What exactly is Qisas/just retribution?

[Serinity]

:salam:

What is it? Idk where to gain Islamic knowledge.

And Allah :swt: knows best.

[darkbro]

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا كُتِبَ عَلَيْكُمُ الْقِصَاصُ فِي الْقَتْلَى ۖ الْحُرُّ بِالْحُرِّ وَالْعَبْدُ بِالْعَبْدِ وَالْأُنثَىٰ بِالْأُنثَىٰ ۚ فَمَنْ عُفِيَ لَهُ مِنْ أَخِيهِ شَيْءٌ فَاتِّبَاعٌ بِالْمَعْرُوفِ وَأَدَاءٌ إِلَيْهِ بِإِحْسَانٍ ۗ ذَٰلِكَ تَخْفِيفٌ مِّن رَّبِّكُمْ وَرَحْمَةٌ ۗ فَمَنِ اعْتَدَىٰ بَعْدَ ذَٰلِكَ فَلَهُ عَذَابٌ أَلِيمٌ
وَلَكُمْ فِي الْقِصَاصِ حَيَاةٌ يَا أُولِي الْأَلْبَابِ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَتَّقُونَ

O you who have believed, prescribed for you is legal retribution for those murdered - the free for the free, the slave for the slave, and the female for the female. But whoever overlooks from his brother anything, then there should be a suitable follow-up and payment to him with good conduct. This is an alleviation from your Lord and a mercy. But whoever transgresses after that will have a painful punishment.
And there is for you in legal retribution [saving of] life, O you [people] of understanding, that you may become righteous.

(2: 178-179)

Isnt that clear enough for a brief description?

[Serinity]

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا كُتِبَ عَلَيْكُمُ الْقِصَاصُ فِي الْقَتْلَى ۖ الْحُرُّ بِالْحُرِّ وَالْعَبْدُ بِالْعَبْدِ وَالْأُنثَىٰ بِالْأُنثَىٰ ۚ فَمَنْ عُفِيَ لَهُ مِنْ أَخِيهِ شَيْءٌ فَاتِّبَاعٌ بِالْمَعْرُوفِ وَأَدَاءٌ إِلَيْهِ بِإِحْسَانٍ ۗ ذَٰلِكَ تَخْفِيفٌ مِّن رَّبِّكُمْ وَرَحْمَةٌ ۗ فَمَنِ اعْتَدَىٰ بَعْدَ ذَٰلِكَ فَلَهُ عَذَابٌ أَلِيمٌ
وَلَكُمْ فِي الْقِصَاصِ حَيَاةٌ يَا أُولِي الْأَلْبَابِ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَتَّقُونَ

O you who have believed, prescribed for you is legal retribution for those murdered - the free for the free, the slave for the slave, and the female for the female. But whoever overlooks from his brother anything, then there should be a suitable follow-up and payment to him with good conduct. This is an alleviation from your Lord and a mercy. But whoever transgresses after that will have a painful punishment.
And there is for you in legal retribution [saving of] life, O you [people] of understanding, that you may become righteous.

(2: 178-179)

Isnt that clear enough for a brief description?

I don't understand. What does "free for the free" mean??

[darkbro]

I don't understand. What does "free for the free" mean??

Free means non-slave.

Hopefully someone knows better and can explain it.

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[aaj]

Not really a fan of wiki as a reliable source, but it will suffice for now:


It is a category of crimes in Islamic jurisprudence, where Sharia allows equal retaliation as the punishment. Qisas principle is available against the accused, to the victim or victim's heirs, when a Muslim is murdered, suffers bodily injury or suffers property damage.In the case of murder, Qisas means the right of a murder victim's nearest relative or Wali (ولي) (legal guardian) to, if the court approves, take the life of the killer.


The Qisas or equivalence verse in Quran is,

O ye who believe! the law of equality is prescribed to you in cases of murder: the free for the free, the slave for the slave, the woman for the woman. But if any remission is made by the brother of the slain, then grant any reasonable demand, and compensate him with handsome gratitude, this is a concession and a Mercy from your Lord. After this whoever exceeds the limits shall be in grave penalty.
— Quran 2:178

The Hadiths have extensive discussion of qisas. For example, Sahih Bukhari states,

Allah's Apostle 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."
— Sahih al-Bukhari, 9:83:17


Islamic law treats homicide as a civil dispute between believers, rather than corrective punishment by the state to maintain order. In all cases of murder, unintentional homicide, bodily injury and property damage, under traditional sharia doctrine, the prosecutor is not the state, but only the victim or the victim's heir (or owner, in the case when the victim is a slave). Qisas can only be demanded by the victim or victim's heirs.

The principle of Qisas is available as a legal course, only when the victim is a Muslim, but not to non-Muslims, according to historical Islamic jurist literature of all Islamic doctrines of Sharia except Hanafi

Alternative to qisas

The Qur'an also allows aggrieved Muslim parties to receive monetary compensation (blood money, diyya, دية) instead of qisas,[11] or forfeit the right of qiṣāṣ as an act of charity or in atonement for the victim family's past sins.

We ordained therein for them: "Life for life, eye for eye, nose for nose, ear for ear, tooth for tooth, and wounds equal for equal." But if any one remits the retaliation by way of charity, it is an act of atonement for himself. And if any fail to judge by (the light of) what Allah hath revealed, they are (No better than) wrong-doers.
— Quran 5:45

[kritikvernunft]

What does "free for the free" mean??

Imagine that Bob hits Charlie in the face. What is the morality of this act? Impossible to say. You must first figure out what hostile acts Charlie carried out against Bob, before that.

It means that the morality of hostility is fundamentally neutral and can only be evaluated in the context of preceding acts of hostility that went in the opposite direction. It naturally leads to a concept of "hostility accounting". The Qisas recommends that the party with a negative balance on his hostility account, settles this by making a payment to the other party. If the other party accepts this, this payment should then put an end to their mutual history of hostility. The other party may also choose to waive this payment.

The Qisas is a typical symmetry law, of which you will find many in the laws of nature. They can all be described by Noether's theorem: Every symmetry (=invariant) of the action (=history) of a system has a corresponding conservation law. The Qisas describes a symmetry that maintains the conservation of the invariant of justice, in the presence of a history of hostility.

[M.I.A.]

...yikes..

for every action there is an equal and opposite action..

within an enclosed system?

which beggs the beggers question..

does gods law impose itself? ..if not imposed.

don't bother replying too it...


there are obvious reasons for the qisas.

[kritikvernunft]

does gods law impose itself? ..if not imposed.

That is the theory of the karma. That answer is yes, but only if accounted across successive lifespans.
The karma only adds up, if there is not just a next life, but there has also been a previous life. Then, it all balances out nicely.
We suffer today, not only for what we did wrong previously in this life, but also for what we did wrong in a previous life.
Since as an accounting system for suffering, the karma is complete, it aims to explain all suffering.
This world is not nirvana (paradise). Hence, all of us are here because we still had bad karma left at the end of our previous life and had to be punished with suffering.
This is, in fact, a penitentiary/prison world, and most of us will end up again in another penitentiary/prison world in the next life.
This game will go on till the last day.

[M.I.A.]

..I'm not saying if something is true or not..

I have no knowledge of the unseen?

but most things have common ground...familiar concepts..

I prefer Islam in its simplicity..

although no disrespect is intended.

it's probably for our own benefit.


*based on a true story*


the world turns.. but only the wicked would consider it a game.


there are those that consider life a game, it is not a game...

it is a matter of life and death.


badly badly paraphrased..

although easy to remember for some reason?

[kritikvernunft]

I prefer Islam in its simplicity.

Yes, but how can we understand and explain why we suffer? If a 3-year old child dies in pain, how do you explain why? The child is innocent. It has not done anything bad. Why did it need to suffer so much? Justice requires that all our suffering is of our own making. Since the child did not suffer for misdeeds in this life, it must have been for misdeeds in a previous life.

the world turns.. but only the wicked would consider it a game.

Only violations of Divine Law constitute wicked behaviour. All other behaviour is permissible.

there are those that consider life a game, it is not a game...it is a matter of life and death.

All opinions are permissible, unless they break the rules of Divine Law. Your views are yours. Other people's views are theirs. With death being just the transition point between this life and the next, I wonder why people fret so much about it? Why would this life be better than the next? Next life is only supposed to be worse, if you really did bad things. Otherwise, there is no reason why it should be worse. When my time has come, I will just go to the next life, just like everybody else one day will, and I know already today that I will not worry about that at all.

[M.I.A.]

..I am not really prepared to talk about it.

all I know is that I have not planned to write my life overy someone else's name.

...and I feel twice as old as I am... so feel free to cash it in.

for those that deny themselves is a great reward.

...sins of past lives?

tell me.. where have you lived?

and Allah swt says, don't covet your own soul.

...it's always ever the tip of an iceberg..

ready to take down any ship..

unable to hold account of all the droplets in the ocean.


it's all however you would see the world...

and a bad interpretation is just that..

if only I had said.

“Once, an old woman came up to him and asked for paradise. He said, “Old women do not enter the paradise.” The woman started crying. As she started leaving the room, the Prophet, showing his subtle sense of humor, stopped her and said, “Old women will become young before entering the heaven.” (Tirmadhi)

[kritikvernunft]

...sins of past lives? tell me.. where have you lived?

We have no visibility before or after this current life. We don't know. It wasn't meant to be known. Otherwise, we would. The karma is a metaphysical theorem. The only thing that I can say about it, is that it is consistent and non-contradictory. We cannot "know" more than that about it. One thing is for sure, however. It is very hard to discover a consistent and non-contradictory metaphysical theorem. Most metaphysical theorems fall apart very, very easily. That is most likely why we don't have many of them.

There are only a few scriptures that have survived the test of time, one of which, the Christian Bible, has pretty much collapsed now, simply, because it has allowed inconsistencies to overtake it. The straw that broke the camel, was the exchange between the emissary of the papacy and Martin Luther, in the year 1521, in which Luther said that he would retract what he had written, if the papacy could show him wrong through scripture and reason. It is the answer of the papacy that has annihilated Christian religion: But Martin, the Bible itself is the arsenal whence each evil heretic has drawn his deceptive arguments. Christian religion has been crashing and burning ever since that infamous reply. In order to hang on his power, the papacy did not hesitate to disavow and even curse the Christian Bible. A religion can never recover from that.

In fact, it was inevitable that this would happen. Earlier Christianity had detected that the ritual of baptism was insanely dangerous. When people know that they can just wash away their sins with water, they can just liberally sin, because the water will all solve it anyway. So, they fixed that problem by insisting that you can only do it once and that it had to be done at birth. Then, the papacy reintroduced the same problem again. If you buy indulgencies (=documents) from the papacy, it will take away your sins. Martin Luther understood the danger. Too many people would now feel free to commit the worst atrocities, because all they needed to do, was to buy enough indulgencies, in order to solve the problem of evil and sin. So, Martin Luther denounced the papacy for doing these sales. That is how the total breakdown started, the beginning of the end.

All metaphysical theorems that contain an error, will collapse. The error will snowball and overtake everything. You cannot implement that kind of theories for centuries and hope not to become overwhelmed by the spectacular fallout of such error. The theorem of the karma is thousands of years old and it has not collapsed up till now. If it were truly inconsistent or contradictory, it would already have crashed and burned.