5 - Islamic criminal law today

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In 1972 Mu῾ammar al-Gaddafi surprised the world by announcing that he had reintroduced the Shari῾a provisions on theft and banditry, making these offences punishable by amputation. Observers of the Arab and Muslim world were puzzled, since this return to Islamic criminal law did not fit with the prevailing modernisation theories that were based on the assumption of a continuous and unstoppable spread of secularisation. Most of these observers regarded Islamic criminal law as something of the past, enforced only in traditional countries such as Saudi Arabia, where, they believed, it would in due course disappear under the influence of modernity. No one expected that Gaddafi would inaugurate a trend and that from the 1970s more Muslim countries would adopt Islamic penal codes.

This chapter deals with the role of Islamic criminal law today. In section 5.2 I will deal with the application of Islamic criminal law in Saudi Arabia, as a typical example of a state where Islamic criminal law has continuously been implemented and where conservative religious scholars have effectively barred attempts to codify it. The main focus of this chapter, however, is on the reintroduction of Islamic criminal law. In section 5.3 I will deal with those countries where Islamic criminal law was grafted onto a legal system that was essentially Western. For each country, I will briefly sketch the political circumstances surrounding the introduction of Islamic criminal law and then discuss the contents of these laws, their conformity with classical Islamic criminal law doctrine, and their enforcement.