272 crime and punishment: The Islamic World iscretionary punishments with little regard to sharia, often d under the pretext of following the dictates of political expediency Beginning in the 12th century jurists tried to assimilate the concept of political expediency into the framework of sharia Late medieval jurists such as the Syrian Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), developed the influential doctrine of “governance in accordance with sharia.” In the long run, however, this doctrine tended to further subordinate Islamic judges to the executive power of the temporal authorities Documents of investiture for the office of the Islamic judge from the ninth to the 15th centuries tend to be silent with regard to the divinely ordained punishments, let alone the discretionary punishments Only with the full development of the doctrine of political expediency under the Ottoman Empire (13th–20th centuries) were Islamic judges reintegrated into the administration of penal justice From early on there was a dual regime of religious and temporal criminal justice The institution known as the Court of Grievances was originally instituted under the caliph alMahdi (r 775–785) According to al-Mawardi, the major medieval theorist of Islamic public law, this court possessed the authority to investigate crimes ex officio, in addition to relying on rules of evidence somewhat more lax than those of the Islamic judge’s court However, the Court of Grievances seems to have functioned as a criminal court only in cases that aroused great public interest, such as when the popular mystical preacher al-Hallaj was sentenced to death by crucifixion in 922 in Baghdad In the day-to-day prosecution of crime, the urban police and the market inspector played a more important role Between the 11th and 13th centuries in Baghdad the chief of police was a powerful political player, second in importance only to the vizier The police punished crime according to both the principles of political expediency and sharia The brigandage verse in the Koran was conveniently exploited for the persecution of all sorts of offenders The police were aided by the market inspector, who was set to watch over public morals and commercial fraud Market inspectors are mentioned in the chronicles as having publicly rebuked, flogged, or ignominiously paraded trespassers against norms of public behavior Types of punishment in medieval Islam included executions, corporal punishments, shame punishments, banishment, imprisonment, and fining The form of execution most frequently mentioned in the chronicles is crucifixion, a practice that comes closer to hanging than to the Romanstyle nailing on a cross However, execution by the sword may have been just as common or even more widespread Other forms of execution, rarely mentioned in the sources, included stoning, throwing from towers (a punishment applied to sodomites), strangling (of high-ranking members of the military or administrators), burning (mostly of heretics), drowning (of ill-reputed women), and trampling by elephants (especially in the East) Corporal punishments included flogging with whips, switches, or crops; beating of the soles of the feet was common under the Ottomans Except in cases of retaliation, a strong reticence to mutilate bodies appears to have prevailed through much of Islamic history Ignominious parades on donkeys, camels, or oxen were common sights throughout the Islamic Middle Ages Offenders were led through the city, their faces blackened with smut or embers, sitting backward, while their crimes were called out to the public Other forms of shame punishment included the privation of the right to act as witness, a coveted position of honor The stipulation in the Koran that certain criminals “shall be banished from the land” was taken to refer to both banishment and imprisonment, since prisons were thought to be a kind of netherworld of almost eschatological proportions Little is known about what popular prisons looked like, but conditions in the great prison in the Cairo citadel (Mamluk Period, 1250–1517) seem to have been miserable, with prisoners starving to death if unaided by their families Pecuniary punishments, though disputed by the jurists, were a common form of discretionary punishment The outstanding feature of the administration of penal justice in medieval Islam would seem to be the divorce of legal theory from penal practice Soon after the decline of charismatic religious leadership in early Islam (ca 622–720) the prosecution of crimes was usurped by the temporal authorities (ninth–11th centuries) However, concurrent with the development of Islamic legal doctrine, the jurists managed to reclaim a measure of influence in criminal law by defending the inviolability of the human body as well as that of the private sphere of Muslim households and by bringing the concept of political expediency back into the fold of sharia (especially from the 14th century on) Thus, debates about the extent to which the prosecution of crime in medieval Islam lay outside the realm of religious law must take into account specific historical and doctrinal contexts The study of the history of Islamic criminal law is still in its infancy, despite some progress in recent years, especially with regard to the Ottoman Period, for which court registers are available See also alchemy and magic; 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