Quran Lessons
This is Our Religion, Part 13
The Boundaries
Has Islam set for each mistake an urgent penalty? Of course not, there are a lot of errors people commit and are not faced with anything more than reprimand and scolding or guidance and advice.
Take disbelieving, which Islam considers one of the biggest mistakes and the worst atrocity of all.
Islam doesn�t punish a disbeliever with a certain punishment.
It only considers such a person a faulty one, but what can Islam do for him as long as his belief is not urging him to hurt or harm others?
He would live with other Muslims, guarded and secured!
There are a lot of other mistakes like ungratefulness to parents, and usury. Islam considers these mistakes abominable crimes. Despite that Islam didn�t put special penalties for them.
Crimes that Islam is steadfast against and doesn�t leave them for people to set their punishments are: Murder, Adultery, Defamation, and Intoxication.
These crimes were left for Allah and His messenger to discipline those who commit them and the extent of punishment set upon them.
We in our turn - sufferers from the wolves of honors, money and blood - know the range of justice achieved by abiding to these supreme Divine orders.
Apparently not a lot of people are aware about when to apply the boundaries of Allah or to punish those mistaken.
If they had known the truth they would be contented with Allah�s Laws and would realize that it is Justice and Mercy altogether.
Man is a sinner by nature, and his sins are not alike in the amount of harm done to him or to the society.
And here there are two privileged rights to be considered:
The right of the faulty person in having a chance to repent and to seek a clearer path.
And the right of the society in sustaining its entity from the whims of the blindfolded and from jumbling that harm the innocent and the inattentive.
Islam guarantees both rights and doesn�t allow looking upon one of them away from the other.
As for the right of the faulty to repent, there is no religion on earth that facilitates repentance for sinners like Islam does.
But what if one of these sinners turned into wild dogs? Leaving them free would make grow but wilder and the society would suffer harder.
Punishment for such people is unavoidable!
Muslims have agreed that Boundaries (Penalties) confirmed by the book (Quran) and the Sunna (Way of the Prophet pbuh) must be carried out and there are seven of them which we�ll talk about them as follows:
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(1-2)
Cutting the thief�s hand and
The punishment of armed Robbers.
Stabilization of security in society is one of the greatest blessings of all.
How great it is for people to move as they may, without having to worry for their lives, money or honor!
When Ibraheem (Abraham) asked Allah in his Duaa (supplication) for the city he had established he asked for two things, a guaranteed sustenance and a stable security and he asked for security prior to sustenance in his Duaa to Allah:
And remember Abraham said: "My Lord, make this a City of Peace, and feed its People with fruits' such of them as believe in Allah and the Last Day." He said: "(Yea), and such as reject Faith, for a while will I grant them their Pleasure, but will soon drive them to the torment of Fire, an evil destination (indeed)! [2:126]
And for security to prevail and for every human being to feel assured Allah set many rules and of the most important among them is the penalty for theft.
Stealing is a crime worthy of tracking and extirpation.
Its mere presence is a cause for hardship and concern so how will it be if it was widespread and common.
Imagine a hard working man who works all month long to provide income for him and his family. He gets his salary eagerly and heads back home thinking of the many bills waiting to be paid. On the way a criminal hand stretches out to steal what he has earned.
What can he say or do? How could such a thief be left to collect in moments what others had worked for, for days?
I personally know an employee who went abroad for a year or two, just to be able to build a house for him to marry, but all of a sudden thieves came to this house to turn it upside down and took away what this man has been saving for years.
Another one is a farmer who sold his crop but didn�t have the chance to benefit from his earnings because thieves took them away from him!
And so a malicious unemployed home-sitter eats out from the earnings of a hard working employee.
These mean smart thieves steal others' money and then would spend it extravagantly in fulfilling their desires recklessly because they didn�t work for earning it.
Then it is not weird for a respectable society to seek to rid itself from these kinds and would set for such people a penalty that would decapitate them from the society and would frighten any one trying to follow their steps.
Hands in Islam�s view are three kinds:
A working hand; and this hand has the right to be rewarded, protected and encouraged. It is of its rights to be secured in its quest and to enjoy without any intrusion form others.
An unemployed hand; and it is from its rights to be able to find the work that would keep it busy. Reasons of honest earning should be provided for it as a natural right in this life and not to force it to seek for sustenance through begging or stealing.
The last kind is a corrupted hand; a hand that declined from honest working and turned to harming people. A hand, which treating it was so difficult despite the abundance in religious teachings that urge for lawfulness and rebuke the forbidden.
What would Islam do to such a hand less than cutting in order to relieve both its owner and the society from its corruption?
We refer the question to those who want to keep this hand in place and refuse to rid us from it, what is the purpose of leaving it?
They might reply, we want to stop it from its corruption in putting it to jail for a while then we would let it go.
We answer, the moment it�s out of prison it would turn back to stealing and harming the others, should it be left forever?
Not a person who cares about people and jealous on their ethical and physical dignity would do that!
The issue for us to wait or postpone the penalty is not the place of disagreement between us and those who rebel against Islamic penalty system.
Because in religion the penalty is not carried out except after the judge's conscience is completely assured to what he is ruling out.
And the judge will not rule on an embarrassed hungry person or in a case where suspicion hovers around it.
The hand to be cut is the one that committed injustice to society not the one oppressed by it.
Allah said:
As to the thief, male or female, cut off his or her hands: a punishment by way of example, from Allah, for their crime: and Allah is Exalted in Power. Full of Wisdom. But if the thief repents after his crime, and amends his conduct, Allah turneth to him in forgiveness; for Allah is Oft Forgiving, Most Merciful. [5:38-39]
In the countries that carried out the penalty of cutting the thief�s hand things settled down and complete security and assurance prevailed.
Cutting one hand spared the country the reason for opening too many jails in which criminals are fattened then released to the society crueler and wilder than before.
Adding to this that robbing others' money is an expanding and growing crime that might end up in killing others with no right.
And it is so easy for a thief to kill those who might interrupt his way during his theft whether they were security officers or owners of the money being stolen.
Thieves commonly cooperate among each other to reach their common ends and from this point highway robbers are formed or others that share completing works of spoliation and plunder.
Normally prisons are schools for the teaching and planning of these crimes.
It is normal also for the penalty to double according to the severity of the crime done.
We often hear about armed robberies on cars, trains, stores and fields but the weird thing about this is that some people feel some sympathy with these criminals and try their hard to lessen their punishment.
In my turn I have so much suspicion in the conscience of these defenders to the extreme that urges me to say:
Only a thief would sympathies with another thief and only a killer would sympathize with another killer.
Islam in its turn has put an end for this leniency in punishing those reckless criminals.
Allah said:
The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter; Except for those who repent before they fall into your power: in that case, know that Allah is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful. [5:33-34]
And here we need to state three matters:
First, keeping and protecting people�s money is a must in addition to the rejection of those desiring to take them through twisted ways.
Celestial boundaries are an assured guarantee for that.
Second, there is no place for mercy for those who arouse chaos, and waste the rights of others.
Leaving those people alone is like opening doors of suffering on the whole society and a seduction towards oppression and values degradation.
Third, when the diversion is an accidental error, you find the legislator to be among the first of those who ask for mercy, and facilitate repentance.
The legislator is the one with the rule that says it is better for the judge to commit a mistake in pardoning someone than to commit a mistake in punishing another.
But the difference is wide between disabling boundaries and being accurate when applying them.
There are a group who lie and say:
Cutting off the hands of thieves has created a group of disabled unemployed people. This saying is a strange impudence because cutting through 14 centuries benefited and didn�t harm to the extent that the society seldom felt of it.
That is because fear from cutting alone drove thieves away from stealing and urged them to seek lawful ways of earning.
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