: How did we reach a point where such suffering became morally imaginable?
For Muslims, this question demands more than sympathy for Palestinians. It demands a recovery of Islam’s insistence that justice is not an optional virtue added to political life. Justice is the measure by which political life itself is judged.
That is perhaps the most important message in Moosa’s intervention. Gaza has not given him a new theology. Rather, as he puts it, it has taught him to read the old one differently.
That re-reading also returns the argument to South Africa. A country once synonymous with institutionalised racial oppression has become one of the most prominent international voices challenging Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Having lived through both sides of that history, Moosa was asked what moral responsibility South Africa now carries — and what it should do with the authority its own struggle has given it.
And that may be the challenge Gaza poses to all of us. The question is not simply whether we care about the suffering of Palestinians. It is whether our understanding of faith, justice and humanity is strong enough to make us unwilling to accept a world in which that suffering can continue.
