Religious Discussion
28 July 2026 09:50
This is similar to the corporal punishments in the Torah, they were difficult to apply due to the various conditions they had to meet.
It's almost as if it were an indirect way of saying "avoid it".
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Religious Discussion
28 July 2026 07:07
Islamic Hudud punishments were very rarely carried out. I remember reading its only a handful in numbers.
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Religious Discussion
28 July 2026 06:43
Funny how that works
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Religious Discussion
28 July 2026 06:43
This is only semi related but the US uses the death penalty in a way that looks kind and absolves the guilt of the executioner thereby but the kindest thing you could do is firing squad which no one wants to do
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Religious Discussion
28 July 2026 06:39
I agree and share your concern. Islam reserves the death penalty as the ultimate punishment to show that the crime done is serious and deserves a fitting response. However, carrying out the death penalty has always been discouraged in Islam.
This isn’t a contradiction, it’s by design. The evidentiary bar to actually convict someone is set deliberately high, and judges are instructed to look for any legitimate way to acquit before reaching for the harshest sentence. The Prophet himself modelled this, turning a man away multiple times when he came to confess, rather than rushing to punish. The severity of the penalty tells you how seriously the crime is regarded. The reluctance to apply it tells you how seriously the law takes getting it right. Both exist for a reason, and neither one cancels the other.
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Religious Discussion
28 July 2026 06:33
In life we can improve conditions, we can make punishment more humane, we can absolve those who were wrongfully convicted. In death, you cannot. It is an ultimate and irrevocable punishment.
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Religious Discussion
28 July 2026 06:25
Mourning doesn’t need punishment. Nobody said it did.
But “death for death’s sake” skips the real question, which is proportion. If murder gets roughly the same response as a much smaller crime, what does that say about the life that was lost?
Real question for you: is a 20-year sentence vengeance too? Same thing, state deliberately hurting one person for a long time. If that’s justice and this isn’t, what’s the actual line? Or is it just “whatever severity I’m personally okay with”?
And check Posts 2 and 3 if you haven’t. Prison isn’t the gentle option everyone assumes. It’s brutal too, just stretched out. So “mourn without killing” quietly assumes prison is mercy. It’s not.
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Religious Discussion
28 July 2026 05:52
Added this to the post:
“The hudūd honour the victim the same way. Even in offences where no single person stands in court demanding justice, the law refuses to treat what happened as small. Theft still takes something real from someone. Public disorder still leaves people less safe. The hudūd exist to say, on their behalf, that this mattered — that no harm gets waved through simply because the person it happened to isn’t in the room to ask for justice themselves.”
Every 9/11 anniversary, families read the names of all 2,983 victims aloud, one by one, at Ground Zero. War memorials do the same for fallen soldiers. Even after death, we don’t treat a name as done. we keep saying it, keep marking the loss as real. That’s honouring the dead. That’s exactly what Qisas and the Hudud do too, they honour what was taken, permanently, even when the person can’t ask for it themselves.
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Religious Discussion
28 July 2026 04:53
capital punishment does nothing for the victim.
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Religious Discussion
28 July 2026 01:30
Emily has been banned! Reason: CAS ban.
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Religious Discussion
27 July 2026 22:22
⬜️⬛️
|| THE HUDUD FILES ||
A multi-part series examining Islamic criminal law, Western criminology, and the philosophy of punishment — and asking whether the West’s answer to justice actually holds up.
(9) The Person the Debate ForgetsAsk someone why they oppose severe punishment, and they will tell you, almost without fail, about the offender.
His dignity. His right to a future. His capacity, however unlikely, to change.
Fair enough. These aren’t small concerns, and no serious argument for proportionate punishment should wave them away. A society that stops caring about the humanity of its worst people has lost something real.
But ask yourself a harder question: who has quietly gone missing from this conversation?
The victim.
Not mentioned. Not centred. Barely present at all — reduced, at best, to a case number that justifies why the offender is in the room to begin with. Somewhere along the way, the entire architecture of the punishment debate rebuilt itself around the person who did the harm, and the person who suffered it simply disappeared from view.
In qiṣāṣ — equal legal retaliation for crimes against a person — the right to pursue justice belongs to the
walī al-dam: the victim or their family, not a distant state speaking on their behalf as if they weren’t in the room. The Qurʾān’s justification for this makes no reference to the offender’s wickedness at all:
“In the law of retaliation there is saving of life to you, O you men of understanding” (
Sūrat al-Baqarah, 2:179). The weight of the ruling rests entirely on what protecting life actually requires.
That same family holds, at the very same moment, the right to forgive completely — an act the Qurʾān calls expiation for them. No one is forced into anything. The option that exists is matched to what was taken, because what was taken was real, serious, and gone forever. The victim decides. The victim is heard. The victim is never spoken over on their own behalf.
Here is an assumption worth pausing on, one rarely said out loud because saying it out loud exposes how strange it is: that answering the gravest possible harm with the same tools used for minor ones is somehow the more civilised choice. That taking a life seriously enough to answer it seriously is indecent, while treating it the same as a lesser offence is compassion. Look closely at that trade. If every serious crime gets roughly the same institutional response no matter what was done, someone has already decided, quietly, that what the victim lost wasn’t worth a different answer.
Philosopher Edward Feser makes the same point from a different tradition: to punish proportionately is not cruelty toward the offender — it is the only way to take seriously what he actually did, which means taking seriously the person he did it to.¹⁴ Immanuel Kant, a philosopher abolitionists invoke constantly in the name of dignity, argued the opposite of what is argued in his name today: that punishing someone exactly as their crime deserves is what treats them as a rational adult, not an animal to be managed.¹⁵ Walter Berns went further, arguing that severe punishment protects something larger than the individual case — the moral seriousness of the law itself.¹⁶
The abolition debate has spent decades perfecting the question of what the offender deserves. It is worth asking, just as honestly, what the victim’s life demanded — and why that question is so easy to set down.
References:
¹⁴ Edward Feser & Joseph Bessette,
By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed¹⁵ Ibid.
¹⁶ Walter Berns,
For Capital Punishment: Crime and the Morality of the Death Penalty🔜 Up next:
The series finale — pulling every thread together1 •
2 •
3 •
4 •
5a •
5b •
6 •
7 •
8 •
9———————————————
Tags: #Hudud #Law #Shariah
Note: Wisdom is what a believer is after; quoting books and people doesn’t necessarily mean agreeing with everything they say.
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Religious Discussion
26 July 2026 15:56
what do you want to learn?
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Religious Discussion
26 July 2026 15:38
Hi, I’m a Taoist, looking to learn
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Religious Discussion
25 July 2026 17:06
Are you suggesting the idea of individualistic society?
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Religious Discussion
25 July 2026 16:34
If they think, it is their right to kill a fetus because they have right on their body. How will they sacrifice to preserve for other human beings.
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