Injustice heralds ruin

This is one of the chapters of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima. In it he holds that aggression against people's property takes away their hopes of gain, so that their hands recoil from striving. ²

In his view, when people sit idle from making a living, the markets of settlement go slack, people scatter across the horizons, the population of the region thins, its cities fall into ruin, and the state is disordered. He explains this by saying that the state is a form of settlement that decays with the decay of its matter. ²

Injustice, for him, is more general than taking property. Whoever usurps someone's work, demands something from him without right, or imposes on him what the Law has not imposed, has wronged him. He counts the imposition of labour and the forced service of subjects without right among its gravest forms. ²

Ibn Khaldun holds that this is the wisdom the Lawgiver intended in forbidding injustice, because it heralds the cutting off of the human race. He links it with the five necessities of the objectives of the Law. ²

See settlement and injustice.