Evil and Suffering

Evil and suffering are understood within the framework of divine wisdom and human will. The empirical fact of suffering in God’s world provides a significant and indicative theme for Islamic thought. Already forming part of the Qur’an’s diagnosis of the human condition as exemplified with particular amplitude in the lives of the prophets, a consideration of suffering features in all major schools of theology and mysticism, as well as providing grounds for a dramatic complaint literature. However, although thinkers have worked to determine the reasons for suffering and to identify the due human response, they have seldom understood it as a challenge to God’s existence. Much of this article will consider the cosmological and metaphysical reasons for kalām’s distinctive adoption of forms of antitheodicy, which will be followed by a conspectus of the very different treatments of evil presented in Sufi and literary traditions.