Stoning in Islam: Useful fact

by Hesperado

In case any Muslim apologist (or non-Muslim apologist for Islam) tries to tell you that stoning is “not Islamic” or “not in the Koran”, the following excerpt from a scholarly study on Islamic law may be helpful.

(At the end, below, the reader may find the definitions of several Islamic terms used in the excerpt).

Now here is the excerpt (citation follows at the end):

“…the Islamic penalty for adultery — death by stoning — derived, according to some, from a so-called stoning ‘verse’. That no such ‘verse’ is to be found in the mushaf led to a rejection of stoning by a minority who insisted on the penalty that is to be found at Q. [Koran] 24:2 — one hundred strokes of the lash. The majority of the fuqaha, however, including the founders of the four surviving madhabs, acknowledged the stoning penalty, merely differing as to which had been its source, Qur’an or Sunna.”

Source: “The Exegesis of Q. 2:106 and the Islamic Theories of Nashk…” by John Burton, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Vol. 48, No. 3 (1985), pp. 452-469, published by Cambridge University Press.

Definition of Islamic terms:

fuqaha = the legal scholars who interpret fiqh

fiqh = the body of law as interpreted for implementation in society (i.e., it refers to the exegesis by legal scholars of sharia and its practical application)

mushaf = the Koran (considered as a bound volume)

madhab = school of law (there are four major schools of Islamic law — Maliki, Hanafi, Shafi’i, and Hanbali)

naskh = abrogation (of one verse in the Koran in favor of a later one)

Sunna = the teachings of Mohammed (as derived from the hadiths and Muslim biographies, which together with the Koran becomes the basis for all sharia).

Postscript: The fact that in the 21st century we have to learn this vile excrement makes me existentially sick, and I long for the day such knowledge is relegated to the antiquarian curiosities of dusty anthropology — as, for example, the human sacrifices of the ancient Aztecs.