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| Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada |
Taliban Leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada announces a
return to the policy of stoning women:
"We will soon implement the punishment for adultery. We will flog women in public. We will stone them to death in public. We will bring shari'ah to this land.”
How enlightened - stoning and flogging.
Stoning as a form of capital punishment goes back to ancient times. Stoning appears to have been the standard method of capital punishment in ancient Israel. The Torah and Talmud prescribe stoning as punishment for a number of offenses, however, Rabbinic Judaism developed a number of procedural constraints which made these laws practically unenforceable.
Although stoning is not mentioned in the Quran, classical Islamic jurisprudence imposed stoning as a shari'ah punishment for adultery based on hadith (sayings attributed to Muhammad).
Only a few isolated instances of legal stoning are recorded in pre-modern history of the Islamic world. In recent times, stoning has been a legal or customary punishment in Iran, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen, parts of Nigeria, Afghanistan, Brunei, and tribal parts of Pakistan. That said, it is rarely practiced - it appears that is about to change in Afghanistan.
If you want to see just how barbaric Islamic stoning is, I recommend the excellent movie The Stoning of Soraya M, a 2008 movie about the stoning of a young woman in Iran.
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| Scene from "The Stoning of Soraya M" |
The movie stars the talented Shohreh Aghdashloo, Mozhan Navabi, and Jim Caviezel, and is available for free on YouTube.
I will caution that the stoning scenes are graphic and intense. The requirements for stoning are quite precise, as shown here (click here for a larger view):
Welcome to the 7th Century.
