The islAmic World by CHristian langE The Islamic polity was born when the prophet Muhammad emigrated from his hometown Mecca in modern-day Saudi-Arabia to Medina in 622 c.e.. Until his d
Trang 1bodies were broken with sledgehammers on a wheel, or they
were drawn and quartered—stretched and torn apart by
horses In the Inquisition courts of the church, heretics were
bound over to the civic authorities for a public burning
In England the Star Chamber was instituted by the
Tu-dor kings to hear cases on appeal; its decisions superceded the
findings of common-law courts The Star Chamber held public
trials and, as a branch of the royal government, was supposed
to provide a fair hearing and avoid the petty rivalries and
cor-ruptions of local courts It dealt with fraud, bribery, property
crimes, public disorders and, after the Church of England was
established, obedience to the doctrines of the church The Star
Chamber could order fines, time spent in the stocks,
whip-pings, brandings, and mutilations but never execution
The islAmic World
by CHristian langE
The Islamic polity was born when the prophet Muhammad
emigrated from his hometown Mecca (in modern-day
Saudi-Arabia) to Medina in 622 c.e Until his death in 632
Muham-mad laid the foundations of the Islamic political and legal order,
including rules governing the prosecution of crime and the
ad-ministration of punishment The greatest danger to the urban
settlements of seventh-century Arabia resulted from bands of
nomads attacking caravans on the ancient trade routes
con-necting southern Arabia with Greater Syria This is reflected in
the “brigandage verse” in the Koran, which stipulates that “the
reward of those who make war upon God and His Messenger
and strive after corruption in the land is that they be killed or
crucified, or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides,
or that they be banished from the land.” Until the end of the
Umayyad Dynasty in 750, marauding Arab nomads, among
them the infamous brigand-poets (saaliq), continued to
chal-lenge the central authority of the caliphate
With the rise of the Abbasids (749–1258) and the
develop-ment of Islamic urban society from Spain to India, urban
crimi-nality appears on the horizon of Islamic criminal history In the
towns of Syria, Iraq, and Persia local militia, created originally
around the 10th century to protect the city’s neighborhoods
against abuses by the agents of the repressive state apparatus,
developed into gangs of common thieves and ruffians A
dif-ferent class of urban criminals was that of the so-called Clan
of Sasan (Banu Sasan), the blanket designation in medieval
Islamic literature for the practitioners of begging, swindling,
confidence tricks, displaying disfiguring diseases and mutilated
limbs, and other offenses Crime and criminals were never
ab-sent in Islamic history, even though periods of peace,
prosper-ity, and security may have helped to curb criminal activity
No criminal codes existed in Islam before the 15th
cen-tury In theory criminal law was developed by the jurists of
Islam, who devoted special attention to offenses mentioned in the corpus of Islam’s sacred texts (the Koran and the Sunna, the collected reports from the prophet Muhammad) In ac-cordance with the law of Islam (sharia) jurists classified pun-ishments for offenses that touched on public interests as the
“rights of God.” This concept implied that once a procedure was initiated, neither the victim nor the judicial authorities could pardon the defendant In addition to brigandage the Koran stipulates that four offenses are punishable as rights of God: theft, fornication, unfounded accusation of fornication, and consumption of alcoholic drinks The punishments pre-scribed for these offenses, known as divinely ordained punish-ments, are amputation of the right hand for theft, 100 lashes or stoning for fornication, 80 lashes for unfounded accusation of fornication, and 80 or 40 lashes for alcohol consumption The typical punishment for apostates—those who renounce Islam publicly by words or by conduct—is execution
This rather grim picture needs to be qualified in impor-tant respects The divinely ordained punishments tend to
be defined narrowly (with the exception of brigandage) and underlie strict rules of evidence For example, four eyewit-nesses are required in cases of alleged fornication In addi-tion, the accused has ample opportunity to use legal doubt as
a defense, because according to a widely circulated saying of the prophet Muhammad, the divinely ordained punishments are to be averted on the strength of doubt Thus, as jurists conceive it, the purpose of a divinely ordained punishment
is to serve as a threat and deterrence rather than an actual prosecution of a crime The Koran regulates murder and cor-poral injury only insofar as the victim’s immediate relatives are given a right to seek retaliation in the court of the Islamic judge, in the form of either “an eye for an eye” (talionic, or re-taliatory, punishment) or monetary recompense Complaints must be brought forth by the victim’s party because talionic punishments are considered the rights of men
The majority of offenses, however, are not specified in either the Koran or the Sunna They fall under a third, re-sidual category of punishment—that of discretionary pun-ishment Legal discussions of discretionary punishment contain little systematic reflection However, a lot of atten-tion is given to the issue of slander and calumny, which re-flects Islamic law’s prohibition of exhibitionism and effort
to protect personal honor The Syrian al-Kasani (d 1189) proposed an influential fourfold classification of discretion-ary punishment, the more “honorable” the offender, the less harsh the punishment (in descending order: jurists and de-scendants of the Prophet, landowners and military leaders, merchants, and commoners)
According to legal theory, discretionary punishment was the domain of the Islamic judge, but the repressive state organs appear to have adjudicated and implemented crime and punishment: The Islamic World 21