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Hadith On Death Penalty For Apostasy And Adultery
According to Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, there is no death penalty for apostasy and stoning for adultery. But there are some hadiths that say Prophet Muhammad ﷺ allowed killing for three crimes: Apostasy, Adultery and Qisas
Narrated Abdullah: Allah’s Messenger (ﷺ) said, “The blood of a Muslim who confesses that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that I am His Apostle, cannot be shed except in three cases: In Qisas for murder, a married person who commits illegal sexual intercourse and the one who reverts from Islam (apostate) and leaves the Muslims.”
Abu Umamah bin Sahl bin Hunaif narrated that on the day of siege, ‘Uthman bin ‘Affan stood overlooking the people, and he said:“I swear to you by Allah! You know that the Messenger of Allah (s.a.w) said: ‘The blood of a Muslim man is not lawful, except for one of three (cases):Illegitimate sexual relations after Ihsan (having been married), or apostasy after Islam, or taking a life without right, for which he is killed.’ By Allah! I have never committed illegitimate sexual relations, not during Jahiliyyah nor during Islam, and I have not committed apostasy since I gave my pledge to the Messenger of Allah (s.a.w), and I have not taken a life that Allah had made unlawful. So for what do you fight me?”‘
How should these hadiths be understood?
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Hadith On Death Penalty For Apostasy And Adultery
updated 11 hours, 29 minutes ago
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Apostasy is not a different crime. It was the same kufr. The punishment for kufr in the time of the holy prophet was death, because the Prophet had completed Hujjah on them.
Learn the concept of the Law of Itmam e Hujjah in Ghamidi discourse.
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These ahadith mentions both apostasy and adultery in one sentence. So even if we understand apostasy here as itmam e hujjah, how to approach the adulterers part of these ahadith?
And these ahadith specifically mentioned killing married adulterers.
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This reply was modified 1 day, 10 hours ago by
Jubair Ahmed.
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This reply was modified 1 day, 10 hours ago by
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Javed Ghamidi sahab said in his videos that stoning punishment was carried out for the adulterers who were causing fasad al ard. And that argument is understandable for the ahadith that mention the incident of stonings of the man from Bani Aslam or the woman from Ghamid tribe.
But these 2 narrations specifically say killing a Muslim for adultery is permissible if he/she is married, does not mention fasad fi al ard. Fasad al ard also contains robbery, armed attack, terrorism etc but none of those crimes were mentioned here, it only mentioned married adulterers, the “married” word specifically
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Hadith reports are summaries of events, and narrators do not necessarily mention every detail. They typically describe what they consider the most relevant aspects of the incident. As a result, we do not possess a complete record of all the proceedings in every case.
Being married was one of the factors that contributed to the act being classified as fasād fī al-arḍ (corruption in the land), but it was not the only factor.
I would encourage you to study Ghamidi saheb’s complete argument in his books and videos. The answers to these objections have been provided there.
Read his articles on Rajm:
https://www.javedahmadghamidi.com/books/5aa66af75e891e8f44a44105?chapterNo=2&lang=ur-
Thank you for the link. I can’t read Urdu so I had to translate it to English using chatgpt. He mentions the hadith in chapter 2
The third report is narrated in Sunan al-Nasa’i from the Mother of the Believers, Sayyidah ʿA’ishah, in these words:
“The Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him, said: ‘The blood of a Muslim person is not lawful except in one of three cases: a married adulterer, who is to be stoned; a man who kills another intentionally, who is to be killed in retaliation; or a man who leaves Islam and wages war against Allah, the Mighty and Majestic, and His Messenger, who is to be killed, crucified, or exiled from the land.’” (No. 4053)Then he wrote this about the original Arabic words used in this hadith and other hadiths that mention stoning married adulterers:
The second issue that emerges from these cases is that the Prophet’s investigation into whether the offender was married is also generally expressed with the same word “ihsan,” about which we have already explained that in Arabic it is not used solely for marriage. There is no doubt that in some reports the word “thayyib” is also used for this purpose, but since this difference itself shows that a strict word-for-word transmission was not followed in narrating the incident, we now have no way of knowing what word the Prophet himself used on that occasion. Therefore, stoning as punishment being given merely because the offender was married cannot be established definitively from these case accounts any more than from the reports of this chapter.
The third thing that becomes evident from these reports is that the style adopted in them for presenting a law as severe as stoning is extremely vague and very unclear. For example, in the first report the punishment is given for married with married and unmarried with unmarried adultery, but if an unmarried man commits adultery with a married woman, or a married man with an unmarried woman, what should the punishment be? There is no mention of this in the report. The opening sentence of the report also creates the impression that perhaps only the punishment of female adulterers is being mentioned. Then the words “al-bikr bil-bikr” and “al-thayyib bil-thayyib” that appear in this report are, in terms of Arabic usage, also questionable for the meaning commonly understood from them. Likewise, the words “ihsan” and “muhsan”, which are used in the second and third reports for “marriage” and “married,” are known to every Arabic speaker to be used in Arabic not only in the sense of marriage, but also in contrast to slavery as “freedom” and “free person,” and in contrast to “lack of chastity” as “chaste” and “a chaste person.” After the Prophet’s mission, lexicographers explicitly stated that these words were also used in the sense of “Islam” and “Muslim.” Arabic does have words that are used only for “marriage” and “married,” but it is strange that in presenting a law that would lead to a human being being subjected to the severe punishment of stoning, ambiguous words with multiple possible meanings were used without any contextual indication. So if someone, for example, interprets “zina after ihsan” to mean adultery after becoming free, what in the wording of the report would prevent this meaning? Such is the reality of these reports from which a change in the Qur’anic ruling is derived and a law of stoning for the married adulterer is extracted. Consider this ambiguity and contradiction, and then decide whether, for a human being, even if one were to formulate a law for slaughtering a mosquito in this manner, any rational person could accept it.
I’m leaving this comment so that if someone in the future have this same question, they can easily find it.
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This reply was modified 1 day, 1 hour ago by Jubair Ahmed.
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This reply was modified 1 day, 1 hour ago by Jubair Ahmed.
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This reply was modified 1 day, 1 hour ago by
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You can learn about opinion from his video lectures:
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