ROBERT F. WORTH ESSAY


Stoning may be one of the oldest forms of execution in the world, and it is certainly among the most barbaric.

Two recent cases have drawn world attention. In mid-August, a young couple was stoned to death in Afghanistan for trying to elope, a grim sign of the Taliban’s resurgence. In July, an international campaign arose in defense of an Iranian woman who had been sentenced to death by stoning on adultery charges.

Much of the outrage those cases generated - apart from the sheer anachronism of stoning in the 21st century - seems to stem from the gulf between attitudes in the West and parts of the Islamic world, where some movements have turned to draconian punishments, and a vision of restoring a long-lost past, in their search for religious authenticity.

The stoning of adulterers was once aimed at preventing illegitimate births that might muddy the male tribal bloodlines of medieval Arabia. But it is now taking place in a world where more and more women demand reproductive freedoms, equal pay and equal status with men, including in parts of the Islamic world.

Those clashing perspectives became apparent in July when Brazil offered to grant asylum to the Iranian woman convicted of adultery. The case became an embarrassment to the Iranian government, which values its warm diplomatic ties with Brazil. The Iranian authorities quickly redefined her crime as murder, in an apparent effort to legitimize their case against her. She still may be stoned or hanged.

The Taliban defined themselves in the 1990s with their incredibly harsh and widely disputed version of Islamic law, under which stonings for adultery became common. The stoning in August, by hundreds of villagers in Kunduz Province, indicated where Afghanistan may be headed.

“There is no way to say how many stonings took place, but it was widespread” when the Taliban ruled, said Nader Nadery, a senior commissioner on the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. “Often the man escaped, and the woman only was punished, especially if he had connections or was a member of the Taliban.”

Stoning is not practiced only among Muslims, nor did it begin with Islam. Human rights groups say a young girl was stoned to death in 2007 in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Yazidi community, which practices an ancient Kurdish religion. The Old Testament includes an episode in which Moses arranges for a man who violated the Sabbath to be stoned, and stoning probably took place among Jewish communities in the ancient Near East. Rabbinic law, which was composed starting in the first century A.D., specifies stoning as the penalty for a variety of crimes.

Some Muslims complain that stoning is too often sensationalized in the West to smear the reputation of Islam generally. Most of these severe punishments are carried out by the Taliban and other radicals who, many Islamic scholars say, have little real knowledge of Islamic law.

Stoning is a legal punishment in only a handful of Muslim countries - Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and Nigeria, but it is very rarely used.

Stoning is not prescribed by the Koran. The punishment is rooted in Islamic legal traditions that designate it as the penalty for adultery. While the penalty may seem savage to the West , scholars say it is consistent with the values of Arabian society at the time of Muhammad, Islam’s founding prophet.

Adultery “was considered to offend some of the fundamental purposes of Islamic law: to protect lineage, family, honor and property,” said Kristen Stilt, an associate professor at Northwestern University who has written about Islamic law. That may help explain the link between sexual crimes and stoning, as opposed to another form of execution. A crime that seemed to violate the community’s identity called for a communal response.

Iranian leaders are clearly uneasy about stoning, which has helped to darken their country’s reputation.

Iranian lawyers who have been involved in such cases say that as many as 100 stonings have been carried out since the revolution, but that the practice was becoming less common.

Currently at least 10 people are in Iranian jails under stoning sentences, seven women and three men, he added.

There is a vigorous domestic campaign against stoning in Iran, largely led by women.

In Afghanistan, stoning seems to be on the rise, despite its unpopularity.

“You do see an increase in these so-called applications of justice by the Taliban in morality cases,” Mr. Nadery said. “Over the last seven months, 200 people have been killed for showing disapproval or criticizing actions by the Taliban.”


MARKUS SCHREIBER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
An Iranian sentence of death by stoning, given recently to a woman accused of adultery, led to protests like this one in Berlin. Iran changed the women’s crime to murder and she still faces execution.