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The distribution of incomes in South Africa in 2004, ten years after the transition to democracy, was probably more unequal than it had been under apartheid. The authors of this book explain why this is so, offering a detailed and comprehensive analysis of inequality in South Africa from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. They show that the basis of inequality shifted in the last decades of the twentieth century from race to class. Formal deracialization of public policy did not reduce the actual disadvantages experienced by the poor nor the advantages of the rich. The fundamental continuity in patterns of advantage and disadvantage resulted from underlying continuities in public policy, or what the authors call the “distributional regime.” The post-apartheid distributional regime continues to divide South Africans into insiders and outsiders. The insiders, now increasingly multiracial, enjoy good access to well-paid, skilled jobs; the outsiders lack skills and employment.

The author of this book has long been known as a reformist or moderate Islamist thinker. In this book he argues that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—in its broad outlines—meets with wide acceptance among Muslims if their interpretation of Islamic law is correct. Under his theory of the purposes of Shariʻa, justice and human welfare are not exclusive to Islamic governance, and the objectives of Islamic law can be advanced in multiple ways. The book examines the Western concept of freedom and the Islamic perspective on freedom and human rights, basic democratic principles, the basic principles of an Islamic political system, the concept of tyranny across three different schools of thought, and concludes with an examination of the solutions in Islamic thought that can curb state tyranny, for the benefit of freedom, justice, and the human rights of citizens.