Stoning in Islam

In Islam, stoning (Arabic: رجم, romanized: rajm) is the Hudud punishment wherein an organized group throws stones at a convicted individual until that person dies. Under some versions of Islamic law (Sharia), it is the prescribed punishment in cases of Zina committed by a married person which requires either a confession from either the adulterer or adulteress, or producing four witnesses of sexual penetration. The punishment of stoning as a capital punishment for adultery is unique in Islamic law in that it conflicts with the Qur'anic prescription for premarital and extramarital sex (zina) found in Surah An-Nur, 2: "The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication - flog each of them with a hundred stripes". For this reason some minority Muslim sects such as the former Kharijites, and Islamic modernists such as the Quranists disagree with the legality of stoning. However, stoning is mentioned in multiple hadiths (reports claiming to quote what Muhammad said verbatim on various matters, which most Muslims and Islamic scholars consider an authoritative source second only to Quran as a source of religious law and rulings), and therefore most schools of Islamic jurisprudence accept it as a prescribed punishment for adultery. The punishment has been rarely applied in the history of Islam owing to the very strict evidential requirements stipulated by Islamic law.

Practice

Legal imposition of the stoning punishment was very rare in Islamic history. During the 623-year history of the Ottoman Empire, for which there are voluminous court records, there is only one recorded example of a judge sentencing a convict to death by stoning, and the ruling contravened Islamic law on at least two grounds (sufficient evidence was not produced, and a Jewish man was sentenced to death despite the law stating clearly that the death penalty for illegal sex should only be applied to Muslims). No sentences of stoning have been recorded in Syria during Muslim rule. In Ottoman Istanbul, only one instance of stoning ever took place, according to Ottoman records. Muslim jurists used a number of techniques to avoid application of the stoning penalty. They interpreted the evidentiary requirements so strictly that it was effectively impossible to prove the offense. They actively encouraged witnesses to withhold testimony, and argued that it was morally better to do so. They defined the offense narrowly to exclude many types of sexual activity. And they developed the legal concept of shubha (doubt), which held that when an illegal sexual act resembled legal sex in some way, the stoning penalty should not be applied. Techniques used to argue that the pregnancy of a single woman should not be considered evidence of zināʿ included fantastic presumptions about the length of the human gestation period. Classical Hanafite jurists ruled that it could last for up to two years, Shafi'ites four, and Malikites as long as five years. According to journalist Max Rodenbeck,

In almost all cases where it has been applied in recent years, stoning has taken place in tribal or rebel areas beyond the control of central governments—the Taliban in Afghanistan, ISIS in Iraq, and Boko Haram in Nigeria being cases in point. Out of the world’s forty-nine Muslim-majority states, six retain the punishment in deference to Islamic legal tradition, ... Of these countries only Iran, which officially placed a moratorium on stoning in 2002 but still gives leeway to individual judges, has actually carried it out. Saudi Arabia sentenced four people by stoning between the 1980 and 1992. As of 2005, stoning punishments have been considered or handed down in Nigeria and Somalia for the crimes of adultery and sodomy (homosexuality). Since the Sharia legal system was introduced in northern Nigeria in 2000, more than a dozen Muslims have been sentenced to death by stoning. In one case, an appellate court in the state of Sokoto overturned a stoning sentence on the basis that divorced defendant might not have conceived her child in zina (fornication) because she may have been carrying her baby for as long as five years. Another Nigerian state court of appeal assessed the upper limit of gestation at seven years. In Pakistan "more than three decades of official Islamization have so far failed to produce a single actual stoning..." Iran officially placed a moratorium on stoning in 2002 but still gives leeway to individual judges to sentence stoning. Sentences of stoning have generated heavy backlash by human rights groups, which consider stoning a form of execution by torture. From July 2014 to February 2015, at least 16 people of whom nine were executed (not all by rajm) by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Syria for the crimes of adultery or homosexuality, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Scriptural basis

Quran Stoning is not mentioned as a form of capital punishment in the canonical text of the Quran.

Hadith

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