Are Islamic punishments just or harsh?

Just

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by Ahmad Saeid

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There ain't no punishment in Islam

To truly understand punishment in Islam, we need to consider a few factors:

First of all, the human is not just a physical existence, the human is the master piece of Allah, it's beautifully complicated, and it's meticulously balanced.

The way I understand human is that it's like the balance , in one end the body which we see, in the other end the soul, we can't physically see it, but we know it's there, because when it leaves the body it dies, and in the middle, the mind, not the brain, but the mind, it's the thing we use to decide what side is going to take over, the soul or the body, in every particular decision we make throughout our lives.

Now in many civilizations and religions we know about body and soul, each one pulling the humans to its side, and the mind in the middle, but yet the mind is not one piece, yes physically too, but we have conscious and subconscious, each working according to different rules, one for the emotions and one for logic, and this beautiful system is in charge of making decision whether to follow the body, or to follow the soul.

The soul has its own "software"- the beliefs, the love, the craving to the creator, and that "software" is trying to take us to the right direction, and to bring us closer to Allah.

In the other hand, the instincts are the "software" of the body, its implanted in it to keep it alive, both on personal level and as a humanity in total, and when we make a crime, the instinct is taking over the mind and the soul, and you can't stop it without using a "higher level" instinct, for example: Imagine a man who's trying to rape a woman, and his eyes are blinded with lust, now he knew that he might go to jail for raping her, but this information just doesn't speak to him at this moment, it just doesn't stop him, at this moment an instinct is taking over, and it cannot be stopped with an "idea" of being in the jail, because it doesn't move any instinct, but what he will do if he knew that this woman is AIDS infected? Here a higher instinct takes over another, to stop him from committing a crime, that's exactly how the philosophy of Islamic "punishment" works, it speaks to the "violence" in the language that it can understand it with: "don't kill or you will be killed!" this is the kind of information that can reach the enraged person, in a sound that he can actually hear.

According to this division of human into 3 parts we can truly understand why Allah created us, in my humble opinion, the reasons why we was created may include the following :

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Because Allah previously had created animals, who worshiped Him just by following the core instincts He implanted in them, and also created the Angles, who worshiped him because they was programmed to obey Him, they was pure souls, who craved only following His rules and nothing more. He also had the devils, who are sinners by nature, and then He created humans, who are a mix of animals and angels, bodies and souls, instincts and beliefs, and He gave them minds in order to decide to worship Him by their own well.

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Because Allah is a creator, and He wanted to create the world as beautiful as we all witness.

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Because Allah is generous, and He wanted to give us existence, as a gift (notice that there was nothing before Allah decided to gift existence to everything that exists).

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Because Allah is merciful, and He created us to forgive us.

Lots of reasons actually, but this is not our aim in this article, what I wanted to say is, that everything Allah created is going by a rule, gravity, sunrise, water circulation in the planet, Amazon layer and the whole universe is going like the clock, because it's forced and programmed to work like this, and we are the only thing that has the freedom to decide to live according to what He told us, and we have the rules, we have the "manual", the "user guide", and that's the "game" that is life, we have body, and soul,
there's life and death, there's heaven and hell, there's the rules we should follow, and the choices we make, with the knowledge we have, isn't it just beautiful!

The freedom I'm talking about is the ultimate freedom, the core freedom, the freedom to worship the only God that gave us existence, the freedom that we was born with, to choose to listen or not to listen, to read or not to read (the first word of the Quran was "Read" by the way).

This freedom we have is not unlimited, no freedom is unlimited, we are not free to kill, or to harm other people or even ourselves, because our lives does not belong to us, it's His property, therefore, when we look at punishment in Islam, we can clearly see that the punishment is there to prevent us from crossing those lines, from stealing, from killing, from conducting an adultery, from harming anything on this planet including ourselves, these punishments are to protect us from even ourselves, from our instincts, not to mention that it will protect us as a society in general, and the example is there, go now through the internet and try to find out the rate of crime in USA for example, and compare it to that in KSA, where they use the Islamic punishment, and you will find out how this system is working in practice.

I know a lot of people will ask me like: now if you will steal, do you prefer the authorities to cut your hand, or to put you in jail?

My answer is: off course I prefer to go to jail, that's why if I will be in a country where they cut hands for stealing I WILL NEVER STEAL. Not that I will steal in other countries J but just think about it, would you do it?

The punishment is here to prevent crimes from happening, not to "punish" the people who did them.

Now you may say that: what if the person is hungry, and he had to steal? In Islam, if you steal because you are hungry, no one will cut your hand, furthermore, in order to use this low, there should be another low in force, which is Zakat, and that's giving 2.5% of any money, that you didn't had to use for a whole year to the poor people, once a year. That's even less than the taxes people pay in most countries, and that's if you haven't used that money for one year.

Only after taking that money from the rich people, and giving it to the poor ones, which is considered one of their rights, only then we can cut the hand of that who steals, if he didn't steal to eat, if there will still be anyone who can't eat.

A lot of people think that we don't have the right to kill the killers, since only that who gave life is entitled to take it, and I couldn't agree more, and this rule works even on the killer, he didn't create the person he killed, so he doesn't have the right to kill him, and we don't have the right to kill the killer without an order from His creator, and once we know that Allah is the creator of the universe, and that Quran is his rules that he sent to people to "choose" to follow or not to follow, and that this ability to choose is the same thing that gives us the privilege of being rewarded with heaven for obedience or being punished with hill for disobedience, the same God who created us told us to kill that who kills in order to prevent people from killing each other, or at least to minimize the killing "And there is life for you in retaliation, O men of understanding" (Quran, 02-179).

We can speak in other place about how we know exactly that Allah is the only God, or about the fact that Quran is the actual words of the creator, but here let me conclude with this:

Killing is not a strange thing in nature, even the ants kill the one that gives wrong information for the others according to one research, they put a piece of food in a place, and an ant found it, and it went to tell the others about it's place, while it went there they removed the food, and when they came there was no food, so they went back, and after repeating the same procedure two times, the ants kill the one they thought it was lying, and even later they put that piece of food in that place and when they found it, they mourned the ant they killed.

So why it's considered to be weird if the laws of Allah, the same creator of ants and humans, gives the right to kill those who commit crimes to ant's, who don't have any mind or courts or investigators or lawyers or evidences and fingerprint and cameras and all other advanced technology, and let us the smart beings commit crimes as we wish without being "punished"!

Isn't it just weird that we always defend the killers, and never try to protect the victims, the next victim that we could've protected it's life by killing this "killer" so that the next one won't kill! Allah chooses to kill the killer, and let the victim survive, but those who are miss leaded, who think they work for human rights defend only the rights of the killers, and never the victims! That's harsh!

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