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Islamic criminal jurisprudence


Islamic criminal law (Arabic: فقه العقوبات‎‎) is criminal law in accordance with Sharia. Strictly speaking, Islamic law does not have a distinct corpus of "criminal law." It divides crimes into three different categories depending on the offense – Hudud (crimes "against God", whose punishment is fixed in the Quran and the Hadiths); Qisas (crimes against an individual or family whose punishment is equal retaliation in the Quran and the Hadiths); and Tazir (crimes whose punishment is not specified in the Quran and the Hadiths, and is left to the discretion of the ruler or Qadi, i.e. judge). Some add the fourth category of Siyasah (crimes against government), while others consider it as part of either Hadd or Tazir crimes.

Sharia courts, unlike other legal systems in the world, do not use jury or prosecutors on the behalf of society. Crimes against God are prosecuted by the state as hudud crimes, and all other criminal matters, including murder and bodily injury, are treated as disputes between individuals with an Islamic judge deciding the outcome based on sharia fiqh such as Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali and Jafari followed in the Islamic jurisdiction.

Hudud, meaning "limits", includes crimes specified in the Quran, considered crimes against God. These are:

The Shafi'i school of Islamic jurisprudence does not include highway robbery. The Hanafi school does not include rebellion and heresy.

Except for drinking alcohol, punishments for all other hudud crimes are specified in the Quran or Hadith to be amputation, flogging and beheading

The punishment for stealing is the amputation of the hand (Quran 5:38). This practice is still used today in countries like Iran,Saudi Arabia, and Northern Nigeria. In Iran, amputation as punishment was described as "uncommon" in 2010, but in 2014 there were three sentences of hand amputation, and one of eye gouging in 2015. Fingers, but not the complete hand, were amputated as punishment four times in 2012-13.


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