“Peace” can be the oppressor’s favorite word. The Qur’an will not let it be used that way: where ʿadl is absent, what reigns is not salām but silence.
The two terms keep company throughout the Qur’an. Believers are commanded to stand firm in justice though it be against themselves and their kin; they are commanded, in the same breath of revelation, to incline toward peace when peace is offered. The theological temptation — every generation’s temptation — is to choose one and quietly retire the other.
Choose peace without justice, and you consecrate the status quo: a calm purchased with other people’s suffering, which scripture calls not peace but corruption in the earth. Choose justice without peace, and you license the avenger: a righteousness that reproduces, under new management, the cruelty it rose against. The tradition’s answer is not a compromise between the two but a refusal to separate them.
Reading the pair together
ʿAdl in the Qur’anic lexicon is a setting-right — the restoration of balance, the giving of each their due. Salām is not mere quiet but wholeness, soundness, safety; it is the name by which God calls Himself. Read together, they describe a single trajectory: peace is what justice is for, and justice is what peace is made of. The peacebuilder who forgets the first becomes an accountant of grievances; the one who forgets the second becomes a chaplain to power.
There is no true peace without justice — and no justice worth the name that does not intend peace.
This is why the Fellowship’s statements insist, in season and out, on both vocabularies at once: the protection of civilians and the naming of oppression, mercy for the enemy and truth about the crime. It is not rhetorical balance. It is theology.