Demystifying Shariah by Sumbul Ali-Karamali

Author:Sumbul Ali-Karamali [Ali-Karamali, Sumbul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

THE SCARY STUFF

Punishments

APOSTASY IS JUST one of the Islamic punishments to achieve notoriety in the West today. By the time I was thirteen, my classmates in California public schools somehow knew that Muslims chopped the hands off of thieves, though they knew no Muslims except me, and I didn’t chop off any hands. This, as well as other stereotypes, was confirmed by television and films, not least Disney’s Aladdin, which nearly suffered Princess Jasmine to lose her hand to a merchant’s knife, added racism to its lyrics (describing Arabia as a “barbaric” place where they routinely cut off ears) and to its characters (giving the good ones American accents with fair skin and small noses and giving the villains dark skin and big hooked noses).

Under shariah, no one would ever have sanctioned the merchant’s amputation of Jasmine’s hand for theft. Where was her requisite trial? Where did they evaluate whether amputation as a penalty applied to the theft (it didn’t) or whether she’d made a mistake (she had) or whether she had stolen from hunger (she had indeed), thus rendering amputation inapplicable and even conviction unlikely? Shariah has never ever given license to anyone, much less fruit-stand merchants, to take the law into their own hands.

Shariah rules on offenses and punishments form a tiny part of shariah—only about 2 percent of any jurisprudential text.1 Such rules were designed to limit the violence of the time and deter reprehensible conduct.

Harsh punishments were the norm in premodern times, before police forces existed. Death by stoning constitutes most of the penalties for violating the Ten Commandments.2 Until the nineteenth century, English common law punished hundreds of crimes, even misdemeanors, with death.3

Harsh punishments everywhere were meant as deterrents, because the chances of being caught committing a crime were low. In some cases, these punishments were homiletic, demonstrating the moral severity of an offense but not necessarily intended to be implemented.

In Islamic lands, the chances of being caught were low, not only because of a lack of police and other enforcement agencies but also because of shariah itself. Shariah prohibits “searching out transgressions (tajassus)” and requires “turning a blind eye to private misconduct (satr).”4 Therefore, you couldn’t spy on someone in order to catch them at a crime. And, even if you knew someone who drank alcohol in the privacy of his house, you weren’t allowed to burst in on him to prove it. (Yes! A prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures!)

One of Muhammad’s companions, Umar, later the second caliph, stars in a famous story illustrating these principles. Walking in Medina one evening, Umar heard raucous noises emanating from one of the houses. He climbed over the wall of the house and found inside a man not only drinking wine but cavorting with a woman who was not his wife. Umar accused the man of sinning, and the man retorted that, whereas he himself may have indeed sinned, Umar had committed three Qur’anic sins: seeking out faults in others (49:12), climbing over the wall of the house (2:189), and entering a home without permission (24:27).

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