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crime and punishment: The Islamic World 271 bodies 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a public burning In England the Star Chamber was instituted by the Tudor kings to hear cases on appeal; its decisions superceded the findings of common-law courts The Star Chamber held public trials and, as a branch of the royal government, was supposed to provide a fair hearing and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 corruptions 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, whippings, 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 SaudiArabia) to Medina in 622 c.e Until his death in 632 Muhammad laid the foundations of the Islamic political and legal order, including rules governing the prosecution of crime and the administration 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 connecting 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 challenge the central authority of the caliphate With the rise of the Abbasids (749–1258) and the development of Islamic urban society from Spain to India, urban criminality 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 different 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 absent in Islamic history, even though periods of peace, prosperity, and security may have helped to curb criminal activity No criminal codes existed in Islam before the 15th century 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 accordance with the law of Islam (sharia) jurists classified punishments 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 prescribed for these offenses, known as divinely ordained punishments, 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 important respects The divinely ordained punishments tend to be defined narrowly (with the exception of brigandage) and underlie strict rules of evidence For example, four eyewitnesses are required in cases of alleged fornication In addition, 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 corporal 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 retaliatory, 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, residual category of punishment—that of discretionary punishment Legal discussions of discretionary punishment contain little systematic reflection However, a lot of attention is given to the issue of slander and calumny, which reflects Islamic law’s prohibition of exhibitionism and effort to protect personal honor The Syrian al-Kasani (d 1189) proposed an influential fourfold classification of discretionary punishment, the more “honorable” the offender, the less harsh the punishment (in descending order: jurists and descendants 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
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