Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2007, pages 57-58

Muslim-American Activism

The Death Penalty in The Islamic Legal Tradition

THIS YEAR THE World Day Against the Death Penalty fell during the Islamic Holy month of Ramadan. Acknowledging this, Amnesty International USA’s Program to Abolish the Death Penalty and the Government Relations Program hosted an Iftar and lecture on the death penalty in classical Islamic legal tradition—the shariah. In his opening remarks Zahir Janmohamed, advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa, described the event as a “discussion of the death penalty in modern Islamic societies, focusing on the origins and evolution of the concept of clemency and the trend of some Muslim nations to pardon prisoners during the month of Ramadan.”

Najam Haider, adjunct professor in Islamic Studies in the Theology Department at Georgetown University, provided an overview of the three types of crimes in Islamic law: huddud crimes committed against the “rights of God”; qisas crimes against individuals, including homicide or assault; and ta’azir crimes committed against public security, with punishment largely at the discretion of the judge or a legislature. “If a crime is of a type one or two, the evidence burden is high,” explained Haider. “However the evidence burden is not as high for the type three crimes, and it is believed in Islamic classical tradition that those crimes of ta’azir are not punishable by the death penalty.”

In Islamic states such as Iran and Saudi Arabia individuals who commit ta’azir crimes may be sentenced to death, however. Haider said this is because of the states’ own interpretation of a single Qur’anic verse: “The only reward of those who make war upon Allah and His messenger and strive after corruption in the land will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land. Such will be their degradation in the world, and in the Hereafter theirs will be an awful doom” (5:33).

“When Islamic political organizations come to power,” the professor said, “most times the number one agenda item is addressing the criminal system.

“Saudi Arabians use their own definition of ”˜strive after corruption in the land’ to empower themselves to go outside of the definitions of the three typologies,” Haider noted. “Iran adheres to the same principle to execute ”˜armed uprising against public peace.’ This presents a dilemma in the modern period with the ways Islamic classical tradition are interpreted.”

Haider currently is completing his doctoral dissertation at Princeton University on the origins of Islamic sectarianism. A Fulbright Scholar in Damascus, Syria in 1997-’98, he went on to earn a master’s degree in Islamic Historiography from Oxford University in 2001.

—Marwa Rifhahie