Plato is famously quoted as having said that knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.The question of justice, according to him, arises only in a situation where there is chaos. In an ideal statethere is no need to talk about justice because everyone knows already what is right and what is wrong and acts accordingly, so there is no conflict. Hence, education is very important, with the purpose of establishing proper order, and once that is established questions about justice should no longer arise.
Of course everybody would like to live in an orderly society like that where everyone knows his or her place. But Plato’s Republic is an ideal. He does not rule out a totalitarian regime as a necessity to safeguard order and to maintain a caste system. In the system every citizen must be made to believe that everybody is born into a certain caste namely the producers, the soldiers and the guardians. For the sake ensuring the greater good of the city every citizen must be made to remain in their respective caste. That is Plato’s idea of justice, one based upon a man made social hierarchy and strictly enforced order.
But justice in the state is parallel with justice in an individual person. Why should one be just in the first place? Why should one regard, stealing, cheating and murdering wrong? May be some people would simply reject the whole idea of justice altogether, arguing that everybody would be very much concerned with self-interest rather than worrying about being just or not. For Plato, however, stealing, cheating and murdering are wrong because they bring damage to the society as well as to our own souls. Justice is similar to beauty, truth and goodness in the sense that they all can be imagined in the mind without having to exist externally in the real world, like our idea of a perfect triangle. Based upon our conception of the ideals we judge how far the way of real world has deviated from the right path. In this regard, the job of the philosophers is to study and promote the ideal.
Muslims would not object to Plato’s emphasis on the importance of justice in his conception of knowledge. But they would assert that justice in Islam does not obtain only in a two party relation because the Qur’an teaches that justice begins with the individual as a human being. Any injustice committed by an individual is in fact an injustice towards one’s own self because that simply means that he has allowed his lower self be in control over his reason, which is a gross injustice. Hence, according to Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, the aim of education in Islam is to produce a good man, not merely a good citizen as envisaged by Plato and secular education. There is big diffrence between the two. A good citizen is not necessarily a good man, he might even be an evil person because it is possible for a state to make people doing all sorts of evil or wrong acts. A good man on the other hand is a just man, in whom knowledge and action are harmoniously fused together and that brings about a condition that we call justice.
A Muslim’s idea of a good man is not based upon an ideal but a real person, namely The Holy Prophet himself. He is the best example for all Muslims of all time regardless of race, age or gender.Because of him the Muslims are always certain of their identity, and unlike the secular man they do not suffer from a crisis of identity. This is what the secular philosophers cannot offer to mankind because no ordinary human being would be able to do that.
If the true position of the Holy Prophet is duly recognized and acknowledged, an Islamic university, by virtue of being the highest and most perfect form of Islamic education, should reflect the Perfect Man, namely the Prophet. Unfortunately that is not really the case because even the so called Islamic universities are in fact based on western models, and as such they do not reflect man but the secular state. This only shows how far have the Muslims been misguided in their conception of education. If that is not first corrected there is no way the Muslims would be able to lead mankind towards justice because they themselves are still deeply enmeshed in ignorance and doubt.