: Dying for a Consensus on Capital Punishment

It says in the Qur’an that the taking of an innocent life is like the killing of all mankind. It also lays out scenarios in which the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for a crime. While most Muslims accept the principle of a death penalty, the application of that principle in today’s world isn’t that clear. Despite popular impressions to the contrary, Muslim penal law is ordered to be free of any spirit of vengeance or torture. But aside from obvious cases like murder, the death penalty in the Muslim world is applied to everything from apostasy (in Taliban-held Afghanistan) to being Sunni or Shia (arbitrarily, in Pakistan) to offending Muslims (remember Salman Rushdie?) to wearing a hijab (in Turkey). In the US, the recent trial and conviction of Imam Jamil Al-Amin has led many Muslims to question the death penalty. It’s the application of the death penalty in such arbitrary, overtly political, and public ways that is leading some (including Shaykh Hamza Yusuf of the Zaytuna Institute) to say that Islam is against the death penalty, at least as it is applied today in the Muslim world, arguing that “the measure of proof is so difficult that (the likelihood of a death sentence) is practically nullified.”

Shahed Amanullah is editor-in-chief of altmuslim.com.