In the Name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful
Extract from QUR’AANIC
STUDIES – A Modern Tafsir PART I:
178. Ya ayyuha allatheena
amanoo kutiba AAalaykumu alqisasu
fee alqatla alhurru bialhurri waalAAabdu bialAAabdi waalontha bialontha faman AAufiya lahu min akheehi shay-on faittibaAAun
bialmaAAroofi waadaon ilayhi bi-ihsanin thalika
takhfeefun min rabbikum warahmatun famani iAAtada baAAda thalika
falahu AAathabun aleemun
2:178. O you who believe!
Prescribed for you, is the capital punishment in the matter of murdered
persons. If a free man, a slave/servant or a female commits the crime, this
prescribed punishment would accordingly be applicable only to that free man,
that slave/servant or that female, respectively. But where the guilty person’s
fellow citizen concerned commutes the sentence, the commutation must be
adequately implemented, and the guilty person must fulfil the terms of
commutation in good measure. That is a remission from your Lord, and His grace!
Then whoever transgresses thereafter – for him shall there be a painful
punishment.293 to 296
293. Advocates of abolition of capital punishment,
beware! You cannot change what the Creator Himself has laid down. But it should
well be noted that, in the light of Verse 4:92, capital punishment would be
applied only to cases of intentional murder, and not to killing by
mistake. And, of course, it is not applicable to killings in a war.
294. The Arabic al-quisuaasu basically means
retaliation – a tit-for-tat response. In the context of an intentional murder,
therefore, I have rendered the Arabic word as 'capital punishment' in the
translation.
295. Literally translated, the second sentence of the
Verse would look like, 'The free man, to the free man ...' In the context of
the first sentence, it would obviously mean, 'If the murder is committed by a
free man, the capital punishment would be meted out to that free man ...' To
avoid any mistake in and consequent misconception of a literal rendering, a
free renderiong is done, as in the second sentence of this English translation
of the Verse.
296. In some translations, the Arabic term min
akheehi occurring in this Verse, is so rendered as to mean 'the murdered
person's brother'. But there is no justification for relating the possessive
pronoun hi (his) here to the murdered person, as he/she (the murdered
person) is not mentioned earlier in this Verse or in the immediately preceding
Verses. The murderer, on the other hand, is mentioned. And it would be
blasphemous to expect a mistake in a divine script. Moreover, akhee, in
Qur'aanic terminology, does not necessarily mean only the close blood
relationship of a brother. It often means (as for example in Verse 27:45) a
fellow human of the same group, community or nation. Min akheehi would
therefore mean any human being, duly authorised by the community, in which the
murder is committed, to examine the case and pronounce his judgement or grant
commutation of the death penalty. I have hence rendered min akheehi as
'the guilty person's fellow citizen concerned' in the translation. Besides,
this divine provision for commutation, it may be noted, would take care of
cases of murder committed, inter alia, under intense provocation.
Friday, the 6th of
March 2020.
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