by Ahmad Saeid

Created on: December 21, 2008

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,

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