ABSTRACT
Most of the details in the Qur’an about punishment deal with the next world, not this one, but in the media a great deal of attention is paid to the strict physical punishments that exist for a series of offenses. Is this justified? There is good reason to think it is in the sense that if a legal system has very different laws from the norm in most countries, then we need to look at the rationale for those laws. In Islamic law a distinction is made between three broad categories of offense, hadd, ta‘zir and qisas. The concept of hadd is there to deal with the worst crimes and are mentioned in the Qur’an, whereas ta‘zir are milder, and qisas represents acts for which compensation and restitution is possible, and indeed desirable.
