The phrase “It’s karma!” has become a common expression in global popular culture, casually invoked to explain misfortune or poetic justice. Its usage now extends well beyond the geographical and civilizational boundaries of its origin, namely, the Indian subcontinent. In fact, it is at times even found being used by some individuals in markedly different theological contexts, including some Muslim communities, despite its extremely problematic nature from the perspective of Islam.

This type of casual adoption of such things, typically based in ignorance and an uncritical attitude, overlooks the deeply embedded metaphysical and anthropological assumptions of the doctrine of karma as articulated in the Indic religious traditions.

At its core, karma refers to the principle of moral causation: every action, intention, or thought contributes in shaping an individual’s destiny. In its secularized, popular form, it is often reduced to a simplistic moral mechanism, i.e., “what goes around comes around.”

In its classical formulation within Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, karma is part of a comprehensive metaphysical framework in which the soul or self (atman or, in Buddhism, the stream of consciousness) is bound within samsara, an endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Each birth is conditioned by the moral residue (karmic traces) of past actions. The ultimate goal, moksha (liberation), is to transcend this cycle entirely, often through spiritual insight, renunciation, or the extinguishing of desire.

Godless Law?

From an Islamic perspective, the problems are both obvious and numerous. To begin with, this metaphysical structure assumes a cosmos governed by an impersonal moral law rather than a conscious, personal deity.

The modern secular fascination with the concept of karma can be attributed mostly to its compatibility with a post-religious moral landscape.

Stripped of its metaphysical underpinnings, such as reincarnation and liberation, the popularized version of karma offers a morally intuitive yet seemingly “theologically neutral” framework: actions have consequences, and the universe somehow balances moral accounts. This appeals to a secular sensibility because it preserves the notion of ethical causality without requiring belief in a personal God, divine command, or eschatological judgment.

In this way, karma functions as a kind of cosmic natural law, impersonal, self-executing, and free of doctrinal obligations.

It aligns with contemporary liberal notions of autonomy and privatized spirituality—one’s ethical fate is determined not by divine will or covenantal duty but by one’s own choices in an allegedly self-regulating moral ecosystem.

As such, karma becomes a secular surrogate for both law and piety, a comforting belief that justice operates without the need for religious accountability, sacred texts, or a transcendent moral order.

Yet, this very feature is also philosophically vulnerable. By depersonalizing justice and detaching it from an intentional moral lawgiver, karma reduces moral responsibility to a mechanistic process devoid of grace, forgiveness, or final judgment.

It may offer the illusion of moral order but not a coherent basis for moral obligation, human dignity, and especially redemptive transformation, as encapsulated in the Islamic notions of repentance (tawbah) and justice, which conflict majorly with the notion of karma. A person may repent sincerely to Allah and be forgiven for a past evil action, facing no punishment at all and in fact being rewarded for their sincere repentance. The victims of evil actions may be rewarded for enduring their suffering: for disbelievers, exclusively in this life; and for Muslims, in this life and/or the next.

Unjust Justice?

Another issue is one that is more anthropological in nature, as the human being is viewed not as a once-created soul that is accountable for their beliefs, decisions, and actions in just a single life but, rather, as an entity that is entangled in a deterministic web entwined with past lives and future consequences. It is a depressing story where people are punished for things in their past lives despite having no knowledge or recollection of them whatsoever.

In fact, some who believe in these things end up committing suicide because of how difficult their life was, supposedly as punishment for all the bad they did in their past lives; as well as the thought of how much bad they’ve done in this current life, meaning they will supposedly have a potentially even more difficult subsequent life.

In essence, the doctrine of karma posits that the individual is both the architect and the prisoner of his own existential condition, trapped by and within the consequences of his prior selves.

This framework raises significant moral and ontological concerns, particularly when it intersects with traditional social hierarchies.

For instance, the idea that a Brahmin may be “demoted” to a Dalit in a subsequent life as a form of karmic retribution implicitly assigns the condition of Dalit an ontological status of degradation and punishment. Such a view not only naturalizes caste-based hierarchies but justifies them morally by linking social suffering to personal guilt, even if the individual has no memory or awareness of the alleged transgression that it resulted from.

As V.S. Naipaul astutely observed in one of his many books on his ancestral homeland of India, the doctrine of karma has historically served not merely as a metaphysical belief but as a social rationalization for material suffering and inequality, including caste hierarchy. Within this framework, extreme poverty, illness, or social marginalization are often interpreted as morally justified consequences of actions committed in a previous life rather than injustices to be remedied.

The suffering individual is presumed to have “earned” their condition through past transgressions, even if these acts are unrecalled and unrecoverable. How can an individual even begin to attempt transformative moral reform if he has no clue whatsoever about the sins he has committed?

This is a reason why societal misery has remained a constant in Indian history, despite the rising economic standards.

Moreover, the implications become even more problematic when considering the idea of reincarnation into non-human forms. If a soul is reborn as an animal due to its negative karma, a critical philosophical question arises: how can an animal, which lacks self-reflective consciousness, moral reasoning, or free agency, be expected to “repay” or exhaust its karmic debt?

The very criteria by which karma operates, i.e., intention, volition, moral discernment, etc., are absent in non-human creatures.

This introduces a fundamental contradiction: karmic justice presupposes moral accountability, yet it assigns suffering to beings incapable of moral discernment or action.

In this sense, the karmic system risks collapsing into a deterministic fatalism, where moral responsibility is distributed across lives without continuity of memory, agency, or selfhood.

In response to such critiques, Avatans Kumar, a public speaker and columnist affiliated with the Times of India (one of India’s leading newspapers), has attempted to counter the argument that the doctrine of karma legitimizes social injustice. He draws upon the work of Arvind Sharma—one of the most prominent contemporary scholars of Hinduism in Western academic circles—, who regularly offers a defense rooted in what he frames as a rebuttal against “neo-Orientalist reductionism.” Kumar thus writes in a piece dated back to 2020:

To make his point, Sharma cites an example of a patient suffering from lung cancer. The patient in his example is also a chronic smoker. “Medical science avers this to be the case. Then does it make medical science a callous science?” asks Sharma. “From the standpoint of medical science,” elaborates Sharma, “it is a question of fact and not value. Chronic smoking causes cancer, so the statement that a patient is now suffering from lung cancer as a result of being a chronic smoker is a statement of fact, which does not make medical science a callous science. If, however, the doctor were to say to the patient after she has been so diagnosed, “you brought this cancer on yourself by chronic smoking. You are to blame for it. Therefore I am not going to treat you” — then the doctor would be exhibiting a callous streak and would have let down his profession. The doctor has converted the fact into a negative value by blaming the victim. Normally, however, doctors convert it into a positive value — in the sense that while holding the victim responsible for her condition, they do what they can to treat it and are solicitous rather than callous in their approach to the patient.”

This is often presented as the strongest philosophical defense of karma from within the Hindu tradition, and it is being articulated here by some of its most prominent apologists. Yet the logic underpinning this argument is flawed at the most foundational level.

Take, for example, this glorified analogy of a person who develops lung cancer after years of smoking. In this case, the illness is a foreseeable consequence of voluntary behavior, rooted in direct causality. However, the real critique against karma challenges precisely the absence of such transparent continuity. The analogy breaks down when applied to reincarnation: it is not that the individual with lung cancer had smoked but, rather, that someone who never touched a cigarette is now condemned to suffer as if they had.

Applied “socially,” the implications are ethically disturbing: if one sees a destitute Dalit beggar on the street, are we to presume, without evidence or memory, that in a previous life he must have committed some grave moral crime, perhaps even murder?

This assumption not only lacks epistemological grounding but also fosters what might be called a negative anthropology—a worldview in which suffering is always retrospectively justified; and where the poor and marginalized are reflexively perceived as morally culpable.

Such a framework risks eroding the very foundations of compassion and social solidarity, which are important attributes of an ideal Islamic society.

Contrast this inhumane perception of the less privileged to what we read in the Qur’an or in the sayings of Allah’s Messenger ﷺ, such as the following prophetic narration:

It has been narrated from Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him) that the Prophet ﷺ said: “The person who assists and takes care of the widow and the poor is like the person who is striving in the path of Allah or like the one who is fasting all day and performing Salah all night”

Or the following:

I heard the Messenger of Allah ﷺ say: “Search for me among your weak ones, for verily, you are being aided and provided rizq (sustenance) via your weak ones.”

Consider the contrast in perception shaped by theological worldviews:

When an upper-caste Hindu sees a famous global figure like Donald Trump, immensely wealthy, powerful, and perhaps morally questionable, there may be little inclination to morally scrutinize or contextualize his success… yet, when the same observer looks upon a local street sweeper, especially one belonging to a lower caste, his mind may intuitively drift toward speculative narratives of karmic retribution. The latter’s social degradation is implicitly interpreted as the fruits of prior sins, thereby reinforcing an ingrained, hierarchical anthropology where visible suffering is equated with moral failure.

In stark contrast to this, the Islamic paradigm offers an entirely different moral psychology:

When a Muslim encounters a fellow believer who is poor or destitute, he does not view him as somehow being cosmically guilty or karmically condemned. Instead, what he sees is a fellow soul, equal in dignity, united in faith. He sees someone who may be better than him before Allah due to their endurance of great hardships. He sees someone who is less likely to fall into those evils that stem from having a lot of wealth. He sees someone who is potentially a means by which he himself can draw nearer to Allah through acts of charity (sadaqah), solidarity, and service. The believer has an opportunity to purify his own soul and increase his standing before Allah through acts of goodness towards the poor and weak.

The poor are not “deservedly” poor. They are just being tested in different ways than those who are not poor, and assisting them is a means for the salvation of others.

Thus, where the karmic view may encourage suspicion, detachment, or rationalized indifference, the Islamic view cultivates empathy, moral responsibility, and a shared eschatological destiny.

The poor are not mere burdens or “karmic cases.” For many, they may actually be the most precious keys to paradise.

Metapysical Karma… Or Political Karma?

There is, undeniably, a striking moral inconsistency, even hypocrisy, in how the doctrine of karma is selectively applied by some who claim to uphold it. Among numerous Hindu nationalist voices, one may hear assertions that the contemporary suffering of Palestinians, for example, is nothing more than karmic retribution and cosmic justice for unremembered transgressions allegedly committed in past lives. This framing allows distant suffering to be dismissed as a metaphysical balancing act, a kind of cosmic schadenfreude disguised as spiritual explanation, not as a moral crisis or political injustice.

Yet, quite tellingly, this same logic is rarely ever directed inward. The historical persecution, marginalization, or displacement of Hindus—whether under Islamic rulers, or colonial powers in India’s past, or in modern-day Pakistan and Bangladesh—is never interpreted by these same voices as karmic debt repayment. Instead, such suffering is seen as injustice in its purest form: undeserved, offensive, and demanding redress. What emerges is a far-cry from any sort of coherent metaphysical commitment to karma as a universal principle. It is a highly instrumentalized doctrine, invoked only when it serves a certain political or ideological convenience.

This selective application not only undermines the credibility of the karmic framework, it also exposes its ethical fragility. A worldview that applies metaphysical determinism to the pain of others while preserving one’s own suffering as exceptional or unjustified reveals a kind of metaphysical chauvinism, not spiritual insight.

In contrast, the Islamic perspective, with its insistence on individual moral responsibility, divine justice, and the unknowability of God’s wisdom, resists such morally opportunistic narratives. In Islam, suffering is never used to assert one’s superiority over another; nor is it interpreted as definitive evidence of sinfulness. Rather, it can be a test, a means of purification, a path to gain closeness to Allah, or it could be for reasons known only to Allah. Whatever the case, it is always approached with humility, not judgment.

Imprisonment of the Self

In Islamic theology, human accountability is framed within a balance of divine will (qadr) and moral agency. While nothing can occur outside the scope of Allah’s will, individuals are judged according to their intentional actions, for which they bear personal responsibility. They are likewise judged for how they react to the hardships and suffering they face in life. Do they patiently endure and turn to Allah in prayer, or do they express ingratitude and dissatisfaction with Allah’s decree and turn away from Him?

The system of divine justice is one that is tempered by divine mercy. Sincere repentance can erase sin, as can experiencing pain and sickness. Even seemingly small acts of goodness may outweigh and erase various wrongs a person has committed. The believer lives in a state of moral responsibility, yes, but this is accompanied by the possibility of redemption, divine pardon, and hope.

In contrast, under the classical karmic doctrine, it is not only one’s actions but even one’s thoughts and mental states that are said to generate karmic consequences. Every intention—be it conscious or unconscious, intentional or unintentional, voluntary or involuntary—becomes a metaphysical seed that bears fruit, either in this current life or in the countless lives yet to come. The individual is thus under the heel of a totalizing moral surveillance, one administered not by a divine Judge who can forgive but by an impersonal cosmic mechanism that never forgives and never relents.

The psychological burden this creates is profound: the self is subject to a state of perpetual siege, with no possibility of grace, no moment of final reckoning, and no definitive closure. Liberation (moksha) becomes an almost unreachable goal that requires not only moral purity but also a transcendence of desire and action altogether. In this sense, the karmic self is not simply bound morally. It is existentially trapped in a loop from which escape depends on near-perfect spiritual discipline.

Islam, by contrast, affirms both the dignity and fallibility of the human being. It commands moral vigilance, but it also allows for repentance, divine mercy, and a clear path to salvation.

Rather than being haunted and pursued relentlessly by one’s own dark shadow across “infinite lifetimes,” the Muslim is called to reform in the here and now, knowing that God’s justice is never separated from His mercy.

Ironically, in much of the modern media, often shaped by secular-liberal and sometimes overtly politicized narratives, Islam is frequently portrayed as a rigid or “totalitarian” system, allegedly at odds with individual freedom. This perception is especially prevalent in discourse influenced by Western liberalism and, at times, amplified by ideological agendas, including those sympathetic to Zionist political interests.

If we examine the core assumptions of the karmic worldview, we find a cosmic determinism that places the individual under an unforgiving metaphysical machinery: every action, thought, or even subconscious inclination is weighed and inscribed in an impersonal moral calculus, carried over not only one life but potentially thousands. There is no appeal to mercy, no divine intervention, no possibility of absolution beyond exhaustive spiritual asceticism. In this sense, karma constructs a moral universe that is extremely paralyzing and inescapable.

Islam, by contrast, recognizes human weakness and imperfection as part of the existential condition. It allows for the existence of sin and error, but there is also justice, repentance, mercy, renewal, and divine forgiveness. Accountability is tied to knowledge, intention, and conscious action, not unconscious karma accumulated over forgotten lives. Additionally, Islam affirms the human being’s freedom to choose virtue or vice, and it offers a clear, finite framework for moral growth and redemption within a single, meaningful life.

Thus, the question arises: Which system is, in truth, more restrictive of “human freedom”? Is it the Islamic worldview, which binds moral responsibility to conscious choice and offers hope through divine mercy; or is it the karmic system, which subjects the self to a relentless and inscrutable metaphysical bureaucracy across countless lifetimes?