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Salam Dear brothers and sisters, I am new here and would like your help to refute the Sunni arguments. In the Internet the hate against the Shiites is meanwhile so large that we are only accused of doing everything wrong, I would like to meet this. Can you recommend me some good sites that refute the arguments of the Nasibis?

Salam, every one. I'm a Ph.D candidate in Architecture who is doing research and writing ISI Articles. Since I'm studying in Iran and I've always lived here, I'm not very good in writing article in English. Although we have learned English for many years but writing a scholarly article with out mistakes seems very difficult to me. I knew someone who helped me but he is not helping me anyone so I have been left with out help. Therefore, If anyone ( who is educated ) is willing to help me, please let me know. I can pay for the time you take or I can go to shrine pray for you (since I am living in Mashhad) or even both! Tanx a lot p.s: it is not necessary that you know Farsi. I write articles and you just correct the mistakes.

Questions on stoning and hand chopping in Islam? BY PAUL WILLIAMS on DECEMBER 12, 2016 • ( 9 ) A new MUST READ article by Jonathan Brown, an Associate Professor and Chair of Islamic Civilization at Georgetown University. Reblogged from the Yaqeen Institute Often the only things people in the West associate with Islam are stoning and hand chopping. These images permeate our culture, from the trailer of hits like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) to straight-to-cable pablum like Escape: Human Cargo (1998) (again, in the trailer… ‘If you can’t live by their rules, you might dieby them’). There is no better example of how our society has consistently and profoundly misunderstood Islam and its tradition of law, known as the Shariah. Stoning and hand chopping do feature in the Shariah, but their actual function can only be understood by stepping back and examining how the Shariah conceives of law overall. Only then can we make sense of its severest corporal and capital punishments, known as the Hudud (pronounced Hudood). The Idea of God’s Law The Shariah is not a law code, printed and bound in volumes. It’s the idea of God’s law. Like other broad legal concepts like ‘American law’ or ‘international law,’ the Shariah is a unified whole that contains within it tremendous diversity. Just as American law manifests itself as drastically different traffic laws or zoning codes in different states or locales, so too has the Shariah’s application varied greatly across the centuries while still remaining a coherent legal tradition. Like other broad legal concepts Shariah is a unified whole containing tremendous diversity.CLICK TO TWEET The Shariah is drawn from four sources. The first two are believed by Muslims to be revealed by God either directly or indirectly: 1) the revelation of the Quran (which itself, contrary to the claim of a prominent Trump supporter, contains relatively little legal material), and 2) the authoritative precedent of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, known as his Sunna (often communicated in reports about the Prophet’s ﷺ words and deeds, called Hadith). These two sources work in tandem. The Sunna is the lens through which the Quran is read, explaining and adding to it. The second two sources are the products of human effort to understand and channel the revelation of God through the Prophet: 3) the ways that the early Muslim community applied the Quran and the Sunna, and 4) the further extension of this tradition of legal reasoning by Muslim scholars in the centuries since. The human effort to mine these sources and construct concrete, applicable rules from the abstraction of the Shariah is known as fiqh. If Shariah is the idea and ideal of God’s law, then fiqh is its earthly – and thus its inevitably fallible and diverse – manifestation. If Shariah is the ideal of God’s law, then fiqh is its earthly-fallible and diverse–…CLICK TO TWEET There’s More to Law than Law and Order A great irony in the ubiquity of stoning and hand cutting in the popular imagination is that these punishments constitute a minuscule portion of the Shariah. The tradition of law in Islam is the Muslim effort to answer the question ‘What pleases God?’ in any particular situation. As such, unlike what we think of as law in modern states, the Shariah encompasses every sphere of human activity. Most of these areas would never see the inside of a courtroom in a Muslim state let alone in the West (though, oddly, obscure points in Islamic law do sometimes come up in cases on freedom of religion). If we were to look at a typical, comprehensive book of fiqh (well over a dozen volumes, usually), we’d find that the core subjects of the Shariah are the forms of worship in Islam, including prayer (and the rules of ritual purity needed to perform it), fasting, charity tithes, the pilgrimage to Mecca and hunting and slaughter of animals (about 4 volumes out of 12). Only then would we find recognizable areas of the law such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, contracts, property, liability, injuries, etc. Although they are seemingly the only thing most people know about the Shariah, in a typical book of fiqh less than 2% of the book is devoted to the Hudud crimes and their punishments. Stoning and hand cutting are punishments that constitute a minuscule portion of the Shariah.CLICK TO TWEETLess than 2% of a typical fiqh book is devoted to the most severe crimes and their punishments.CLICK TO TWEET Criminal Law in Islam & The West In order to understand Islamic criminal law, we have to make sure we understand what we mean by criminal law in the first place. Most areas of law in the US, Europe and elsewhere are civil law, meaning they deal with people’s rights over and obligations to each other. These include contracts, marriage, property, etc. The government might play a role in adjudicating disputes in these areas through the infrastructure of courts, but these are disputes between private parties over wrongs they do each other. Crimes are about wrongs done to the public, society or state as a whole, and in most modern states it is the government that acts to bring people who’ve committed them to justice. Of course, wrongs to individuals and wrongs to society can coincide. In old (like, veryold) English law, if a man murdered another man in the street, then two wrongs had been done. The murderer had wronged the victim’s family by killing him, and he had also wronged the king by violating his ‘peace’, or the overall order of his realm (hence our term ‘disturbing the peace’). The murderer was answerable to both aggrieved parties.[1] Centuries (and many, many legal turns) later, we find OJ Simpson on trial for two wrongs: one civil (for wrongful death and the damages this caused the victim’s family), and one criminal (murder) for which he was prosecuted by the state. As we all recall, OJ was found innocent in his criminal trial but liable (i.e., guilty) in his civil trial. How could this be if the two trials were, in effect, for the same act? Did he commit murder or not? The two trials produced two different results because of different standards for meeting the burden of proof. In civil cases in the US, the jury only has to conclude that the preponderance of evidence indicates that the person is guilty (i.e., over 50% likelihood), while in a criminal trial the jury must be convinced ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’[2]There are different burdens of proof because of the differences in punishments for civil and criminal wrongs. Civil wrongs are punished by compensation. Criminal wrongs are punishable by incarceration or corporal or even capital punishment. In the West, the notion that judges or juries should exercise extra caution in finding someone guilty of a crime comes from canon law (the law of the Catholic Church) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as does the notion of innocent until proven guilty.[3] The Shariah has remarkably similar features (actually, I think that Western canon law was influenced a great deal by Islamic law, just as Western philosophy and science were profoundly shaped by Muslim scholars in those fields from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries… but that’s another issue). Muslim jurists didn’t categorize law into civil and criminal law, but these labels are nonetheless useful in trying to understand the Hudud. The categories that Muslim jurists used were those of violations of the ‘rights of God’ (ḥuqūq Allāh) as opposed to violations of the ‘rights of God’s servants’, i.e. human beings (ḥuqūq al-ʿibād). The rights of human beings include the right to physical inviolability (in other words, one can’t be killed or harmed without just cause), the right to dignity, the right to property, the right to family, and the right to religion. Just as in modern human rights, these rights are not absolute. They can be infringed upon with just cause. But they belong to all human beings regardless of whether they are Muslims or not. If someone breaks your toe, smashes into your car or reneges on a contract they made with you, they owe you compensation because they have violated your rights. They owe this even if they didn’t intend any of these actions, since the damage was done and they were the cause. The same applies in American civil law (in both Islamic and American law, an exception would be if you smashed someone’s car because someone else threw you onto it, which was out of your control). Along the same lines, according to the rights of human beings in the Shariah, if someone steals your phone from you, they owe you either the return of your phone or its replacement value. If someone kills your family member accidentally, then your family is owed the compensation value as specified in the Quran and the Sunna. In such cases, as taught by the Prophet ﷺ, the job of the judge is to “ensure that all those with rights receive them.”[4] Violations of the ‘rights of God’ in the Shariah are an important counterpart to crimes in the Western legal tradition. Of course, the ultimate ‘right of God’ upon mankind, as explained by the Prophet ﷺ, is for God to be worshipped without partner, and this right extends to other acts of worship as well, like giving the Zakat charity.[5] But, unlike human beings, God is eminently beyond the capacity of any creature to harm. Also unlike human beings, God has “ordained upon Himself mercy” (Quran 6:54), and promised that His “mercy encompasses all things” (Quran 7:156). This element of God’s vast mercy plays a crucial role in the other rights of God that Muslim jurists have identified, namely the crimes known as the Hudud. What are the Hudud? The concept of Hudud in Islamic criminal law is not found in the Quran, though it is referred to in Hadiths considered authentic by Muslims.[6]Ḥudūd in Arabic is the plural of ḥadd, meaning limit or boundary. The Quran mentions the “limits of God” several times, warning Muslims of the sin of transgressing them and that they should not even approach them (Quran 2:187). But nowhere does the phrase appear in the clear context of labeling certain crimes (see Quran, 2:229, 4:14, 58:4, 65:1, though 4:14 is followed by discussion of sexual impropriety). As the famous scholar Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) noted, definitions for the categories of crimes (and their corresponding punishments) in Islamic law were the products of human reason and not scripture.[7] Early Muslim jurists probably inherited the concept of a category of crimes called Hudud from references to it made by the Prophet ﷺ and the early generations of Muslims. Muslim scholars have agreed that the Hudud include: adultery/fornication (zinā), consuming intoxicants (shurb al-khamr), accusing someone of fornication (qadhf), some types of theft (sariqa), and armed robbery or banditry (ḥirāba). Muslim schools of law have disagreed on whether three other crimes should be included as well: public apostasy (ridda), sodomy (liwāṭ) and assassination/premeditated murder for purposes of robbery (ghīla).[8] What is in common among the Hudud crimes is that their punishments are specified in the Quran or Sunna and that they are considered to be violations of the rights of God.[9] Of course, some of the Hudud are also violations of the rights of humans as well. Sariqa (the Hudud-level of theft, see below), qadhf (sexual slander) and ḥirāba (armed robbery, banditry) are obviously violations of people’s rights to life, property and/or dignity. The scriptural commands that specify these Hudud punishments are, in summary: Zinā: The Quran commands that men and women who engage in fornication be lashed 100 times (Quran 24:2), and Hadiths add that if the person is single and has never been married then they should also be exiled for a year.[10] The Hanafi school of law does not accept the additional punishment of exile because it does not deem the Hadiths in question strong enough evidence to alter the Quranic ruling. It was agreed upon by all the Muslim schools of law that the Quranic punishment referred to here was for unmarried people. Married men and women guilty of adultery are punished by stoning, as demonstrated in the Sunna of the Prophet.[11] Sariqa: the Quran specifies that the thief, male or female, should have their hand cut off “as a requital for what they have done and as a deterrent ordained by God” (Quran 5:38). Qadhf: The Quran commands that anyone who accuses someone of adultery and does not provide four witnesses to the alleged act should be lashed 80 times and should never again have their testimony accepted (Quran 24:4). Shurb al-Khamr: Though the Quran prohibits drinking wine (khamr) and intoxication, the punishment for drinking comes from the Sunna. The most reliable Hadiths state that the Prophet ﷺ would have a person lashed 40 times for intoxication, but the caliphs Umar and Ali subsequently increased this to 80 after consultation with other Companions.[12] Ḥirāba: This crime is understood to be set out in the Quran’s condemnation of “those who make war on God and His Messenger and seek to spread harm and corruption in the land.” The Quran gives it the harshest punishment in Islam: crucifixion and/or amputating hands and feet (Quran 5:33). The vast majority of Muslim scholars have held that this verse was revealed after a group of men brutally blinded, maimed and murdered a shepherd and then stole his camels. The Prophet ﷺ ordered the killers punished in exactly the same way.[13] Yet prominent scholars were skeptical of reports that he had actually ordered the murderers’ hands or feet cut off.[14] This disagreement between the punishments ordered by the Quran and by the Prophet ﷺ may have been because the Prophet’s ﷺ order came before the verse was revealed,[15] but the ambiguity is generally understood as illustrating that the ruler/state has discretion in deciding the proper punishment for ḥirāba.[16] The Hudud do not cover what most legal systems would consider the most serious part of criminal law: murder. But this does fall within what we can term Islamic criminal law. Although the Quran and Sunna conceptualize murder, accidental killing, as well as physical injuries done to others, as private wrongs against individuals and their families, from the time of the Prophet ﷺ it was the state that oversaw these disputes and carried out punishments. These were violations of the rights of people, but they also touched on the realm of public order and violence, which was the territory of the ruler.[17] Since cases of homicide were brought by the victim’s kin (much like in the West until the nineteenth century), the state (in the person of the judge or governor) would be responsible for bringing cases for victims with no kin, on the basis of the Prophet’s ﷺ saying that “The authority (sulṭān) is the guardian of those who have no guardian.”[18] The state also often took responsibility for compensating victims and their families when the guilty party could not be identified.[19] God’s Mercy and Applying the Hudud Punishments Violations of people’s rights have to be restituted because those people have suffered actual damage or loss. God, on the other hand, is not actually harmed by violations of His rights. In the case of the rights of God, it is God’s mercy that defines Islamic legal procedure. Only an adult Muslim of sound mind and who is aware that one of the Hudud acts has been prohibited by God and still intentionally engages in it is even theoretically liable for the punishment.[20] In this regard, the Hudud crimes differ from violations of the rights of people, such as accidental manslaughter or accidentally damaging someone’s property, where intention is not required and children’s families are liable for damage they cause. The central principle in the application of the Hudud punishments is maximizing mercy. This was formulated clearly in a Hadith attributed to the Prophet ﷺ that was also echoed by prominent Companions, among them his wife Aisha and the Caliphs Umar and Ali. The best attested version states, “Ward off the Hudud from the Muslims as much as you all can, and if you find a way out for the person, then let them go. For it is better for the authority to err in mercy than to err in punishment.”[21] Within a century of the Prophet’s death Muslim scholars had digested this Hadith into the crucial legal principle of ‘Ward off the Hudud by ambiguities (shubuhāt).’[22] The central principle in the application of Shariah’s most severe punishments is maximizing…CLICK TO TWEET Some might argue that this doctrine was developed by Muslim jurists in the generation after the life of the Prophet ﷺ to remedy the Quran’s harsh punishments. In other words, they inherited a regime of severe punishments and maybe they thought they needed to find some way out of applying them. Or one might argue that the Prophet himself ﷺ preached warding off the Hudud if at all possible because he was uncomfortable with the punishments revealed in the Quran. But neither of these theories could be correct. The establishment of a harsh regime of punishments alongside a nearly unreachable standard of proof occurs together within the Quran itself. The Quran ordains that those who commit adultery should be lashed 100 times, but just one verse later it states that anyone who accuses someone of adultery without four witnesses to the act is punished with 80 lashes for slander.[23] Why would a message seeking to establish an order of law set up harsh punishments but then make them almost impossible to apply? We will discuss this later, but now let’s turn to the ambiguities (shubuhāt) that Muslim jurists elaborated to avoid applying the Hudud. The Muslim jurists who developed the massive and diverse body of fiqh took the Prophet’s command to ward off the Hudud very seriously. Some of the procedural safeguards were found in the Quran itself, such as the requirement for four witnesses to zinā. A significant number were added in the Hadiths. In the most famous case (there are six known instances) of the Prophet ﷺ ordering a man stoned for adultery, the man comes to the Prophet ﷺ and confesses his sin. The Prophet asks him if he is crazy, and when he continues to insist the Prophet ﷺ suggests that perhaps he only kissed the woman.[24] In order to prevent witnesses from assuming sex was occurring when perhaps the couple was just embracing or lying on top of one another, the Prophet ﷺ required the witnesses to testify that they’d seen “his penis enter into her vagina like an eyeliner applier entering into its container.”[25] Because the man who confessed, Māʿiz, insisted on confessing four times to the Prophet ﷺ, the majority of Muslim scholars require all confessions of zinā to be done four times. Anything less cannot be punished by the Hudud.[26] Based on the same case of Māʿiz, jurists agreed that even someone who had confessed to zinā could retract that confession at any point and no longer face the Hudud punishment. Finally, even external signs such as pregnancy were not considered proof that zināhad occurred in the opinion of the majority of Muslim scholars. For example, if a woman’s husband had been away for years, he could have been miraculously transported to be with her.[27] Or she could have been raped. The one school that did consider pregnancy determinative proof of zinā (assuming the woman didn’t claim she had been raped) allowed the possibility that a woman could be pregnant for up to five years. Normally in the Shariah, such miraculous or fantastic claims would carry no weight in legal matters. But as possible ambiguities to prevent application of the Hudud, they were accepted.[28] This immense allowance for ambiguities in ruling on sexual offenses can be seen most clearly in the Hanafi school of law, which was the official school of the Ottoman Empire. When prostitutes and their clients were caught, they were not tried for zinā due to the (admittedly outlandish) ambiguity that prostitution was structurally similar to marriage; both were exchanges of sexual access for money (in the case of marriage, the groom’s dowry payment).[29] This is not because Muslim scholars had any sympathy for prostitution or a low regard for marriage, but rather because they hunted for any possible ambiguity to avoid implementing the Hudud. In the case of sariqa, the strict definition of the crime laid out by the Sunna explains why I’ve been so reluctant to translate it as theft. Sariqa is only a very specific kind of theft. First, Hadiths specify that a thief would only have their hand cut off stealing something over a certain value.[30] In another Hadith, as well as in the practice of the Companions, we are told that an accused thief should be prompted two or three times to deny that he stole.[31] In court procedure, what this means is that, even if the thief is caught red-handed, with the usual number of witnesses (two) testifying that they saw him steal, all the thief has to do is claim that the item was his, and enough ambiguity would be established to make hand cutting out of the question.[32] On the basis of an instance in which a man stole a cloak from under a sleeping man’s head, jurists concluded that only something stolen from a secure location (ḥirz), a concept determined by local custom and conditions, merited the Hudud punishment.[33] The Prophet (peace be upon him) also exempted acts of misappropriation done blatantly in the open.[34] In the end, the list of requirements that Muslim scholars agreed on to eliminate all ambiguities reaches (See Appendix Requirements for Amputation for Theft from al-Subki) . As a result, as described by scholar Rudolph Peters, it is “nearly impossible for a thief or fornicator to be sentenced, unless he wishes to do so and confesses.”[35] This system of making it virtually impossible to implement the Hudud punishments through ambiguities characterized the Hudud crimes of intoxication and, to a lesser extent, sexual slander as well. Someone who smells of alcohol would not be liable for the Hudud punishment. Even someone who was seen drunk and vomiting up wine was not subject to the Hudud punishment according to most Muslim jurists because he could have drunken the wine accidentally.[36] Since Muslim scholars have disagreed a great deal about what constitutes an intoxicant, the approach to applying the Hudud punishment has been to follow Imam Shafi’s position that “people are only punished based on certainty.”[37] Off the Hook? How Non-Hudud Crimes were Punished Of course, just because an ambiguity was found to avoid the Hudud punishment, this did not mean that the alleged wrongdoer was off the hook. Rather, their offense simply dropped from the upper echelon of violations of the rights of God to the violations of the rights of human beings (see Shariah chart below). Such offenses were punished according to taʿzīr, or discretionary punishment set by the judge. So a thief who had been caught red-handed by two, upstanding witnesses (the standard evidentiary bar for crimes) stealing a bar of gold from a safe deposit box could avoid the Hudud punishment by simply denying he had done it. He would not have his hand cut off. But there was still sufficient evidence to convict him of theft at the level of ghaṣb, or usurpation (similar to petty larceny or the civil wrong of conversion in common law). An unmarried couple found naked in bed could not be punished for zinā, but they could still be severely disciplined. A judge or governor could also draw on his authority to maintain public order to punish offenses that fell below the threshold of Hudud. For example, someone who stank of wine and was obviously drunk might not be punished at the level of Hudud, but he could still be punished below that level.[38] In the case of armed robbery/banditry, if the perpetrators repented and surrendered, then these ambiguities would drop the offense from the Hudud range. But they were still liable for the punishments for homicide and non-Hudud theft.[39] Unlike American laws’ different burdens of proof in civil versus criminal cases, the main protection against conviction for a Hudud crime was not the burden of proof (though this was almost unachievable in the case of zinā). The escape hatch was more often provided by the near endless list of ambiguities that the judge saw as his duty to explore. The analogy of American criminal versus civil law is still useful, since it helps us understand how the accused could be found innocent of an act in one category of law by its standard of evidence and simultaneously found guilty of the same act in another category of law. It was much easier to produce the evidence needed to convince a judge that a perpetrator was guilty of a taʿzīr offense than a Hudud one. In the Shafi school of law, for example, someone could be convicted of non-Hudud theft based on the testimony of one man and two women. And in the Hanbali school slaves could testify in non-Hudud cases.[40] But no major Muslim school of law allowed women or slaves to testify in Hudud cases, since the more restrictions on who could bear witness the more difficult it was to convict the accused.[41] Since taʿzīr is, at its core, determined at the discretion of the judge, some punishment could be assigned without reference to any fixed standard of proof at all. Discretionary punishment was historically the primary category of punishment in the Shariah. In some schools of law, jurists developed detailed tables of punishments within their schools of law for what taʿzīrpunishments applied to what sorts of offenses. Lashing, the bastinado (smacking the soles of the feet with a cane) and, to a lesser extent, incarceration, have been the main methods of punishment. Although there has been disagreement on the details, the most common position among Muslim jurists is that the upper limit of taʿzīr punishments is that they cannot reach the punishment for the equivalent Hudud crime. This was simple in the case of sexual indiscretion or intoxication, for which the Hudud crime had a fixed number of lashes. The most that a taʿzīr punishment could be was 99 lashes for sexual crimes or one day less than one year of exile. Theft was a different matter. Petty theft was generally handled by lashing or short jail time, while repeat offenders could be sent to prisons for thieves (see for more on the types of punishments used in Islamic civilization (see Appendix Types of Taʿzīr Punishment). One of the most important features of how the Hudud crimes were conceptualized in the Sunna and by later jurists was the central role of avoiding tajassus, or seeking out offenses done in private, and providing satr, or finding excuses for or turning a blind eye to private misconduct. These concepts were rooted in the Quran, which forbids tajassus (Quran 49:12), and the Sunna, where the Prophet ﷺ repeatedly ignores a man trying to confess to having “violated one of the Hudud.”[42] “If you seek out a people’s secret or shameful areas,” the Prophet warns, “You’ll ruin them.”[43] The Companions understood this as key to legal procedure. The prominent Companion and governor of Kufa, Ibn Masʿūd, was brought a man “whose beard was dripping with wine,” but Ibn Masʿūd’s only response was, “We have been forbidden to seek out faults. But if he does something openly before us, we would hold him responsible for that.”[44]Onereliable report tells that the caliph Umar heard rowdy voices from inside a house in Medina, so he climbed over the wall and found a man with a woman and wine. When he confronted the man, he replied that, while he was indeed committing a sin, Umar had committed three: he had violated the Quranic commands against seeking out faults in others (49:12), against climbing over the walls of houses (2:189) and against entering homes without permission (24:27). Umar admitted his fault and left. As with other areas of Islamic criminal law, the application of the Hudud ultimately fell under the authority of the ruler or state. Although the Prophet ﷺ warned that, once a Hudud crime had reached the authority, the trial had to be held, this was meant to emphasize that no one could expect favoritism.[45] The Prophet ﷺ and the early caliphs made it clear that the ruling authority could suspend the Hudud punishments entirely if this was necessary, as the Prophet ﷺ ordered for soldiers who stole while out on campaign and as Umar famously ordered for theft in times of famine.[46] As the famous Hanafi jurist al-Kāsānī (d. 1191) wrote, “It is not permissible to carry out the Hudud without the probability of some benefit.”[47] Historical Application of Hudud in Islamic Civilization The Muslim judges who applied the rules of fiqh also took the command of the Prophet ﷺ to ward off the Hudud by ambiguities as a divine command. All indications are that the Hudud punishments were very rarely carried out historically. A Scottish doctor working in Aleppo in the mid 1700’s observed that there were only six public executions in twenty years. Theft was rare, he observed, and when it occurred it was punished by bastinado.[48] A famous British scholar of Arabic in Egypt in the mid 1800’s reported that the Hudud punishment for theft had not been inflicted in recent memory.[49] In the roughly five hundred years that the Ottoman Empire ruled Constantinople, records show that only one instance of stoning for adultery took place (contrast this with colonial America/USA, where over fifty people were executed for various sexual crimes between 1608 and 1785).[50] Jurists’ theories of far-fetched ambiguities found real life application. A Muslim woman in India in the late 1500’s whose husband had died in battle was suddenly found to be pregnant and was accused of fornication. She claimed that her husband had been miraculously brought back to life every Friday night, when he would visit her. Jurists of India’s predominant Hanafi school of law were consulted on the case and replied that it was indeed technically possible for such a miracle to have occurred.[51] The concept of non-invasiveness (i.e., avoiding tajassus) and covering up faults (satr) also became real practices. Wine drinking, fornication, prostitution and homosexuality became widespread in medieval Islamic civilization. Yet Muslim scholars could do little more than complain about this.[52] One scholar in Mughal India himself strayed into wonton ways, taking up womanizing and throwing drinking parties. When the market police climbed over the wall of his house to break up one such party he reprimanded them by reminding them of the caliph Umar’s lapse. The police left the scholar’s house in shame (the scholar later reformed himself, reports his biographer).[53] Instances in which thieves did have their hands cut off were shocking to local populations. The famous Moroccan scholar and traveler Ibn Battuta (d. circa 1366) recounts how, in Mecca, when a judicial official had ordered a young man’s hand cut off for stealing, the youth later murdered that judge.[54] The Mughal emperor Akbar the Great (d. 1605) was furious when he found that his chief judge had carried out the execution of a man convicted of a Hudud offense, citing the principle of avoiding this through ambiguities. The judge fell from imperial favor and eventually died in exile.[55] The best illustration of how seriously judges took the command to ward off the Hudud as a religious duty is a near soap-opera level scandal from Mamluk Cairo in the year 1513. A magistrate from the Hanafi school of law had a gorgeous wife, who was lusted over by a Shafi magistrate. This Shafi judge took advantage of his colleague’s absence to enter the couple’s house and consummate the affair. But a jealous neighbor who also was in love with the wife informed the husband, who immediately returned home, busted into his room and found the couple in his bed. The Shafi magistrate pleaded with the fuming husband, offering him money not to disgrace him publically. The man’s wife pleaded along Shariah lines, saying, “Satr is called for.” But the husband refused and locked them in the bedroom until the authorities arrived. When confronted, the Shafi magistrate confessed to zinā and even wrote out his confession before another magistrate. Hearing of this scandal, the Mamluk Sultan, al-Ghūrī, was livid at the corruption uncovered amongst his magistrates. So he asked for a ruling by a Shafi judge, who declared (correctly) that the couple should be stoned. The chief judge affirmed, and the Sultan, who had been acknowledged as overly zealous in punishment, was elated. He’d be commemorated for his justice, he exclaimed, since “history would record that someone was stoned for zinā in his time.” But in the meantime, the couple retracted their confession. Leading scholars wrote that the Hudud punishment would have to be dropped. The Sultan responded in outrage, “O Muslims! A man goes into the house of another man, commits iniquity with his wife, they are caught together under the covers, the man confesses to what he’d done and writes a confession with his own hand, and they say after all this that he can retract it?!” The Sultan convened all the senior judges and jurists at his court, including the then nonagenarian pillar of the Shafi school, Shaykh al-Islam Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī (d. 1520). One leading Shafi scholar, Burhān al-Dīn Ibn Abī Sharīf (d. 1517), replied to the Sultan, “That is God’s law,” warning that whoever executed the couple would be liable for their murder. Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī agreed. Enraged, the Sultan executed the couple anyway, fired all the chief judges and scholars from their judgeships and teaching positions and sent Ibn Abī Sharīf into exile.[56] We must appreciate what took place in this episode: several leading scholars and judges of Mamluk Cairo accepted dismissal from their posts and exile rather than affirming the application of a Hudud punishment. Writing a century later, the historian Najm al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (d. 1650) remarked that the Sultan’s crime of executing two people without legal right and ignoring the protocols of the Shariah was a cause of the fall of the Mamluk state, which the Ottomans conquered only three years after this scandal.[57] Aside from the Hudud, Muslim judges have historically generally been conservative about carrying out capital or severe corporal punishment. For example, one of the few instances in which a judge can refuse to enforce the ruling of another court applying another school of law is if that other school has more severe rules on issues like requiring execution for murder.[58] When one of the Ottoman sultans ordered a group of merchants to be executed for disobeying his ruling on fixing prices, a Muslim jurist intervened, objecting that, “It is not permitted to kill these people in the Shariah.” The sultan replied that the merchants had disobeyed an order he had issued, and the scholar replied, “What if your command did not reach them?”[59] Why Have Rules if You Don’t Follow Them? Law in Pre-modern versus Modern Societies When my students read about Shariah law, their first reaction after learning about the Hudud is ‘Why have punishments you’re not going to apply?’ This question strikes at the root of the incongruity between modern law and how many view the Shariah. Although it seems obvious and, indeed, essential to many today, the notion that a legal system should function as a routinized and efficiently ordered machine stripped of cultural fictions and traditions is fairly new. It is a product of legal reforms envisioned by modernists like the English philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham (d. 1832). Prior to the comprehensive legal reforms in American and British law from the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth, having laws on the books that were not intended to be applied was normal. In fact, it’s still a feature of law today in the US. How many times do we see signs warning us that littering will be punished by a maximum fine of $1000? How many of us know anyone who has been fined $1000 for littering? How many college students are allowed to drink under the age of 21? To quote the conservative legal scholar Robert George (and also Paul of Tarsus), law is our teacher. It is not just a means of resolving disputes or maintaining order. It is a statement by authoritative voices within a society of how that society should be. Another major historical change was in law enforcement. Modern law enforcement as we know it emerged in Great Britain in the early 19th century. It is no coincidence that Britain was also the first state to transition into a new stage of human history, comparable in its dramatic changes to humans settling down in agricultural communities five millennia prior: that of a modern, industrialized society. This involved changes in every area of human life, from culture and religion to political representation and economic power. Pre-modern states like France or Britain, not to mention massive multinational empires, were hugely decentralized. Often, the ruler had little direct control outside major urban areas and sometimes only around the capital. What technologies like the railway (Britain was joined by railways in 1851, followed by the US) and the telegraph (in regular use by the 1850’s) enabled states to do was actually project their authority among their populations on a scale never possible before. At the same time, improvements in health care and sanitation meant that, for the first time, the population of a city like London actually grew on its own without depending on immigrants (previously, morbidity in European cities was so high that they were death traps, with higher death than birth rates).[60]By 1850 more than half the population of Britain lived in cities, a milestone reached globally around the year 2000. That meant that problems of crime in cities also saw manifold increases. So as far as law is concerned, what the modern industrialized, urbanized state and society meant was 1) unprecedented challenges of law and order, 2) a new vision for an ordered, rational, technicalized and bureaucratized world, and 3) the technological, administrative and financial resources to pursue this vision and tackle new challenges. It is difficult for us to imagine how law and order functioned prior to these mid-nineteenth-century developments. Prior to 1830, Britain had no organized police force. Though major cities like New York and Boston developed police forces by the 1840’s, only after the Civil War did official police forces become a normal feature of urban life in America. Ironically, formal police forces in the US South developed out of the Slave Patrols that had formed decades earlier to track the movement of slaves and free blacks out of fear of rebellion.[61] Of course, cities had not been lawless up to this point. As early as 1285 the British monarchs had instituted decrees to safeguard law and order in London, just as Louis XIV (d. 1715) did in Paris. But these ad hoc, often unprofessional, watchmen were only found in the capital cities. More importantly, they did not engage in preventative policing (walking the beat) nor investigation of the wide range of crimes reported. The same applied to the institution of the shurṭa, shiḥna or fawjdār (all meaning, roughly, police) in Islamic civilization, which can first be found under the early caliphs.[62] Prior to the nineteenth century, the only law enforcement officials in cities and towns around the world were the equivalents of local marshals or sheriffs, whose main job was to handle prisoners and provide security in the court. In Britain, if someone committed a serious crime, the assumption was that “a great hue and cry” would be emitted and that a crowd would bring the perpetrator to the courthouse to stand trial.[63] Outside of Islamic metropolises like Cairo or Istanbul, where Shariah courts were readily available to litigate people’s disputes, people in rural areas probably settled most disputes informally within village or family networks.[64] Marshalls and sheriffs conjure up images of the Wild West, and this is actually helpful. As in films like High Noon (1952) or Tombstone(1993), marshals in pre-modern towns were on their own. Only in exceptional situations could they call on and deputize private citizens for a posse (short for posse comitatus). Films like The Wild Bunch (1969) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (also 1969), in which tough and endearing groups of outlaws are eventually mowed down mercilessly by the sheer ordered force of the modern state, commemorate the losses and gains felt at moving from the self-help and community of the pre-modern to the regimented and impersonal world of the modern. Simply put, pre-modern states did not have the means to engage in the type of law enforcement that we consider normal today, particularly preventative policing and the investigation of mundane crimes. This important fact lies behind the severity of punishments found in Islamic law and in many pre-modern legal systems for that matter. Though scholars of criminal law continue to disagree on the best means of deterring crime, a common approach has been the utilitarian one formalized by Bentham. Its basic premise is the following equation: In a system where there are few or no police or where the police do not busy themselves investigating crimes, moderately intelligent criminals faced little chance of being caught. According to the E = S x P equation, if the probability (P) of being caught is minuscule, then in order for any meaningful deterrent effect to be created the severity of punishment (S) must be mammoth. Frightening punishments were seen as the only way to deter potential criminals whom police (what few there were) would never be able to reach. We can see this clearly in Britain in the 1700’s and early 1800’s. In 1820 there were over two hundred crimes punishable by death in Britain, including stealing firewood and poaching fish from another’s fishpond.[66] The colony of Virginia had the death penalty for taking vegetables or fruits from a garden.[67] But, similar to the Hudud, few people convicted of these offenses were actually executed. Putting thousands of petty offenders to death was not the intention of the law in Britain nor its colonies. Scaring people into not breaking the law was. Inevitably, judges and juries would find procedural loopholes to reduce the punishment, such as purposely undervaluing stolen goods to drop the crime from grand larceny (punishable by death) to petty larceny (punishable by flogging).[68] And we can see how the mindboggling advances in technology and administrative capacity in the mid 1800’s changed Britain’s legal landscape. More effective policing, better prisons and, more importantly, better municipal services and a much-advanced economy meant that more offenders were caught and convicted.[69] (P) went up dramatically, so (S) dropped accordingly. By 1900 Britain had only four death-penalty offenses. Cruel and Unusual Punishment No discussion of criminal law in the Shariah can pass without addressing the issue of Western revulsion at flogging, the most prominent form of punishment historically employed by Muslim courts, and at the dramatic Hudud punishments of amputation and stoning. Today we think of incarceration as the normal way of punishing crime, so much so “that it becomes difficult to conceive of a moment when prisons were not at the core of criminal justice,” to quote one noted scholar.[70]But prisons have been the exception, not the rule, for punishment in human history. They are immensely costly, especially for the perennially cash-strapped pre-modern state, and carry with them constant worries over security. Prior to the seventeenth century, when the situation in Europe changed, the main use of prisons globally had been for detaining suspects pending and during trial, not for punishment. Today incarceration is the norm…But prisons have been the exception-not the rule- in human…CLICK TO TWEET Corporal punishment, on the other hand, is quick and cheap. Although many condemn it as barbaric today, inflicting some form of pain on the body of the perpetrator has been the main means of punishing serious wrongdoing in human society. In Europe from the Middle Ages through the 1700s, horrendous types of mutilation were standard punishment: amputating hands, fingers, ears, tongues, burning with hot tongs, drawing and quartering, etc.[71] Thomas Jefferson recommended cutting a half-inch hole in the nose of women who engaged in sodomy.[72] To understand how this situation changed, one must appreciate important trends in criminal punishment that accompanied industrialization in the early-modern and modern West. In the eighteenth century, in Western Europe and later Britain, the dominance of execution and severe corporal punishments made way for various forms of forced labor, imprisonment, and deportation to the colonies. Although the first modern prison opened near Philadelphia in 1790, the philosophy behind it had been maturing for decades. Growing out of institutions for forced labor in the seventeenth century, particularly in continental Europe, prisons emerged as institutions that combined incarceration and forced labor by those who had committed crimes that would otherwise have been punished by death.[73] In the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania, thinkers like the founding father Benjamin Rush (d. 1813) began articulating a theory of reformative justice in which harsh corporal or capital punishments would be set aside in favor of purifying the convict’s soul in hopes of eventual redemption.[74] Hence the origin of the American penitentiary, where prisoners are divided into their own small cells and given meager rations for the purposes of focusing them on reflection and consulting the Bible. This model, even after its secularization and allowance for more socialization, has since been exported widely. This historical arc seems comprehensible enough – corporal punishment to prisons; brutal medieval mutilation makes way for more sanitary executions, makes way for forced labor in prisons, which in turn makes way for the modern penitentiary, where criminals are ‘reformed.’ But the reality is hardly so simple. Rather than a progress from brutality to enlightenment, Western criminal sanctions have simply expressed new and highly idiosyncratic cultural understandings of what is and what isn’t ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ America abandoned public corporal punishment for the penitentiary and reforming the convict by properly directing his soul. But that guiding was done by stunningly brutal means more reminiscent of Abu Ghraib than a place of worship. Through the mid nineteenth century, prisoners were flogged relentlessly, gagged and stuffed into small lockers where they couldn’t kneel or lie down, and had their faces flooded with freezing water. What seems to have been the most deadly of all treatments was forcing prisoners into extended periods of total isolation with enforced silence.[75] All of his was somehow seen as more humane than previous, unenlightened methods of punishment such as placing people in stocks to be pelted by fruit. The same erroneous conflation of cultural convention with enlightened progress can be seen in British colonial rule in India. When the British East India Company took over the responsibility for administering Shariah law in the areas of India it controlled in the late 1700’s, British officials were exasperated and shocked. They were primarily frustrated at how hard it was to execute criminals under the Shariah. They considered it a “barbarous construction” that the family of someone who had been murdered could accept compensation money from the murderer instead of insisting on his execution. British officials couldn’t help seeing this as some sort of pay off. But what truly morally shocked British officials was the use of amputation as a punishment, and they eventually outlawed it in 1834. Hence we find the bizarre confusion expressed by one British woman over how a local Sikh ruler who rarely had criminals executed but instead punished them with amputation was somehow not considered cruel by his subjects (the amputation the British were referring to was mainly not hand cutting but rather an Indian punishment of cutting off the nose as the most severe taʿzīrpunishment; ironically the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb [d. 1707] had banned this as alien to the Shariah).[76] British fetishization of corporal punishment alongside a cavalier attitude towards its capital elder sibling is beautifully captured in the ironic title of J. Fisch’s book on colonial law in India, Cheap Lives and Dear Limbs. As US law professor Peter Moskos recently pointed out in his book In Defense of Flogging, the notion that imprisoning someone in a cell is somehow more humane than subjecting them to brief but intense bodily pain is a collective cultural fiction. And it is totally belied by the reality of prison-life in America. Even societies in which vicious corporal punishment was common, notes Moskos, “rarely if ever placed a human being in a cell for punishment.” “Consequently,” he concludes, “that we accept prisons as normal is a historical oddity.”[77] And incarceration in the general population of a US prison is mild treatment compared to placement in solitary confinement, a common practice in US prisons. As nineteenth-century American penitentiaries discovered, solitary confinement causes dramatic and often irreparable psychological damage. In 2011, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture concludedthat just fifteen days in solitary confinement “constitutes torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” and after that period irreversible psychological damage can occur. The profound failings of the US prison system further indict it as a cruel and unusual form of punishment. First, prisons in the US have totally failed to reform those sent there, which is not surprising considering convicts are placed not around positive role models but around other criminals in an environment where 5% of prisoners say they had been sexually assaulted just within the previous year and in which drug use is rampant.[78] The result is that the US has by far the highest population of prisoners in the world and the second highest per capita. Second, US prisons are cruel and unusual in that they destroy and atomize communities. As Anne-Marie Cusac points out, prior to the penitentiary movement, corporal punishment or humiliation was carried out in public, often in the town square. Criminals might be publically humiliated, but such public pain “understands criminals as existing within that community.”[79] Prior to the mid twentieth century, many prisons were in the center of towns, with prisoners still nearby their families. Now most prisons are in rural areas incredibly distant from the urban neighborhoods most disproportionally affected by incarceration. In America, even after release from prison, felons are unable to vote and are nearly unemployable. Around 5.3 million Americans who would otherwise have a voice in their communities and country’s political process are denied the vote due to a past felony.[80] The American neurosis over criminal justice is even more evident in the application of the death penalty. Developed as supposedly more humane alternatives to hanging, the electric chair and lethal injection only euphemize the violence being done in the act of execution. As a US federal judge observed in his decision regarding an execution in 2014, a society that carries out executions must acknowledge the brutality of the act and not try to disguise it by supposedly less violent means (which often fail to work as quickly or painlessly as they are supposed to). How Should Muslims Understand the Hudud Today? Today the Hudud are relevant mostly in their absence from the legal stage. When they do appear it is with great controversy. With the exception of a few states like Nigeria,[81] Sudan,[82] Iran,[83] and Saudi Arabia, the criminal laws of majority Muslim countries have been replaced by modified British or European imports. How do Muslims make sense of the Hudud’s absence? Can we justify it or, taking things one step further, can we justify not calling for their return? Muslim scholars have followed several tacks in negotiating these profound questions. In the mid twentieth century some argued that the Hudud were abandoned because of Western pressures during the colonial period and that, if restored, the Hudud would help mold more law-abiding and harmonious societies. Once re-affirmed, these scholars argue, the punishments themselves would rarely ever be carried out.[84] Others have more recently argued that a revival of the Hudud would be inappropriate for the foreseeable future because our political and social environments make removing all ambiguities (shubuhāt) systematically impossible.[85] It’s assumed that this situation is a result of colonialism and the globalization of Western values. But some scholars have argued that this had been the case for almost a millennium. Hence the extraordinary rarity of the Hudud being carried out. Taken to a higher level of detail, one Shariah argument for the Hudud not being obligatory at present is that, like a person trying to perform ablutions on a missing limb, the ‘locus of the ruling’ has vanished. According to this argument, whatever the motivation for Muslim states abandoning the Hudud, their absence makes them irrelevant until someone decides to revive them. Another argument is that our current era is an “age of crisis and necessity” (ḍarūra). Since in Islamic law ‘necessity makes the prohibited permissible,’ Muslim states under foreign domination or other constraints are allowed to lapse in ways that would otherwise not be allowed. The Mauritanian scholar Abdallah Bin Bayyah has made the interesting argument that he based on the Prophet (peace be upon him) prohibiting cutting off the hand of Muslim soldiers who stole while on campaign. Instead, the Prophet punished them with lashes or delayed the punishment until the need for a full fighting force had passed.[86] Though Muslims are not literally in the land of the enemy, Bin Bayyah writes, they are in “a land of anxiety” where many Muslims feel uncomfortable with the Hudud’s harsh physical punishments.[87] It’s as if the Abode of Islam has been culturally conquered, with Muslims becoming allergic to their own revealed tradition. The most important point to note is that Muslim scholars have affirmed that what is essential for Muslims is to believe that the Shariah is ideal law and that the Hudud are valid in theory. The actual implementation of the Hudud comes at the discretion of the ruler/state and is not necessary for people to be Muslim.[88] Can We Escape the Controversy? Today few issues are brought up more in the media to question the civility of Islam than the Hudud. Few issues are more often invoked to allude consciously or unconsciously to a clash of civilizations between the benighted past of Islam and the enlightened present of the West. When the Sultan of Brunei announced in 2014 that his country would phase in Shariah criminal law, Hudud included, there was international outcry at this return “to the dark ages.” Few issues are as political as the Hudud. The Hudud are, in fact, the perfect storm of controversy and grievance. To the twentieth-century West, with its phobia of physical punishment, prison-centered approach to criminal justice and increased social permissiveness in matters sexual, the Hudud are barbarity embodied. In the Muslim world, reeling from colonialism and the globalization of Western norms, the Hudud have re-emerged for many as icons of a commitment to Islamic authenticity. To many Islamist movements around the world, the notion of re-establishing the Hudud became both the symbol and substance of a longed for restoration of an authentic past and an independent future. To be fair, holding the Hudud up as the symbol of a true, godly order is not some modern fabrication. The Mamluk Sultan al-Ghūrī was not unusual in hoping to be associated with stoning an adulterer. A quick glance through any chronicle of medieval Islamic civilization will yield mention of rulers or dynasties praised for ‘upholding the Limits of God.’ But, as we have seen, the Hudud were really not much more than symbols of submission to the idea of God’s law. It’s hard to know if those countries that do enforce Hudud punishments today represent a continuation of pre-modern Islamic legal practice or not. The Hudud are probably carried out in Saudi Arabia at a higher rate than they were historically in Muslim societies.[89]But they are still very rare. Between 1981 and 1992, there were four executions by stoning in Saudi Arabia and forty-five amputations for theft. In a one-year sample (1982-83), out of 4,925 convictions for theft, only two hands were cut off. The rest of the guilty were punished by taʿzīr. In the same time period, out of 659 convictions for Hudud-level sexual crimes, no one was stoned. Many death sentences are the result of political punishments, not the Hudud.[90] In Nigeria’s northern states, all of which have adopted Shariah-based legal codes, a few amputations for theft have taken place. There have been at least two sentences to death for adultery, but in all cases so far ambiguities were found to release the guilty party. Like American conservatives calling for a return to some imagined utopia of the 1950s, the authentic past that modern Muslim states claim to revive with the Hudud is mostly an imagined one. It is envisioned to fend off the loss of identity and autonomy that so many have felt in the modern age. So it is no surprise that countries today where the Hudud are actively enforced either define themselves by their resistance to the Western imperial order (Iran), by claims to embody Islamic authenticity (Saudi Arabia), or lie on sharp cultural, religious and political fault lines between Western cultural and military imposition on the one hand and strong traditions of indigenous identity on the other (Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan). So today it is almost impossible to discuss the Hudud apart from consuming political tensions and conflicts over identity and autonomy. In 2005 the Swiss Muslim scholar and intellectual Tariq Ramadan called for a moratorium on corporal punishment, stoning, and the death penalty in the Muslim world. He was subsequently savaged by both Western critics of Islam who saw his call as too little and by some more conservative Muslim ulama who saw it as transgressing the commands of God. Could we imagine some alternative reality in which a complex, cosmopolitan Muslim state passed through the wrenching processes of industrialization, centralization and urbanization while preserving a Shariah legal regime intact? The Ottoman Empire actually offers something fairly close to that. It passed through significant industrialization and urbanization. Though by the mid 1800s the Ottomans were certainly feeling the political and cultural pressures of European power, they escaped the worst of Western colonialism until World War I. The Ottoman Penal Code of 1858 is a fascinating artifact of a modernizing, unquestionably Shariah-legitimate criminal law. The Code was produced as part of the Ottoman state’s reform of its entire administration in light of new technologies and new challenges. The 1858 Code reformed the penal system by replacing existing punishment such as the bastinado with forced labor (kürek), prison, fines and exile (it also retained the death penalty for some crimes). The Code drew almost all of this content nearly verbatim from the French Penal Code of 1832. And yet the Code’s Islamic legitimacy was not in question. It begins ‘In the name of God, the most Gracious, the most Merciful’ and was approved by the Ottoman religious establishment, which remained deeply conservative until the end of the empire. The 1858 Code never mentions Hudud, but this was not because it eliminated them. Rather, this was because the whole Code explicitly limited itself to reforming the taʿzīr level of punishments. Since the Hudud had not been an effective presence in legal application, replacing the taʿzīrarea was tantamount to overhauling the entirety of Ottoman criminal law. By not removing the Hudud and instead leaving them in effective abeyance, the 1858 Code avoided assaulting a major symbol of Islamic legitimacy. The punishments it introduced were set by the French, but they were just as ‘Islamic’ as the ones previously used by Ottoman judges, since taʿzīr was a matter of discretion not specified in the Quran and Sunna. Moreover, the first paragraph of the 1858 Code commits to not violating any rights of individuals under the Shariah, and it even retained people’s rights to the Qiṣāṣ process in the case of homicide should they choose it. Let’s imagine that the Ottoman Empire had not been on the losing side in World War I and that it had continued on to the present day, maintaining its 1858 Penal Code (which survived until 1923 anyway) with slight modifications. Would we hear the same controversies we do over executions in Saudi Arabia or reviving the Hudud in Brunei? Probably not as much, because the Hudud would have continued as a symbol with no noticeable role in the law. Yet there would, no doubt, still be some protests. As Amnesty International objected over Brunei’s announcement, the Shariah is problematic because it assigns harsh punishments “for acts that should not even be considered crimes.” The bottom line is that many modern objections to the Shariah in general and to the Hudud in particular are not about specific punishments. They are about many Muslims’ insistence that acts like fornication should be condemned as criminal in the first place. Perhaps they are even about the insistence that such acts should be deemed morally reprehensible at all. It’s worth considering that the crimes human societies have judged the most acutely harmful – murder and rape – are not included among the agreed upon Hudud crimes. Perhaps the Hudud are not necessarily the most grievous crimes in terms of the toll they take on their victims or society. Fornication and Hudud-level theft are offenses almost by definition done in private, as intoxication could be as well. They are done out of the sight of all but God. Perhaps these stringent laws, which God’s mercy has made almost impossible to apply, exist primarily to remind people of the enormity of the sins that they usually get away with. Appendix From J. Brown, “Taʿzīr,” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Law, forthcoming. Types of Taʿzīr Punishment: The methods favored for taʿzīr punishment have changed over the centuries. The least severe form could consist of a mere lecture from the judge. The mainstay method, mentioned in the ḥadīths on the subject, was beating with a lash (ḍarb bi-sawṭ). Imprisonment was used from the time of the earliest jurists for short-term functions such as compelling debtors to pay or for detention pending trial (ʿAlī reportedly had a prison built in Basra), but the Muwaṭṭa’ of Mālik (d. 179/796) also includes the ruling that someone guilty of abetting in manslaughter should be imprisoned for a year. Al-Khaṣṣāf’s (d. 261/874) manual for judges mentions the ‘judge’s prison,’ used for detaining indebted parties while their assets are located, and the more severe ‘thieves’ prison.’ Standard law works in the Mālikī and Shāfiʿī schools set imprisonment as the punishment for mugging or highway robbery in which no life was lost. Abū Yūsuf’s (d. 182/798) complaint that prisons were overfilled with convicts who should have been punished for ḥudūd crimes shows that imprisonment was in use as a taʿzīr punishment in the early Abbasid period. In fact, in the Abbasid and Seljuq periods imprisonment seems to have been especially common as punishment for low class offenders who committed petty crimes such as theft. Cairo in the thirteenth century had three prisons, one for criminals serving sentences, one for political prisoners and one for those awaiting the death sentence. The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (d. 1707 CE) ordered that habitual thieves and counterfeiters whom normal taʿzīrhad not reformed as well as someone who castrated another man’s son be imprisoned for long periods of time. Imprisonment was also recommended by the sixteenth-century Ottoman Shaykh al-Islam Ebussu‘ud Efendi (d. 982/1574) as a punishment for prostitution. Fining was allowed by consensus only in the Mālikī school; in other schools of law it was disagreed upon or disliked. A twelfth-century ḥisbah manual from Damascus mentions exile as a punishment for prostitutes and effeminate men (mukhannath), and Ottoman criminal law used exile to punish some offenses such as unintentionally setting a home on fire. Mughal criminal courts in some regions used banishment as a punishment for habitual thieves. Public shaming (tashhīr), often involving parading the guilty party on a donkey through the streets, was known as early as the eighth century and was particularly associated as the punishment for bearing false testimony (shahādat al-zūr). But it was not obviously subsumed under taʿzīr until the eleventh century. By the late Mamluk period other recognized means of taʿzīrincluded slapping, rubbing the ears, fines and caning, the latter two finding particular favor in the Ottoman dynastic criminal law (see Qānūn) as well. For the Mālikī school, execution was an allowable taʿzīrpunishment. Although mutilation, such as carrying out the Qur’ānic punishment of amputating the opposite foot and hand for ruthless banditry, has generally been considered to be siyāsah punishment. But criminal codes such as those of the Ottomans and the Mughals also assigned some forms of mutilation as taʿzīr, such as Aurangzeb setting the amputation of both hands as the punishment for exhuming a body. It is with the Ottoman dynastic criminal law (see Qānūn) that we find Islamic civilization’s most regimented system of taʿzīr. The most prominent corporal punishment was caning (of the back or bottom of the feet) along with an accompanying fine, with the amount of the fine increasing with the number of blows specified and the caning carried out immediately, in the court. Unlawful sexual intercourse, which was almost never punished at the ḥudūd level, due to the impossibly high evidentiary bar, was punished by fines and lashings, the severity of which depended on the person’s marital status and wealth. As J. Baldwin has shown, a man who procured a prostitute was sentenced to lashing or caning, with a fine of one akce per stroke, and then paraded through the streets (teshhīr). Other Ottoman qānūn texts stated that a procurer should have his forehead branded. Some offenses were punished only with fines, such as a man caught skipping Friday prayer, according to a fatwa by Ebussu’ud. Imprisonment also played a role in taʿzīr punishment in the Ottoman state, although sentences were often short and intended to teach the offender the error of his ways. In the sixteenth century, prisoners were increasingly sentenced to serve as an oarsman in a galley even for minor offenses such as drunkenness, with the overall average sentence for a range of crimes being eight years. Later, prisoners served their sentences in military installations. In the qānūn of Sulaymān the Magnificent (d. 1566 CE), someone who stole a chicken was to be paraded with the chicken hanging from his neck. Today, punishments categorized under the taʿzīr heading play important roles in several countries with Shariah-informed judiciaries. In Saudi Arabia, the Ḥanbalī school’s approach of taʿzīr punishment continues to be applied, with prison and lashing as the main punishments. In Iran, despite several reforms to Islamicize criminal law under the Islamic Republic in 1982-3 and 1996, the country’s Islamic Criminal Code still carries most of the taʿzīr punishments over from Iran’s French-inspired 1925 penal code. The primary means of punishment are lashing and prison, with a maximum of seventy-four lashes for non-sexual offenses and ninety-nine for sexual ones. Requirements for Amputation for Theft from al-Subki This is a fatwa given by Taqī al-Dīn ʿAlī b. ʿAbd al-Kāfī al-Subkī (d. 756/1356), a senior Shafi scholar and judge from one of the leading scholarly families of Damascus: The Imam and Shaykh, may God have mercy on him, said: It has been agreed upon that the Hadd[punishment] is obligatory for one who has committed theft and [for whom the following conditions apply]: [the item] was taken from a place generally considered secure (ḥirz) it had not been procured as spoils of war (mughannam) nor from the public treasury and it was taken by his own hand not by some tool or mechanism (āla) on his own solely while he was of sound mind and of age and a Muslim and free not in the Haram in Mecca and not in the Abode of War and he is not one who is granted access to it from time to time and he stole from someone other than his wife and not from a uterine relative and not from her husband if it is a woman when he was not drunk and not compelled by hunger or under duress and he stole some property that was owned and would be permissible to sell to Muslims and he stole it from someone who had not wrongfully appropriated it and the value of what he stole reached ten dirhams of pure silver by the Meccan weight and it was not meat or any slaughtered animal nor anything edible or potable or some fowl or game or a dog or a cat or animal dung or feces (ʿadhira) or dirt or red ochre (maghara) or arsenic (zirnīkh) or pebbles or stones or glass or coals or firewood or reeds (qaṣab) or wood or fruit or a donkey or a grazing animal or a copy of the Quran or a plant pulled up from its roots (min badā’ihi) or produce from a walled garden or a tree or a free person or a slave if they are able to speak and are of sound mind and he had committed no offense against him before he removed him from a place where he had not been permitted to enter from his secure location by his own hand and witness is born to all of the above by two witnesses who are men according to [the requirements and procedure] that we already presented in the chapter on testimony and they did not disagree or retract their testimony and the thief did not claim that he was the rightful owner of what he stole and his left hand is healthy and his foot is healthy and neither body part is missing anything and the person he stole from does not give him what he had stolen as a gift and he did not become the owner of what he stole after he stole it and the thief did not return the stolen item to the person he stole it from and the thief did not claim it and the thief was not owed a debt by the person he stole from equal to the value of what he stole and the person stolen from is present [in court] and he made a claim for the stolen property and requested that amputation occur before the thief could repent and the witnesses to the theft are present and a month had not passed since the theft occurred All of this was said by ʿAlī b. Aḥmad b. Saʿīd (Ibn Ḥazm, d. 1064). And the Imam and Shaykh added: and it is also on the condition that [the thief’s] confession not precede the testimony and then after it he retracts [his confession]. For if the thief does that first and then direct evidence (bayyina) is provided of his crime and then he retracts his confession, the punishment of amputation is dropped according to the more correct opinion in the Shafi school, because the establishment [of guilt] came by confession not by the direct evidence. So his retraction is accepted.[A] [A] Tāj al-Dīn and Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī, Fatāwā al-Subkī, 2 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, n.d.), 2:333-4. Source:https://bloggingtheology.net/2016/12/12/questions-on-stoning/

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم السلام عليكم Sayyid Niʿmat Allāh al-Jazāʾirī and his Anthologies: Anti-Sufism, Shiʿism and Jokes in the Safavid World Thee paper examines an important Arabic anthology of literary material of mixedcontent, the al-Anwār al-nuʿmāniyya of Sayyid Niʿmatullāh al-Jazāʾirī (d. 1701) to ascertain its value as a source for intellectual and cultural history of the Safavid period. Al-Jazāʾirī was a prominent transnational Shiʿi intellectual who was bornin the marshlands of Southern Iraq, a leading light of the Akhbārī movement of his time, and major scholar associated with the ḥadīth-based Shiʿi revival of Mullā Muḥammad Bāqir Majlisī (d. 1699). Literary anthologies are of critical importance for understanding, on the one hand, the anthropology of what it meant to be human as well as the wider contours of the cultural, literary and intellectual history of the Safavid period. They represent both a serious engagement and demonstration of literary excellence in the pre-modern and post-classical period, contrary to rather dated notions of the stagnation of the period. Theree themes from the text are analysed: the nature of philosophy, attitudes towards Sufism and mysticism,and the formation of a Safavid Shiʿi cultural identity that was reactive and anti-Sunni and articulated through jokes and light-hearted anecdotes. https://www.academia.edu/1270547/Sayyid_Nimatullah_al-Jazairi_and_Safavid_Shiism In all honesty, I was expecting a lot more from this essay, the author allowed the reader to wet his tongue, but not much more. I am posting it because it gives a glimpse into a type of literature that those of us from non-Arab or Persian backgrounds probably aren't familiar with, and in the footnotes the author references quite a few interesting sounding books and papers.

(salam) I used to think that people innately respect modesty but a couple of years ago it occurred to me that the word 'modest' in the West no longer has a positive connotation. It used to I'm sure, but now it's just... nothing. "Oh you're trying to be modest? Oh okay good luck with that." You will never hear something being advertised as 'modest' in this day and age unless it is specifically targeted to Muslims or conservative Christians/ Jews. And now, amongst Muslims the emphasize is sometimes not even modesty, it's being a hijabi fashionista. Anyway I just started thinking about this after reading this article called Oregon Christian blogger gives up leggings to honor God and husband; sparks international debate. It talks about a woman whose very mild, non controversial blog post about choosing not to wear leggings as pants went viral. Viral?!? I can't believe people feel so threatened by modesty now a day that they have to mock and attack her. I thought this opinion piece in defense of her had a lot of good points There's more in the article if you want to read the whole thing: http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/hey-look-that-woman-is-trying-to-be-modest-lets-all-laugh-at-her-and-call-her-names/ It's just sad, a very sad state of affairs. It is now a threat for a woman to keep her sexuality to herself in public. This also made me think about how often we see Muslim, hijabi women nowaday who wear skinny jeans out in public as part of their hijab. I guess it is tempting to think that since there is technically no skin showing, that you are covered sufficiently but it becomes clear through these articles that something that is tight is not modest enough for hijab. Period. Society would like us to lower our standards of hijab but we have to try to keep our standards as high as possible, God's standards inshaAllah. Any thoughts girls? Or guys?

By Freda Stuffer Quran and Etrat Internet University Abstract: This article is based on a selection of twenty ahadith or narrations from the twelve Imams, may Allah bless them. These narrations trace the path of salvation through a jungle of deceptive worldly distractions. A believer is not deceived by shiny objects and pleasures of this world. A non-believer or a polytheist, on the other hand, can easily be identified. Polytheists or non-believers are recognized by their excessive attachment to things which are temporary and which disappear at the end of this life. Keywords: Narrations, maxims, sayings, hadith, twelve Imams, pleasures of this world, hereafter Introduction: There are some inherent themes throughout the Islamic narrations and resources that have been passed down to us through the ages. A few of these themes clarify the relationship a true believer has with this world and how he or she is distinguished from a polytheist. A polytheist is a person who spends his or her time enjoying the life of this world and trying to gain earthly power through unjust ways. A polytheist or non-believer does not put their faith absolutely in their creator and spend time worshipping Allah or engaging in activities which prepare them for the hereafter. In other words, a polytheist places his or her faith and values in gaining more pleasures of this world and puts their trust in the false gods of power and money in this life. True believers are not deceived by glamorous lifestyles and money for unnecessary luxuries nor do they submit to tyrannical kings who oppress populations. True, monotheistic believers know that it is Allah who created them, Allah whom they worship, and Allah to whom they will return. They know it is Allah who will question them about what they chose to do with the gifts He blessed them with in this life. Subject: Typically, in secular society, a person who is well-off is one with a lot of money and material possessions. However, the school of Ahlul Bayt teaches something else. Imam Ali says that a high education, forbearance, pride (confidence) in one's obedience to Allah, atonement for sins and persistence in doing good deeds are the traits of a person who is well-off. The following saying is recorded in Nahjul Balagha: Imam Ali was asked the meaning of being well-off or well-provided for. Imam Ali replied, "Your welfare does not lie in your having enormous wealth and numerous children but it rests in your being highly educated and forbearing and in your being proud of your obedience to Allah. If you do a good deed then thank Allah for it and if you commit a sin then repent and atone for it. In this world there is a real welfare for two kinds of people, one is the person who, when commits a sin, atones for it and the other is anxious to do good as much as possible. (1) Repentance and doing good deeds, therefore, are two sides of the same coin, in a manner of speaking. If we have not done any good deeds, then repentance is obviously the first step towards making amends. Education on its own is useless without the quality of forbearance. One could be educated to the hilt in all sciences, however, if forbearance is missing from his or her character their education may contribute to their welfare in this life, but not in the next life. In that case there is no real, immortal benefit of being educated at all. Education that really contributes to one’s eternal welfare, that is, in this life and the next, is education that is not separated from the quality of forbearance. In other words, an educated one must also be tolerant in order to obtain real welfare from his or her education. The saying below is also from Nahjol Balagha: Imam Ali's garment was very old with patches on it. When somebody drew his attention towards it, he replied, " Such dresses, when worn by men of status make them submissive to Allah and kind-hearted towards others and the faithful Muslims can conveniently follow the example ". Vicious pleasures of this world and salvation are like two enemies or two roads running in opposite directions or towards opposite poles, one to the North and the other to the South. Whoever likes to gain the pleasures and pomps of this world will hate austerity in life which is necessary to gain salvation. Reverse will be the attitude of a man desirous of achieving Eternal Bliss. One has to adopt either of the two ways of life, and as they both cannot be brought together, a man has to choose one of them. (2) Imam Ali (a.s.) says that salvation and the pursuit of worldly pleasures are antithetical. Here is an example of where free will plays a role in Islam. A person can choose to live a simple, undecorated life and get closer to Allah and ultimately his salvation. A person may also choose the main purpose in his or her life to be for getting as many glamorous clothing, fancy houses and flashy cars as possible while they live. Furthermore, this is the immortal choice which will have lasting effects beyond what any of us could imagine. This is the choice that will determine our eternal life, whether we will arrive safely in heaven or enter into the undesired place. This does not mean that the good things of Allah’s creation are forbidden to us, it simply means that spending all our time trying to gain access to more of Allah’s creation with the intention of squandering it needlessly on ourselves is unacceptable. If we are blessed to acquire more of the good things from Allah’s creation than what we need to meet our personal needs, it is a test. The test is that we are then responsible to see that the excess is distributed among others, especially needy Muslims, who really need it. The second Imam, al-Hasan, peace be upon him, said: "O' Son of Adam! Since the day you left your mother's womb your life has been on the decrease. Therefore, avail yourself of that between your hands for the hereafter, because the believer takes provisions (from this world) and the disbeliever only takes his leisure (from this world)."(3) Here we learn the difference between the qualities of a believer and a disbeliever. The believer is busy with activities that benefit himself in this life and the next life. The disbeliever is unconcerned about activities that benefit him in the next life, his main concern is to enjoy this life while it lasts. He, peace be upon him, also said "If you fail to obtain something of worldly benefit, take it as if the thought of it had never crossed your mind at all."(4) This narration implies that worldly benefits are so worthless that if we miss out on any of them we should not spend time being upset about it. Moreover, we should be oblivious to the existence of any worldly pleasure that we do not acquire for some reason. The third Imam, al-Hussein, peace be upon him, said: "People are slaves to the world, and as long as they live favorable and comfortable lives, they are loyal to religious principles. However, at hard times, the times of trials, true religious people are scarce."(5) In other words, many people are happy to be religious as long as they are getting what they want in life. However, those same individuals will throw religion behind their backs as soon as they feel a little bit uncomfortable or perceive the loss of worldly pleasure and comfort because of their religious principles. He, peace be upon him, also cited: "Praise to God who created the world and made it a mortal, unstable and uncertain house the residents of which keep changing and under going ups and downs , wretched and miserable are those who are deceived by the fleeting and transient pleasures and attractions of this world."(6) Even though some people may devote all of their time and energy to getting and spending they are still unhappy. Eventually their possessions will let them down because they put their faith into the false gods of the world: money and distractions. A believer is one who, due to the grace of Allah, is not deceived by shiny things and dollar signs." The fourth Imam, Ali Zaynul Abideen, peace be upon him taught us through Sahifah Sajadiyah, from The Whispered Prayer of the Complainers: My God, I complain to Thee of an enemy who misguides me and a satan who leads me astray. He has filled my breast with tempting thoughts, and his suggestions have encompassed my heart. He supports caprice against me, embellishes for me the love of this world, and separates me from obedience and proximity!(7) Excessive love of this shifty world is a vice from satan. This prayer shows us how to petition Allah for His nearness and guidance away from the distractions and lies Satan whispers to our hearts. It also helps to inform us that we have the power to ask Allah to change our situations if we wish too. The practice of supplicating Allah teaches us that we have the ability to change Allah’s mind through supplication. This means that our destinies are not mapped out and written in stone from birth. We have free-will in changing our situations through supplication. He, peace be upon him, also taught us through Sahifa Sajadiya, from The Whispered Prayer of the Abstainers: ...dislodge the love of this world from our spirits, just as Thou hast done for the righteous, Thy selected friends, and for the pious, those whom Thou hast singled out!(8) This prayer teaches us that absence of excessive attachment to this world is actually a special favor which Allah bestows on special believers. It also teaches us that we are blessed with the right and free will to ask Allah for the same great favor. Imam Muhammed Baqir, peace be on him, said: "I had a companion. The companion regarded the world as small. Thus, I regarded him as great."(9) The fact has already been established that the absence of excessive love for this world is a favor from Allah. Therefore, when the Imam met someone who regarded this world as something insignificant, he recognized that person as one who was great because of his deep closeness to Allah. Imam Muhammed Baqir, peace be on him, said: "Allah gives this world to both the righteous and the sinners. However, He gives this religion to His close friends only." (10) The Imam meant something like: Allah gave free will to all people. They can choose to take advantage of the material benefits of this life, even to the point of their own destruction. However, true believers recognize the gifts of this world as a test and are not distracted by them. This recognition is a gift which Allah bestows on those who truly seek His nearness, strive to obey Him, and worship Him out of gratitude. Imam Jafar Al-Sadiq, peace be upon him, said: "The desire for the worldly pleasures causes grief and sadness. Abstinence from the worldly pleasures brings about the rest of both heart and body."(11) Greed is an ugly attribute, while its driving passion is based on wanting material things. Greed will let a person down in the end, solely because greed is a form of faith which is placed in a false god. Avoiding or ignoring the loud distractions and shiny objects this world has to offer is a gift and favor from the Unique and true God. In the absence of worldly distractions the spirit can be at peace. When the spirit is at peace, the body and heart find rest. Imam Jafar al-Sadiq, peace be upon him said: Mansoor who had been disappointed after using various means and ways, started deceiving public and tried to manifest and show himself as the real heir of Holy Prophet (P.B.U.H.) and one of the persons fit for the post of Islamic caliphate, on the pretext that he is from the lineage of Abbass (Prophet's uncle) and the family of Prophet (P.B.U.H.). But he knew fully well that he did not have the caliber and capability of this and that post only suited the sons of the Prophet (P.B.U.H.) "the Imams (A.S.)." Imam Sadiq (A.S.) severely and strongly combated against this public deceiving conduct and degraded and disgraced this family through his letters. One day Mansoor wrote to Imam (A.S.) "why do you not come to see me like the others?" Imam (A.S.) wrote in his response. "We do not possess any thing from the world so that we may be afraid of you for it (loss of it). You too do not possess anything for the justice day and the spiritualism so why must I come to see you? The next day Mansoor wrote to Imam (A.S.) "Come here to admonish me." Imam (A.S.) wrote replying him, "whosoever be from the people of the world (adorer of world) will not admonish you and whosoever will be the man of the justice day will not come near you." One of the days Imam (A.S.) was present in the assembly of 'Mansoor'. By chance, a fly started teasing 'Mansoor' and howsoever he tried to make it buzz off it would not and again sat upon his far and head. Mansoor much annoyed as he was, "said to Imam (A.S.), "Why has God created the fly?" Imam (A.S.) at once replied, "For the reason of disgracing and degrading the powerful tyrants through them." 'Mansoor' became annoyed; he sat comfortably on his place and allowed the Imam (A.S.) to leave.(12) This hadith shows us exactly the lack of common ground between a believer and a disbeliever. The disbeliever is all concerned about power, and comfort in this life, which we already know is a manifestation of Satan’s influences. The Believer, on the other hand, is not afraid of him because he knows that what he has or does not have is not controlled by the tyrant who sits on a comfortable seat and surrounds himself with material things and uses his power to force his will on the weak. Furthermore, the believer is not afraid of the disbeliever and is not intimidated by the disbeliever's pompous display of his wealth and glamour nor his attempts to manipulate the believer away from belief. The believer is well aware that if he tossed religion to the wind he, to, could gain access to material wealth and power because then nothing would stop him from exercising all kinds of cheating, dishonesty, aggression and oppression to get what he wants. Therefore, considering the glamour and show of this world as insignificant is one trait that distinguishes a believer from a disbeliever. Imam Musa al-Kadhim, peace be upon him, said: "The supplies of this world and the religion are difficult. Whenever you extend your hand towards any source of the worldly supplies, you will found out that a sinful has preceded you there. When you intend to obtain a source of the religious supplies, you will not find anyone helping you."(13) This narration shows the dilemma of being religious. Regarding worldly supplies, a sinful person has no scruples in taking things he wants no matter how dishonest his means were in taking it. So then when a believer goes through honest ways to acquire something it is often no longer available because a dishonest person snatched it through oppressive means without caring about justice. This hadith also relates to the previous one from Imam Hussein. True religious people are scarce when it comes to sacrificing worldly pleasures. Imam Musa al-Kadhim, peace be upon him, said: O son, let not God see you committing an act of disobedience against which He warned you, and let Him not miss you in an act of obedience to Him of which He ordered you. Keep serious and do not convince yourself that you are worshipping and obeying God perfectly, because no one can achieve perfection in the fields of worshipping God. Beware of joking because it extinguishes the illumination of your faith and disgraces you personality. Beware of indolence and laziness because they both prevent you from receiving your shares of the pleasures of this world and the world to come.(14) An analysis of this saying is that laziness is a vice. It contributes not only to the loss of worldly pleasures, it also contributes to loss in the hereafter. This means that although the pleasures and possessions of this world are worthless, believers may not take this as an excuse to resort to laziness. Working to gain our sustenance and take care of our families and the needy people is also a vehicle which moves us towards worshipping Allah, the Unique. In other words, restricting our worship to prayer and fasting is not enough. Every aspect of our activities and lifestyle can and should be a form of worship. This includes seeking knowledge, teaching, working in honest professions and so on. The important thing is that we do not misuse any of the favors Allah blesses us with by squandering it on worldly attractions and things that will not contribute beneficially to our final destination. Imam Ali al-Ridha, peace be on him, said: "Everyone's friend is his reason; his enemy is his ignorance."(15) Working for knowledge in all fields is important. However, Spiritual knowledge is the most important, for without it we do not have access to every faculty of reasoning that Allah blessed us with. Without full development of the reasoning faculties it becomes easy for satan to deceive people into disbelief through love of this world. Therefore ignorance in all fields is our enemy, but partial ignorance that is a result of avoiding or relaxing one’s education in religion is the worst form of ignorance and creates the most havoc, tyranny, war and oppression in the world. Imam Ali al-Ridha, peace be upon him, said: "This creature (i.e. man) is lonely in three situations: On the day when he is born in the world and sees it, on the day when he dies and sees the next world and its people, and on the day when he is resurrected and sees the rules which he did not see in the world. Allah, the Exalted, greeted Yahya in these three situations and calmed his fear, saying: And peace on him on the day he was born, and on the day he dies, and on the day he is raised to life. 'Isa b. Maryam greeted himself in these three situations, saying: And peace be on me on the day when I was born, and on the day I die, and on the day I am raised to life. "(16) Life in this world is founded on loneliness. Not just loneliness but aloneness with no one but God to give us peace. The day we are born, the day we die and the day when we are resurrected. These three experiences are the loneliest moments in the human being's life. These moments are the most profound moments and these three instances show how deeply we should travel into our knowledge of God in this world. If the thought of their aloneness in these three moments does not move a person closer to God-consciousness, that means they are disbelievers who are unjust to themselves. Imam Muhammed Taqi al-Jawad, peace be upon him, said: "We are only ladling from this world. He whose belief and religion are the same as his acquaintance will surely accompany the acquaintance everywhere. The life to come is surely the remaining abode."(17) This hadith means we should mostly associate with people whose beliefs and religion are the same as ours because we will accompany our friends everywhere, including in the hereafter. So if we associate with bad people it means we are like them, bad, and will find ourselves in their company in the next life." Imam Ali Naqi al-Hadi, peace be upon him, said: "Allah has made this world for testing while He has made the life to come for receiving the result. He has also made the misfortunes of this world the cause of gaining the rewards of the life to come and made the rewards of the life to come as the compensation for the misfortunes of this world."(18) It means something like: the life of this world is like a type of exam, and it is a timed exam. At the end we will see the results of our work, and be awarded according to our deeds. This saying also means that loss, sickness and pain are counted as good deeds for which we did not have to work. so we are rewarded for that too." Imam Hasan al-Askari, peace be upon him, said: "You are plunging into decreased deadlines and limited days. He who sows good will harvest delight and he who sows evil will harvest regret. Each cultivator will gain only what he has cultivated. The slow will not gain but his own share. The acquisitive will not catch that which is not his. The source of every advantage is Allah, and the actual protector from every evil is Allah, too."(19) In other words, this hadith means that we will only receive credit for what we earned. Because Allah is just, He only punishes someone who deserves it, and He rewards only those who cared about pleasing Him while they had the chance to worship and thank Him." Imam al-Mahdi, may Allah bless him and hasten his return, said: "I am Mahdi; I am Qaem (the upriser); I am the one who will establish justice on the earth as it has been filled with injustice."(20) Al-Mahdi said that the world is filled with injustice. What is injustice? Injustice is the absence of justice. That means that all over the world the believers will be experiencing a complete lack of justice. They will be oppressed in every corner of the world, by tyrants. Small individual tyrants and big tyrants who have control over massive populations too. When he returns, he will put an end to injustice. Even the tyrants will somehow get justice for what they earned. But the tyrants will not like the justice they get. The believers will be the satisfied ones at that time." Allah, alone, is worthy of being worshipped! Conclusions: The infallible Imams are consistent in their position regarding the fact that this world is a testing ground. Every gift we acquire from His creation is a test from Allah. Free will plays a role, however, this does not mean that we are free to do as we please without consequences. There is one right choice in every situation and all other choices are incorrect. The Qur’an and the Imams teach us which choice is the right choice, and if we choose to take advantage of our blessing of free will by deliberately choosing other alternatives, our end will not be a happy one. Praise be to Allah, the Imams have expounded the methodology and interpretations of Islam as Prophet Mohammed intended it to be done. They have carefully described the difference between a believer and a non-believer. It is the responsibility of each person to conduct a thorough self-examination, in order to find out if we are guilty of the things that identify us as non-believers or polytheists. If we determine this to be the case we must repent with our whole heart, mind, and soul. If it is not the case then we ought to thank Allah and worship him even more profoundly by trying even harder to accumulate good deeds and improve ourselves and our families and the communities we live in. Allah is the Most Generous. If there is any good in my writing, it comes from Allah. If I have made any mistakes I hope the kind reader will forgive me. I seek only to learn more about Islam and share the results of my learning. References: 1.& 2. Nahjul Balagha 3. & 4. http://www.ezsoftech.com/islamic/infallible4.asp 5. & 6. http://www.sibtayn.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5647:150%20Maxims%20of%20Imam%20Husain%20(A.S)&catid=611&Itemid=694 7. & 8. Sahifah Sajadiyah, aka The Pslams of Islam 9.& 10. http://www.imamreza.net/eng/imamreza.php?id=2734 11. http://www.slideshare.net/almujtaba/20-maxims-by-imam-jafar-alsadiq-as 12. http://www.almujtaba.com/articles/8/000222.html 13. & 14. http://www.maaref-foundation.com/english/library/pro_ahl/imam07_kadim/the_life_of_imam_musa_bin_jafar/20.htm 15. & 16. http://www.imamreza.net/eng/imamreza.php?id=1226 17. http://www.victorynewsmagazine.com/TheNinthHolyImamMuhammadTaqiJawadA.htm 18. http://www.imamreza.net/eng/imamreza.php?id=527 19. http://www.imamreza.net/eng/imamreza.php?id=530 20. http://www.ziaraat.org/mehdi.php#max http://portal.etrat.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=336:the-worldview-of-the-infallibles-twenty-ahadith&catid=169:infallibles&Itemid=89

Whats a good islamic article you have read? Relating to anything in islam (ex. hadith, sins, family, etc.).

(bismillah) In The Name of Allah (SWT) , The Most Beneficent, The Most Merciful. (salam) I hope, and pray, that you are all in the best of health and, more importantly, imaan (faith). So, Christianlady had asked me to recommend a article about Imam Hussein (as) and I was wondering if one of you could, please, please recommend a written Maqtal (although a video would also be fine) of Imam Hussein, which is short and emphasises on the emotional aspect of the tragedy of Karbala? I thank you all in advance. May Allah (SWT) bless us all, our families and loved ones, guide us all to The Straight Path with His Perfect Guidance and may He, The Forgiver of Sins and The Oft-Forgiving, forgive all our sins, for, verily, there is neither any refuge nor any respite for the sinners except in Allah (SWT) .

Salaam, anybody else read “‘More harmful than the Jews’: Anti-Shi‘i Polemics in Modern Radical Sunni Discourse” by M. Litvak, published in Le shi‘isme imamite quarante ans après (2009). thought? With Salaams,