Deen and peace

Day by day, life is becoming difficult. People no longer have security in their lives, their wealth, their family and their dignity because people are refusing to accept the laws that could have guaranteed the security of people in general.

People are considering the laws such as stoning to death, capital punishment or amputation of the hand to be barbaric. But people do not know that those who consider them as barbarism are doing more than that. Who does not know about the sufferings that the prisoners are undergoing through at their hands. If this is not called barbarism, then it means that there is no barbarism in this world. Despite all this, it seems to them that they have a special dictionary that defines all types of tyrannies and oppressions that they are committing, as justice and peace.

Thus, why must the law of stoning be rejected in the case of rape when this guarantees the security of a whole society? If there were such laws, such lowliness which people have committed with our 2-year-old children or our 70-year-old or 80-year-old mothers would not have existed.

It is thanks to our attitude of tolerance that today we find ourselves in such degradation where our mothers and our sisters are not safe.

To understand the need for such laws, let's study one case:

What should be done with those who have hijacked a plane, full of passengers and are coming to crash it on a strategic point in our country? Should we not interfere with this plane because there are innocent passengers in it or should we crash the plane, if necessary, just so that it does not cause more damage whereby more people lose their lives?

According to Islam, this plane must be crashed. We should not consider the innocent people who may lose their lives in this operation because it secures and guarantees the lives of the vast majority by sacrificing a minority. And we do not think that there is a certain law that may suggest something different in such a case. The same philosophy applies to all the laws that have been established by the Shari’ah. That is, it advocates very severe punishments for criminals who are in the minority in order to grant security to the greater majority. At this stage, we must understand that if the Shari’ah has imposed very severe punishments, it has also imposed very strict conditions in order to apply these punishments. Sometimes, a mere doubt is sufficient to waive off the penalty.

Nowadays, if Insaan is living in insecurity and fear, it is himself who is guilty because he has always tolerated the guilty ones and he has chosen to live in such a state by turning his back to the law of Allah Ta’ala.

[English version of "Deen et la paix" – Al Jamiat – Vol.4 No.13]