My mum used to tell me the story of a woman who, at the time that the Prophet Yusuf AS was being sold by those who had rescued him from the well, came forward to put a bid in. She was ridiculed for the smallness of her bid, but she said if nothing else, she wanted to be on record for having tried to save this beautiful boy despite the inefficacy of her offer. I’m quite sure this is not an authentic narration, but its lesson is beautiful and powerful nonetheless. The spirit it inspires of not looking at the enormity of the challenge but the means in your power to utilise in the path of good, is pertinent to many contexts today. We find ourselves facing assault, genocide, warfare, and injustice of every stripe from multiple directions.

The seductive call of despair and fatalism looms large, but we are an ummah called to uphold justice in all circumstances and despite all probabilities. How we act is up to what means we have, and none are wasted on this path. 

In the summer of 2024, activists from Palestine Action scaled rooftops, blockaded factory gates, and some eventually entered hunger strikes; their bodies becoming the last instrument of protest available to them. At the same time, in community halls across Britain, volunteers were fundraising, hosting iftar dinners for displaced families, lobbying councillors, and busily sustaining the infrastructure of solidarity. Both groups were doing something. Both groups were doing it for the same cause. And in some corners of Muslim discourse, both groups were being judged harshly by the other.

This is not a new tension. It is, in fact, one of the oldest questions in the moral life of a community: What does it mean to stand for justice? And who gets to decide how?

The Qur’anic Worldview

The Qur’an does not offer a single model of the justice-seeker. It offers a whole array of them, knowing that we will need models for the multiplicity of our vast ummah. 

The Qur’an gives us Musa AS, who strikes down an oppressor in a moment of raw intervention, and then spends decades leading a people through patient, grinding liberation. He bears with patience not only the sustained efforts against Pharaoh but the near constant insubordinations of the very people he was rescuing. It gives us Yusuf AS, who works within the system of a corrupt state, refusing to leave, using proximity to power as a tool for the vulnerable. It gives us Maryam AS, whose act of resistance is bold yet intimate, and utterly uncompromising, standing alone against the accusations of her community.

Allah ﷻ says in Surah Al-Nisa (4:135), “Oh you who believe, be persistently standing firm in justice, witnesses for Allah, even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives.”

The command is to be qawwamina bil-qist—upright, standing, maintaining justice— but it says nothing about the particular form that uprightness must take.

What the Qur’an does insist on, repeatedly, is that injustice, dhulm, cannot be met with indifference.

The famous hadith of the Prophet ﷺ famously stated, “Whoever among you sees a wrong, let him change it with his hand; if he is not able to, then with his tongue; if he is not able to, then with his heart—and that is the weakest of faith.” (Muslim)

This hadith is often read hierarchically, placing physical action above speech, above inner conviction. But it is more accurately read as a map of capacity and context; a description of how the same moral imperative expresses itself differently depending on what one is able to do and where one stands.

The Prophetic Tradition of Multiple Forms

The Prophet’s ﷺ own community embodied this multiplicity from the very beginning.

In the earliest years of the Meccan period, there was no singular mode of resistance. Bilal RA endured torture in a form of passive resistance that shamed his tormentors and witnessed to the truth in the most costly way imaginable. Khadijah RA used wealth to sustain the movement. Abu Bakr RA negotiated freedom for enslaved believers. Ja’far ibn Abi Talib RA delivered an eloquent defence before the Negus; a sort of institutional diplomacy in a foreign court. And the Prophet ﷺ himself combined public proclamation, private counsel, strategic migration, and ultimately, when the conditions changed, organised collective action. No single approach was declared the righteous one, and the others deemed insufficient.

There was never a scrutiny of how Muslims resisted, but only the ever-present call to justice that demanded that they were standing in resistance at all.

When the Muslims arrived in Madinah and established the safety and security of their own state, this diversification did not now fall away to conformity; it instead deepened further. There were those Muslims who fought physically, while others managed logistics. There were those who maintained community life, cared for the wounded, preserved knowledge, and held together the social fabric without which no movement survives. And of course, the contribution of the Ansar, the Muslim inhabitants of Madinah, was not only in battle; it was in opening their homes, sharing their resources, and building the relational infrastructure that made everything else possible.

Palestine Action and Palestine House

The current moment offers us a vivid case study. Palestine Action — with its direct action, its willingness to accept arrest, its hunger strikes — operates in the tradition of those who use their bodies as instruments of conscience. Their approach is confrontational, high-risk, and deliberately disruptive. It is designed to impose a cost and force a reckoning.

Palestine House and similar community organisations operate differently. They create spaces for the displaced, provide legal support, run educational programmes, raise funds, train advocates, and build the long-term infrastructure of care and solidarity. Their work may be slower and less visible, but it is still indispensable.

The mistake would be to treat these as competing forms of activism. This advocating only for direct action can slide into a kind of moral vanity that dismisses community work as soft or complicit, whilst those advocating for community work can harden into institutional comfort that implicitly judges direct action as irresponsible or counterproductive. Both arguments are at best failures of the imagination, and at worst, a cynical wedge in a community more in need of unity than ever before.

The hunger striker needs the community behind them. The community needs the hunger striker to hold the line. Neither is performing their role if they are busy policing the others.

How Islam Guides Us

Islamic ethics of action have always been contextual. The scholars distinguished between fard ‘ayn, obligations incumbent on every individual, and fard kifāyah, collective obligations satisfied when enough people fulfil them. Much of the work of justice falls into the latter category. When some are doing it, others are free and, in fact, called to do something else.

This means that the Muslim lawyer who takes on a Palestine Action defendant’s case is not doing lesser work than the activist in the dock. The woman who spends her evenings teaching Arabic to refugee children is not doing lesser work than the person on the roof. The journalist, the fundraiser, the imam who makes du’a in public and refuses to be silent, all of these are expressions of the same moral imperative in different registers.

Nor should we overlook the quiet, daily acts of economic and social conscience that don’t make headlines but accumulate into something significant. The Muslim who scrutinises their shopping, who follows BDS guidelines, who redirects their spending away from companies that profit from occupation; all of this too is resistance. It is the kind that asks nothing of you except your attention and your integrity, and it is available to almost everyone. And in an age where information is itself contested terrain, the person who shares a verified account, who amplifies a credible voice, who refuses to let an atrocity be buried by an algorithm, ignored by mainstream media, they are also doing something valuable.

We should be careful not to romanticise only the dramatic and the costly while we quietly devalue what is within reach of the ordinary person on an ordinary day.

The Prophet ﷺ reminded us that even a smile in the face of your brother is an act of charity; the scale of an act does not determine its place in the moral ledger, all that matters is the weight of the intention behind it.

What Islam does not permit is the fourth option: watching and doing nothing.

The hunger strikers of Palestine Action are making a claim with their bodies that demands our attention and our reflection. Whether or not one endorses their specific tactics, they are inviting us to question: what are you willing to give? Islam’s answer is not to prescribe a single sacrifice, but to insist that no one opts out of the question entirely.

The work of justice is large enough for many hands. What it cannot afford is any hand remaining folded.