How does the application of Sharia law and executions by stoning affect relations between the countries concerned and the EU? Parliamentary questions. Subject: Stoning as a consequence of Sharia law. Answer in writing. Is there coordinated action at EU level against stoning? Those able to escape the hole during stoning can be freed, according to Islamic law, a feat that is much more difficult for women than for men because so much more of their body is covered during lapidation.
The law specifies the size of the stones in Sharia Law in Iran to ensure the execution does not take too long or occur too quickly. When Iranian officials have faced substantial public outcry over a stoning sentence, as was the case in the case of Makarrameh Ebrahimi in , they have freed accused adulterers, according to the Human Rights Watch. The use of stoning as a method of execution finds its roots in ancient Greece and in Judeo-Christian religious texts, and has been used to punish those accused of adultery, prostitution, murder, and blasphemy.
It is referenced in the Torah and Old Testament, but has no explicit mention in the Quran. As we all recall, OJ was found innocent in his criminal trial but liable i.
How could this be if the two trials were, in effect, for the same act? Did he commit murder or not? The two trials produced two different results because of different standards for meeting the burden of proof.
In civil cases in the US, the jury only has to conclude that the preponderance of evidence indicates that the person is guilty i. Civil wrongs are punished by compensation.
Criminal wrongs are punishable by incarceration or corporal or even capital punishment. In the West, the notion that judges or juries should exercise extra caution in finding someone guilty of a crime comes from canon law the law of the Catholic Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as does the notion of innocent until proven guilty.
Just as in modern human rights, these rights are not absolute. They can be infringed upon with just cause. But they belong to all human beings regardless of whether they are Muslims or not. If someone breaks your toe, smashes into your car or reneges on a contract they made with you, they owe you compensation because they have violated your rights.
Along the same lines, according to the rights of human beings in the Shariah , if someone steals your phone from you, they owe you either the return of your phone or its replacement value. If someone kills your family member accidentally, then your family is owed the compensation value as specified in the Qur'an and the Sunna. What are the Hudud?
The concept of hudud in Islamic criminal law is not found in the Qur'an, though it is referred to in hadiths considered authentic by Muslims. But nowhere does the phrase appear in the clear context of labeling certain crimes see Qur'an, , , , , though is followed by a discussion of sexual impropriety. As the famous scholar Ibn Taymiyya d. What is in common among the hudud crimes is that their punishments are specified in the Qur'an or Sunna and that they are considered to be violations of the rights of God.
The scriptural commands that specify these hudud punishments are, in summary:. The hudud do not cover what most legal systems would consider the most serious part of criminal law: murder. But this does fall within what we can term Islamic criminal law. These were violations of the rights of people, but they also touched on the realm of public order and violence, which was the territory of the ruler. God, on the other hand, is not actually harmed by violations of His rights.
Only an adult Muslim of sound mind and who is aware that one of the hudud acts has been prohibited by God and still intentionally engages in it is even theoretically liable for the punishment. The central principle in the application of the hudud punishments is maximizing mercy. For it is better for the authority to err in mercy than to err in punishment.
In other words, they inherited a regime of severe punishments and maybe they thought they needed to find some way out of applying them. But neither of these theories could be correct. The establishment of a harsh regime of punishments alongside a nearly unreachable standard of proof occurs together within the Qur'an itself. The Qur'an ordains that those who commit adultery should be lashed times, but just one verse later it states that anyone who accuses someone of adultery without four witnesses to the act is punished with 80 lashes for slander.
A significant number were added in the hadiths. Anything less cannot be punished by the hudud. Normally in the Shariah such miraculous or fantastic claims would carry no weight in legal matters. But as possible ambiguities to prevent application of the hudud , they were accepted. This immense allowance for ambiguities in ruling on sexual offenses can be seen most clearly in the Hanafi school of law, which was the official school of the Ottoman Empire. Sariqa is only a very specific kind of theft.
First, hadiths specify that a thief would only have their hand cut off stealing something over a certain value. This system of making it virtually impossible to implement the hudud punishments through ambiguities characterized the hudud crimes of intoxication and, to a lesser extent, sexual slander as well. Someone who smells of alcohol would not be liable for the hudud punishment.
Even someone who was seen drunk and vomiting up wine was not subject to the hudud punishment according to most Muslim jurists because he could have drunk the wine accidentally. Off the Hook? How Non- Hudud Crimes were Punished. Of course, just because an ambiguity was found to avoid the hudud punishment, this did not mean that the alleged wrongdoer was off the hook.
Rather, their offense simply dropped from the upper echelon of violations of the rights of God to the violations of the rights of human beings. So a thief who had been caught red-handed by two, upstanding witnesses the standard evidentiary bar for crimes stealing a bar of gold from a safe deposit box could avoid the hudud punishment by simply denying he had done it.
He would not have his hand cut off. A judge or governor could also draw on his authority to maintain public order to punish offenses that fell below the threshold of hudud. For example, someone who stank of wine and was obviously drunk might not be punished at the level of hudud , but he could still be punished below that level.
But they were still liable for the punishments for homicide and non- hudud theft. The escape hatch was more often provided by the nearly endless list of ambiguities that the judge saw as his duty to explore. The analogy of American criminal versus civil law is still useful since it helps us understand how the accused could be found innocent of an act in one category of law by its standard of evidence and simultaneously found guilty of the same act in another category of law.
In the Shafi school of law, for example, someone could be convicted of non- hudud theft based on the testimony of one man and two women. And in the Hanbali school slaves could testify in non- hudud cases. Discretionary punishment was historically the primary category of punishment in the Shariah. Lashing, the bastinado smacking the soles of the feet with a cane and, to a lesser extent, incarceration, have been the main methods of punishment.
This was simple in the case of sexual indiscretion or intoxication, for which the hudud crime had a fixed number of lashes. Theft was a different matter. Petty theft was generally handled by lashing or short jail time, while repeat offenders could be sent to prisons for thieves see for more on the types of punishments used in Islamic civilization. One of the most important features of how the hudud crimes were conceptualized in the Sunna and by later jurists was the central role of avoiding tajassus seeking out offenses done in private and providing satr finding excuses for, or turning a blind eye to, private misconduct.
The Companions understood this as key to legal procedure. But if he does something openly before us, we would hold him responsible for that. When he confronted the man, he replied that, while he was indeed committing a sin, Umar had committed three: he had violated the Qur'anic commands against seeking out faults in others , climbing over the walls of houses and entering homes without permission Umar admitted his fault and left.
As with other areas of Islamic criminal law, the application of the hudud ultimately fell under the authority of the ruler or state. Historical Application of Hudud in Islamic Civilization. All indications are that the hudud punishments were very rarely carried out historically.
A Scottish doctor working in Aleppo in the mids observed that there were only six public executions in twenty years. Theft was rare, he observed, and when it occurred it was punished by bastinado.
A Muslim woman in India in the late s whose husband had died in battle was suddenly found to be pregnant and was accused of fornication.
She claimed that her husband had been miraculously brought back to life every Friday night, when he would visit her. The concept of non-invasiveness i. Wine drinking, fornication, prostitution, and homosexuality became widespread in medieval Islamic civilization. Yet Muslim scholars could do little more than complain about this. In the extreme west of the Islamic world, the chief judge of Fez in the early s was respected by everyone for his fairness and knowledge.
Instances in which thieves did have their hands cut off were shocking to local populations. The famous Moroccan scholar and traveler Ibn Battuta d. The judge fell from imperial favor and eventually died in exile. The best illustration of how seriously judges took the command to ward off the hudud as a religious duty is a near soap-opera level scandal from Mamluk Cairo in the year A magistrate from the Hanafi school of law had a gorgeous wife, who was lusted over by a Shafi magistrate. But a jealous neighbor who also was in love with the wife informed the husband, who immediately returned home, busted into his room and found the couple in his bed.
The Shafi magistrate pleaded with the fuming husband, offering him money not to disgrace him publically. So he asked for a ruling by a Shafi judge, who declared correctly that the couple should be stoned. The chief judge affirmed, and the Sultan, who had been acknowledged as overly zealous in punishment, was elated. But in the meantime, the couple retracted their confession.
Leading scholars wrote that the hudud punishment would have to be dropped. We must appreciate what took place in this episode: several leading scholars and judges of Mamluk Cairo accepted dismissal from their posts and exile rather than affirming the application of a hudud punishment.
Aside from the hudud , Muslim judges have historically generally been conservative about carrying out capital or severe corporal punishment.
For example, one of the few instances in which a judge can refuse to enforce the ruling of another court applying another school of law is if that other school has more severe rules on issues like requiring execution for murder.
Law in Pre-modern versus Modern Societies. Although it seems obvious and, indeed, essential to many today, the notion that a legal system should function as a routinized and efficiently ordered machine stripped of cultural fictions and traditions is fairly new. It is a product of legal reforms envisioned by modernists like the English philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham d.
Prior to the comprehensive legal reforms in American and British law from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, having laws on the books that were not intended to be applied was normal. How many college students are allowed to drink under the age of 21?
To quote the conservative legal scholar Robert George and also Paul of Tarsus , law is our teacher. It is not just a means of resolving disputes or maintaining order. It is a statement by authoritative voices within a society of how that society should be.
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