Islamic Law and Penology CHAPTER V

From the time of the Prophet, Islam has been a religion of faith in action. Islam does not seek to set religion and its ideals off in a separate mental chapel, set away from the rest of life. Instead, the symbol of Islam might be the prayer rug, the place of worship which the worshipper can carry with him through the course of his daily life. Islam teaches its believers to follow the path of righteousness day by day in their social relations with others.

Islam thus has, in principle, a public and "political" component. And indeed, the early Muslim community was a political entity as well as a community of faith. Its law, Shari'a, evolved in the first instance as a practical law, designed to apply both religious principles and common sense to the problems  from business disputes to family law to crime and punishment  that arose in the community of the faithful.

Because it is a practical law as well as a law rooted in religious principles,

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, the safety of the public and the rights of the accused are protected in theory by the strictest of safeguards, while humanrights abuses are widespread in practice. Western and Muslim differences in philosophy of criminal justice, and their differing views of what constitute appropriate penalties for particular crimes, thus might seem to be of little practical importance. The real problem of criminal justice and penology in the Third World, we suggested in the last chapter, is the problem of creating legitimate government. Only those governments which are firmly rooted in the beliefs and ideals of the people they govern can ever hope to adhere to high judicial standards. For unstable governments, justice must always take second place to security. We suggested, therefore, that the spread of Islamic government though the Muslim world would tend to favor the improvement of humanrights conditions in the long run. Even where Western critics might disagree with certain elements of Islamic criminal law, most would greatly prefer to see a legal system that called for strict norms of procedure and high standards of evidence in preference to the arbitrary police power commonly found in the Middle East today. Yet
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Approximate Word count = 3764
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)