What it means
عدالت (edâlat) is justice. Not the courtroom procedure, but the older sense: the right ordering of things, giving each what is due. From the Arabic root ع د ل (ʿ-d-l) “to be straight, to balance.”
In Iranian usage the word carries three frequencies at once. Religious: عدل (adl) “divine justice” is the third of the five pillars of Shia theology, the belief that God acts justly. Political: every Iranian government from the 1906 Constitutional Revolution onward has framed itself as the bringer of عدالت. Poetic: Hafez and Sa’di return to the word constantly, often to mourn its absence.
How to use it
- عدالت اجتماعی (edâlat-e ejtemâ’i) “social justice”
- دادگاه عدالت (dâdgâh-e edâlat) “court of justice”
- عدالت رو اجرا کن (edâlat ro ejrâ kon) “carry out justice”
- بیعدالتی (bi-edâlati) “injustice”
- عدالت برای همه (edâlat barâye hame) “justice for all” (a frequent protest chant)
- به عدالت رفتار کرد (be edâlat raftâr kard) “acted with justice”
In Iranian thought
The political weight of عدالت is hard to overstate. The 1979 Revolution promised it. The reformist movements of the 1990s and 2000s promised it again. The Green Movement of 2009 chanted رای من کجاست؟ (rây-e man kojâst?) “where is my vote?” as a demand for عدالت. The 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests treated عدالت as inseparable from آزادی (âzâdi) “freedom.”
Inside Shia theology, عدل defines God. The Mu’tazilite school argued that God cannot do anything unjust by nature, and Shia theology kept this position. So an Iranian who hears the word, religious or not, has the centuries-old debate sitting in the background: is suffering compatible with a just God? The word arrives carrying that question.
The pure Persian word داد (dâd) is عدالت’s older sibling. Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh runs on داد: a king has داد or has لost it, and the empire stands or falls on the difference. Modern Iran prefers عدالت, the Arabic borrowing, in legal and political language, but داد lives on in compounds like دادگاه (dâdgâh) “courthouse,” دادستان (dâdsetân) “prosecutor,” بیداد (bi-dâd) “injustice, tyranny.” The doubled vocabulary is itself a small history of the country: the Persian word for the courtroom comes from Ferdowsi’s poetic vocabulary, the Persian word for justice itself comes from the Quran, and both live side by side in the same sentence.
Related words
- عدل (adl) “justice” (older Quranic form)
- انصاف (ensâf) “fairness, equity”
- داد (dâd) “justice” (pure Persian)
- دادگستری (dâd-gostari) “justice ministry, judiciary”
- بیعدالتی (bi-edâlati) “injustice”
References
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