The problem of evil and divine justice in al-Fārābī and Suhrawardī

This study examines the approaches of Al-Fārābī and Suhrawardī to the problem of evil and divine justice, as representatives of two significant philosophical traditions in Islamic thought. Within the context of the theory of emanation, Al-Fārābī evaluates evil as arising from states such as deficiency, imperfection, and opposition in the realm of existence, explaining its existence in relation to the absence of good; he links divine justice to the competence of each being in a way that they receive their share according to their merits. Suhrawardī, who grounds his understanding of being in a metaphysics of light, describes evil as the absence of light and states that divine justice is realized through beings' proximity to the divine light. Al-Fārābī explains this in a causal framework through reason, whereas Suhrawardī seeks to explain it through discovery and inner illumination, within the context of the relationship between light and darkness. Both philosophers draw attention to moral good and evil by emphasizing that there is no distortion in the realm of existence, everything actually occurs through divine justice in accordance with merit and competence. The fact that the problem of evil has been debated in the history of philosophy and kalam, the contribution of each differing view to the literature as a form of diversity, and the original interpretations of Al-Fārābī and Suhrawardī—representatives of two distinct schools in Islamic thought—increase the significance of this study. Our goal is to conduct a comparative analysis based on the similarities and differences by handling the perspectives on the problem of evil and divine justice within the systems established by two prominent philosophers, representing the Peripatetic (Masha'i) and Illuminationist (Ishraqi) schools.