Question
The following question was submitted by a reader.
Dear Ghamidi Sahib and team,
I hope you are all well.
I have been following your work and listening to your talks for about seven years now. I deeply appreciate how you incorporate critical thinking and rationality into your arguments — it is something that is greatly needed for developing a coherent and disciplined approach to religious thought.
That said, I have been reflecting on a number of questions for which I have struggled to find clear or satisfying answers.
Where does Divine intervention exist in a world where so many outcomes in a person’s life appear to be determined largely by economic, regional, and national circumstances? The trajectory of someone’s life is often shaped from the outset by the country into which they are born, and their aspirations are frequently limited by the constraints of their local economy.
Similarly, many life outcomes are influenced by decisions made by global powers. The drawing of national boundaries during colonial times, for instance, had lasting consequences that continue to affect millions. The atrocities committed during colonial rule in parts of Africa left deep structural damage that persists to this day. In other regions, extreme poverty creates power imbalances that enable exploitation. These historical and geopolitical decisions often produce long-term domino effects, where progress and prosperity remain concentrated in certain regions while others struggle to recover.
In light of this, why do we see so little apparent Divine intervention in such matters? Why have Muslim-majority societies, despite Islamic teachings on justice and economic fairness, not succeeded in establishing systems that prevent wealth from concentrating in only a few regions?
Many nations facing extreme poverty today are Muslim-majority countries. If poverty and lack of opportunity — often rooted in imperialism and colonial history — contribute to higher crime and social breakdown, how does Divine justice account for this? Is it fair that some individuals are born into stable, prosperous societies with fewer systemic pressures toward wrongdoing, while others are born into environments where hardship increases the likelihood of moral failure? Does this not create vastly unequal starting points in both worldly life and the afterlife? And why should a person pray if the course of life appears to be so heavily determined by such circumstances?
I would greatly appreciate it if you could address these questions in one of your segments, or respond to this message when convenient. Your perspective on these matters would mean a great deal.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Answer
What follows is a personal understanding of the issues raised, offered sincerely but without any claim to finality, and with genuine openness to correction.
Where Is Divine Intervention?
There is a tendency, in asking where God is, to imagine divine intervention as something that interrupts the ordinary flow of events — a sudden turn, a miracle inserted from outside the world’s normal workings. But this framing may itself be part of the difficulty.
The country into which a person is born, the family that receives them, the faith tradition that first gives them a language for the transcendent, the historical moment they inhabit — none of these are accidental in the theological sense. They are the specific coordinates of one’s trial, assigned with knowledge and purpose. The Qur’an presents God not as an occasional actor in an otherwise self-running universe, but as the One in Whose hand are all affairs (biyadihi al-mulk, 67:1) and Whose activity never ceases — kullu yawmin huwa fī shaʾn, “At all times, His majesty has a newer manifestation” (55:29). From this perspective, the very structure of a person’s life — its givens, its conditions, its historical and relational texture — is not the background against which God acts. It is divine action, unfolding continuously through what we call natural, social, and historical causation.
But this still leaves the deeper question unanswered: why does God allow the arrangement to produce such staggering inequality and suffering? Why do colonial atrocities happen, why are borders drawn with such devastating arbitrariness, why does institutional corruption persist across generations? Here the Qur’an offers something more profound than reassurance. It offers an explanation rooted in the very purpose of human existence.
Consider the passage in Sūrah al-Baqarah (2:30–33), where God announces to the angels His intention to place a khalīfah — a sovereign — on earth. The angels’ response is immediate and, from their perspective, entirely reasonable: “Will You bring forth in it a creation that will spread disorder in it and shed blood?” This is not a naive question. The angels are not being obtuse. They are registering a genuine concern about what human sovereignty will cost — and God does not dismiss their concern. He does not tell them they are wrong about the disorder and bloodshed. He tells them: “I know what you know not.”
What is striking here is that the angels’ objection is structurally identical to the concern raised in these questions. Both are essentially asking: given the suffering, the injustice, the disorder that human sovereignty produces — given colonialism, given corrupt rulers, given the devastation of institutions that should have protected the poor — where is the divine wisdom in this arrangement? And God’s answer to the angels is, in a profound sense, His answer to every generation that asks this question: there is a purpose operating here that exceeds what immediate observation of the suffering can reveal.
Ghamidi’s commentary on this passage attempts to identify that purpose with precision: the Almighty wants to select individuals for His Paradise — individuals who, in spite of being given sovereignty, remain obedient to Him. This objective could only have been achieved if disobedience from human beings too was tolerated. Hence, in spite of knowing that disorder would ensue in this world, He decided to create Adam and give him sovereignty. The world, in other words, was never designed as a place of guaranteed fairness and comfort. It was designed as a moral arena — a place of genuine trial (ibtilāʾ) — where human freedom, including the terrifying freedom to oppress, exploit, and destroy, is the necessary condition for the moral seriousness that makes the selection of the righteous meaningful. Remove the possibility of injustice and you remove the possibility of justice. Remove the possibility of cowardice and you remove the possibility of courage. Remove the possibility of institutional failure and you remove the possibility of those who, against all odds, rebuild and resist and bear witness.
This is why the Qur’an warns consistently against being deceived by this world’s apparent arrangements. Wa mā al-ḥayātu al-dunyā illā matāʿ al-ghurūr — “the life of this world is nothing but a deceptive enjoyment” (3:185). Final justice is not absent — it is deferred. The asymmetry between this world and the next is not a theological afterthought. It is the structural answer to the problem of historical injustice. The colonial administrator who drew borders with devastating arbitrariness, the corrupt ruler who siphoned welfare funds from the poor, the powerful networks that exploited the vulnerable — none of these escape a reckoning that this world’s apparent arrangements do not yet fully reveal.
There is one further dimension of this Qur’anic passage worth dwelling on. When God responds to the angels, He does not offer them an argument. He offers them a demonstration. He presents before them the righteous among Adam’s progeny — those who would use their authority well, bear witness to truth at personal cost, and embody justice across every generation and circumstance. Ustadh Ghamidi identifies these as the prophets, the companions, the witnesses to truth, and the righteous across history. God’s answer to the angels’ concern about disorder is, in effect: look at these. The existence of people who, amid all the structural injustice and historical suffering of human sovereignty, choose righteousness, maintain their covenant with God, and bear witness to truth — this is presented as the vindication of the entire arrangement.
This means something important and perhaps unexpected: divine intervention is not primarily visible in the stopping of atrocities or the correction of unjust borders. It has always been visible in the raising up, across every generation and every context — including the most oppressive — of individuals who respond to injustice with faith, integrity, and moral courage. That is God’s answer to the disorder the angels anticipated. It has always been His answer.
This does not resolve everything. But it relocates the question in an important way. Rather than asking “why doesn’t God intervene?” we are pushed toward asking: “given the conditions God has allowed, what are human beings — individually and collectively — responsible for?” That shift matters enormously for everything that follows.
The Historical Record: Muslim Institutional Achievements
Before addressing failure, it is important to establish what the Islamic tradition actually produced at its best, because this is not a theoretical or speculative matter. It is recoverable from history.
At their peak — roughly from the 8th to the 13th century, and in some regions considerably beyond — Muslim-majority polities demonstrated comparatively sophisticated and genuinely advanced approaches to economic welfare and institutional justice. The waqf system was arguably the most developed non-state welfare infrastructure in the pre-modern world, funding hospitals, schools, water systems, orphanages, serais, and poor relief on a scale that medieval Europe could not match. Zakāt, when institutionally administered rather than left entirely to individual conscience, functioned as a genuine redistributive mechanism. Trade networks across the Islamic world operated under relatively standardised ethical and legal frameworks. Many institutions provided a form of market regulation aimed explicitly at preventing exploitation of consumers and producers alike.
Rulers like ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz are remembered in the tradition precisely because they actually attempted to apply Islamic economic principles at the state level — and his brief reign is recalled as something close to the ideal of just governance. The legal tradition, across the major madhāhib, developed extraordinarily sophisticated frameworks for contract law, property rights, and the protection of the vulnerable, centuries before comparable developments in European jurisprudence.
This is not nostalgia or apologetics. The claim that Muslims had institutional resources for justice is historically substantiated. The question, then, is not whether those resources exist — they do — but why they have so largely ceased to function. And here, honesty requires confronting several uncomfortable truths simultaneously.
The Decline: Colonial Disruption and Its Real Costs
The colonial disruption of Muslim institutional life was genuine, significant, and should not be minimised. Colonial powers did not merely extract resources — they systematically dismantled existing institutions in ways whose consequences persist to this day.
The waqf system is a particularly clear example. Colonial administrations across British and French-administered territories operated within legal frameworks — common law, Napoleonic code — that either did not recognise Islamic property and endowment law or actively overrode it. The result, across much of the Muslim world, was that waqf institutions lost their legal grounding, their administrative independence, and over time their capacity to function as genuine welfare infrastructure.
The drawing of arbitrary colonial boundaries had consequences that compound to this day. Communities were divided, trade networks disrupted, and administrative structures built whose logic was extraction rather than welfare. The atrocities of colonial rule in parts of Africa — the Belgian Congo, the German campaigns against the Herero, the British concentration camps, the systematic looting of agricultural and mineral wealth — left structural damage in precisely the regions that now face the most acute poverty. These are not ancient history. Their consequences are present and measurable.
Moreover, colonialism did not merely damage economies. It damaged the institutional ecology within which Islamic governance had operated — the independent judiciary, the endowed scholarly class, the civil society mechanisms that created real friction against unchecked power. What it left behind, in many cases, was not just poverty but institutional decapitation.
The Decline: Muslim Failure and the Weight of a Covenant
And yet — colonial disruption, real as it is, is not the complete explanation. Intellectual honesty, which the Islamic tradition itself demands, requires saying so plainly.
The internal corruption of waqf institutions preceded colonialism in many regions. Even before colonial powers reached their peak, waqf endowments in parts of the Muslim world had already been converted into vehicles for elite wealth protection — families endowing waqfs with stipulations that their own descendants serve as administrators and primary beneficiaries, effectively transforming a charitable institution into a dynasty-preservation mechanism. Classical jurists wrote extensively against this abuse precisely because it was widespread.
More significantly, post-colonial Muslim governments actively continued and in some cases accelerated the dismantling of Islamic welfare institutions. Nasser’s nationalisation of Egyptian waqf was not a colonial act — it was a Muslim Arab nationalist government deciding that centralised state control served its political interests better than an independent Islamic civil society. The same pattern repeated across the Muslim world: newly independent governments, whether pan-Arab nationalist, socialist, or simply authoritarian, found independent waqf institutions inconvenient and absorbed them into state bureaucracies where they became politically managed, underfunded, and largely ineffective. This was a choice made by Muslim leaders, not an imposition from outside.
The scholarly class, whose institutional independence had historically depended in significant part on waqf endowments, largely acquiesced. Deprived of their financial base and facing the full coercive power of modern nationalist states, scholars either aligned with governments or retreated into purely religious functions stripped of social and political leverage. The result was the loss of the productive tension between religious authority and political power that had, at its best, given Islamic governance its self-correcting capacity.
And then there is the question of what wealthy Muslim nations have done — or rather, have not done — with the unprecedented resources accumulated since the mid-20th century. The Gulf states have accumulated extraordinary oil wealth over the past half century — wealth whose scale, relative to the poverty of many other Muslim-majority nations, represents one of the most dramatic concentrations of resources within a single religious community in modern history. The theological and legal framework for rebuilding waqf as a serious welfare institution does not need to be reinvented — it is sitting in the jurisprudential literature, fully elaborated, waiting to be applied. What is largely absent is not capacity but will, and not resources but the sense of shared obligation that the concept of the ummah was meant to cultivate.
Central to understanding this situation is a theological reality the Qur’an states with remarkable clarity. The Muslim community — as the recipients of God’s final revelation — was not simply given Islam as a private religious inheritance to be personally enjoyed. It was entrusted with it as a responsibility toward humanity: to be, in the Qur’an’s words, shuhadāʾ ʿalā al-nās — “witnesses over humanity” (2:143). Muslims were not conferred with honorary titles passively. They described a covenant — a divinely assigned office whose fulfilment would bring God’s facilitation and whose abandonment would bring consequences. Those entrusted with God’s guidance and appointed as witnesses over humanity are held to account for how faithfully they discharge that trust.
The weakness, fragmentation, and institutional failure that characterise much of the Muslim world today are not, from this perspective, random misfortune or solely the result of external forces. They are, in significant part, the traceable consequence of a community that was entrusted with a covenant and has, over centuries, drifted far from its demands — abandoning the Qur’an as a living criterion, neglecting the moral and intellectual responsibilities that covenant entailed, and failing to embody the justice it prescribed. This is a sobering reckoning. But a covenant that has been neglected can be returned to — and that possibility of return is itself part of the divine mercy the tradition insists upon. The Qur’an is direct: Inna Allāha lā yughayyiru mā biqawmin ḥattā yughayyirū mā bi-anfusihim — “God does not change the condition of a people until they change what is within themselves” (13:11).
Corruption: The Mechanism That Perpetuates Suffering
There is a more immediate mechanism connecting historical failure to present suffering that deserves direct attention: corruption. In many of the Muslim-majority countries facing the most acute poverty — across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and parts of the Arab world — corruption is not incidental or marginal. It is systemic, and it functions as perhaps the single most direct mechanism by which poverty is perpetuated and whatever welfare capacity remains is hollowed out.
The effects are concrete and devastating. Redistributive mechanisms — including zakāt funds and state welfare budgets — are siphoned at multiple levels before they reach the poor. Courts that should provide recourse for the vulnerable are purchasable by the powerful. Infrastructure contracts are awarded to political allies rather than competent builders. Foreign aid and development assistance, directed at these countries over decades in enormous quantities, has been systematically captured by political elites and their networks, leaving the structural transformation it nominally aimed at largely unrealised.
The Qur’an has a specific term for this: fasād fī al-arḍ — corruption in the land. Ẓahara al-fasādu fī al-barri wal-baḥri bimā kasabat aydī al-nās — “Corruption has appeared on land and sea because of what human hands have earned” (30:41). The disordering of the social world is attributed not to divine abandonment but to human action. The verse continues: God allows people to taste some consequence of their deeds — laʿallahum yarjiʿūn — so that they might pay heed. This is a theology of consequence, not fatalism. It preserves both human agency and divine justice simultaneously.
This corruption is not simply a colonial legacy, though colonialism contributed to it by modelling extractive governance and cultivating elites whose loyalty was to external power rather than to their own populations. Post-colonial Muslim leaders made their own choices. The Islamic tradition has extensive and explicit resources against precisely this — the concept of amāna applied to public office, the explicit prohibition of bribery in hadith, the institution of the muḥtasib as a public accountability officer. These were not colonial impositions. Their abandonment is an internal failure, and it has had catastrophic human consequences.
Does Poverty Cause Crime? A Necessary Complication
The assumption that poverty and lack of opportunity are primary drivers of crime — and that those born into poorer circumstances therefore face greater moral hazard — deserves careful examination rather than simple acceptance.
The revelations surrounding figures like Jeffrey Epstein have cast this assumption into sharp relief. Here were individuals of extraordinary wealth, influence, and social capital, embedded in networks spanning governments, financial institutions, and royal households, engaged in systematic moral depravity of the most serious kind. This is not an isolated case. History and current events alike demonstrate that some of the most consequential moral failures — corruption at scale, wars of aggression, systematic exploitation — are committed by those with the most resources, not the least. Concentrated power creates its own forms of temptation, its own insulation from accountability, and an unparalleled capacity for harm.
The Qur’an’s recurring cast of villains — Pharaoh, Qārūn, the wealthy elites of Makkah who opposed the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) — is a persistent reminder that the severest divine indictments fall consistently on those who misuse power and wealth, not on those crushed beneath them.
That said, a complete picture requires acknowledging what poverty does produce: specific pressures and vulnerabilities — hunger, desperation, severely constrained choices — that the Qur’an itself recognises. The principle lā yukallifu Allāhu nafsan illā wusʿahā — “God does not burden any soul beyond its capacity” (2:286) — implicitly acknowledges that constraint shapes accountability. The more honest position is not that poverty is irrelevant to moral life, but that moral risk is universal and not class-specific. Wealth does not confer moral safety. Poverty does not determine moral failure. Both create their own particular temptations and vulnerabilities, and God’s assessment accounts for actual conditions in both cases.
On Justice, Unequal Starting Points, and the Afterlife
A deep anxiety underlies these questions: if a person born in a stable, prosperous society faces fewer systemic pressures toward wrongdoing, while another born into structural hardship and institutional failure faces far greater ones, is the moral accounting of the afterlife genuinely fair?
The Qur’an’s answer is that divine justice is not crude arithmetic applied to external behaviour abstracted from circumstance. The principle lā yukallifu Allāhu nafsan illā wusʿahā is not a vague reassurance — it is a constitutional principle of divine justice in Qur’anic theology. The person who grew up amid structural hardship, with fewer resources, fewer institutional protections, and greater external pressures, is not assessed by the same absolute standard as one who had every advantage and every support.
There is also a dimension of divine knowledge that no theology of justice can afford to ignore. The One who judges knows not just the actions but the conditions — the pressures, the alternatives that were and were not available, the distortions of conscience produced by environments of sustained deprivation, trauma, or institutional failure. Divine justice in the Qur’an is never abstracted from divine knowledge and divine compassion operating together.
As for those who caused or perpetuated the colonial histories, the drawn borders, the resource extractions, the systemic corruption, the structural damage that continues to shape lives — they are not exempt. The Qur’an’s treatment of historical oppressors is sober and consistent: “Do not think that God is in the slightest unaware of what these unjust people are doing. He is only deferring them for the day on which eyes will be bewildered.” (14:42). These domino effects of injustice, the suffering they continue to produce across generations, do not escape the divine record. Divine justice operates simultaneously at multiple levels: mercy and reduced accountability for those crushed by systems they did not choose, and full accountability for those who built, maintained, and profited from those systems.
On Supplication (Duʿāʾ) in a Structurally Constrained World
The question of why one should pray if so much of life is shaped by structural circumstances rests on a particular and limited understanding of what prayer is for — namely, as a mechanism for altering external outcomes. While that dimension is real, it is not the whole picture, and perhaps not even the most important part.
Duʿāʾ, at its core, is not a request submitted to a cosmic administrator. It is a conversation — an act of orienting the self toward the One who is the source of all good, expressing our hopes, fears, and gratitude in the full knowledge that He already knows what we need before we ask. Many of us have experienced this in a form that defies easy explanation: blessings arrive that were never explicitly petitioned for, as though God knew the right moment to give what the heart silently longed for. And at other times, what is ardently requested is withheld — not because the supplication was unheard, but because what we desire may not be what we truly need at that moment, or it may be at odds with something that is only in God’s knowledge.
This does not mean one should stop asking. The act of making duʿāʾ is, in itself, an acknowledgement of our dependence on God and a means of drawing closer to Him — and that proximity is itself an act of worship, independent of whether the specific request is granted.
The Prophet (pbuh) is reported to have taught that God loves those who ask, and that no sincere supplication is ever truly in vain. As narrated by Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī in the Musnad of Imam Aḥmad:
مَا مِنْ مُسْلِمٍ يَدْعُو بِدَعْوَةٍ لَيْسَ فِيهَا إِثْمٌ وَلَا قَطِيعَةُ رَحِمٍ إِلَّا أَعْطَاهُ اللَّهُ بِهَا إِحْدَى ثَلَاثٍ: إِمَّا أَنْ تُعَجَّلَ لَهُ دَعْوَتُهُ، وَإِمَّا أَنْ يَدَّخِرَهَا لَهُ فِي الْآخِرَةِ، وَإِمَّا أَنْ يَصْرِفَ عَنْهُ مِنَ السُّوءِ مِثْلَهَا. قَالُوا: إِذًا نُكْثِرُ؟ قَالَ: اللَّهُ أَكْثَرُ
“There is no Muslim who does not offer any duʿāʾ in which there is no sin or severing of family ties but God will give him one of three things in return: either He will answer his duʿāʾ sooner, or He will store it up for him in the Hereafter, or He will divert an equivalent evil away from him because of it.” They said: “We will ask abundantly.” He said: “God is more generous.”
Musnad Aḥmad, 10749
The companions’ instinct — then we will ask abundantly — and the Prophet’s response — God is more generous — is itself instructive. The calculus runs always in the supplicant’s favour. What varies is the form in which the response comes: immediate grant, deferred reward, or protection from an equivalent harm. No sincere duʿāʾ is wasted. The currency is simply not always the one we expected.
This means that even in circumstances where structural forces feel overwhelming — where the country of one’s birth, the economy of one’s region, the corruption of one’s institutions seem to foreclose so much — prayer is not futile. It is, among other things, a practice of maintaining interiority and relationship with God that no structural force can entirely determine or confiscate. The coloniser could impose external conditions. He could not colonise the inner life of one who turned, in those conditions, to God. This is not a counsel of quietism or passive acceptance of injustice. The Qur’an is insistent on active struggle against oppression and on working to change unjust conditions. Prayer and action are not in competition. Prayer is the root from which sustained, patient, morally serious action grows, and the relationship it cultivates with God is its own form of liberation, independent of external circumstance.
In Summary
The circumstances of our birth — including the country, family, and historical moment we inhabit — are not obstacles to divine justice but part of the terrain within which it operates, each soul being accounted for according to its actual conditions and real constraints. Islam did produce, historically, comparatively just and functional welfare institutions — this is not theory but documented history. Their decline results from multiple causes: genuine colonial disruption of institutional life, but also internal corruption that preceded colonialism, post-colonial Muslim governments that continued the dismantling, a scholarly class that largely acquiesced, and wealthy Muslim nations that have not used their extraordinary resources to rebuild what was lost. The corruption that now hollows out governance in many of these societies is not simply a colonial legacy. It has contemporary Muslim authors who face their own accounting before God. The assumption that poverty straightforwardly produces crime while wealth confers moral safety is contradicted both by Qur’anic theology and by the evidence of our own times. Moral risk is universal, and God’s assessment is calibrated to actual circumstance, not abstract equality. Those who designed and maintained unjust systems do not escape divine reckoning. And prayer, rightly understood, is not a mechanism for overriding structural reality but a relationship with the One whose wisdom, timing, and generosity operate at a depth our immediate understanding cannot fully reach; and that relationship is itself a form of freedom that no external circumstance can entirely take away.
I hope these reflections are of some benefit, and I remain open to further discussion on any of the points raised.
Mushfiq Sultan, Al-Mawrid Institute
