Suffering, Islamic Consolation Literature and the Process of Meaning-Making

Human suffering is one of the most enduring realities that religious believers of all kinds continue to grapple with. Muslim thinkers too have pondered deeply over it, producing imaginative and novel ways to understand and explain this suffering. This article explores how theodicies – ways God’s justice and fairness are compatible with the existence of evil and suffering in the world – by themselves are not adequate to address suffering because of their theoretical nature. The proposal in this article is to adopt a meaning-making approach, one that allows the person suffering to construct meaning rather than have a theoretical solution imposed on them.