The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

punishment

Punishment in an Islamic context is a crucial element within the larger notion of God’s justice (‘adl). For justice to prevail, evil must be punished just as good must be rewarded, both in this world and in the afterlife. God judges humankind on the Day of the Resurrection, while judges and rulers dispense punishments on Earth. Muslim conceptions of political leadership stress the leader’s responsibility to maintain justice and uphold the law, which entails actively punishing wrongdoing. God’s punishment of a disobedient life is internment in hell.

Even in the Qur’an, hell has many names, and later it was frequently described as having seven levels, reminiscent of the Inferno of Dante, who indeed cribbed his vision of hell from Islamic sources. Muslims who died with unrepented mortal sins (kabā’ir) spent a terminal period in hell before ascending to paradise; others became eternal denizens. Punishment in hell was imagined first as environmental. Hell was a vast, volcanic landscape full of fetid winds, acid rain, and burning brimstone. The hellbound were subjected to these conditions and harassed by serpents and scorpions. Hell was also a prison and torture chamber. Hell’s wardens were gruesome angels (zabāniya) who busied themselves meting out punishments particular to the various sins of the damned.

In Islamic law, punishments can be divided into three separate categories: crimes with fixed penalties (ḥudūd), retaliation (qiṣāṣ), and discretionary punishment (ta‘zīr). Crimes with fixed penalties are murder (qatl), theft (sariqa), brigandage or highway robbery (ḥirāba or qaṭ‘ al-ṭarīq), adultery and fornication (zinā), false accusation of adultery (qadhf), drinking wine (shurb al-khamr), and apostasy (irtidād or ridda). The punishments for these crimes are stipulated in the Qur’an or the sunna, and they are thus nonnegotiable and fixed, even though there are various positions on precisely what the punishments should be. Reciprocal retaliation (qiṣāṣ) for murder or injury is allowed, at least in principle, by Islamic law. However, the case of bodily injury even up to death is often treated as a tort, where the victim or the victim’s family receives a settlement (diya) from the perpetrator. Discretionary punishment covers all other kinds of crimes and torts. A judge adjudicates between the claimants and renders a judgment at his discretion; these punishments may include admonition, fines, public humiliation, incarceration, flogging, or even the death penalty.

Muslim legal theorists did not advance a distinct theory of penology, the study of crime and punishment, explicitly. The desirability of restitution and retribution certainly was prominent, given that achieving justice was the goal of punishment. However, deterrence can also be found mentioned alongside as a positive result of punishment, thought of as a contribution to social order. Rehabilitation of a criminal through punishment, while occasionally mentioned, was not a prominent dimension of Muslim legal thinkers’ views on punishment.