The notion that Islam is a religion that thrives on violence was part and parcel of European medieval polemics.
‘The use of force', writes Norman Daniel, ‘was almost universally considered to be a major and characteristic constituent of the Islamic religion, and an evident sign of its error.'1 In the Western imagination, Muslim warfare, or jihad, has been just one aspect of the Islamic penchant towards violence; another is the perceived cruelty and arbitrariness of the Islamic penal system.
Traces of this preconception can be found also in modern times. As an example, one might mention that violent executions at the hands of fearsome, massively muscular Arab henchmen were a popular trope of nineteenth-century Orientalist painters, as seen, for example, in the two paintings, ‘Execution of a Moroccan Jewess' (1860) by Alfred Dehodencq (1822-82) and ‘Execution without Trial under the Moorish Kings of Granada' (1870) by Henri Regnault (1849-71).While it has become a common scholarly tactic in recent decades to question approaches that otherise the European Middle Ages from the perspective of the modern, rational nation-state, declaring them uniquely irrational and violent, careful scholarly investigations into the complex mechanisms of penal justice and crime control under premodern Islamic regimes remain a desideratum. This is not to say that the Islamic prosecution of crime, in the period under consideration here (c. eleventh to fifteenth centuries), was not arbitrary and violent, even if it bears mentioning that Western travellers to the Near East sometimes praised the efficiency, and also the fairness, of the penal system in place under the Ottoman sultans (r. c. 679-
Author's note: This chapter was written during a fellowship at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in autumn 2015.
1 Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (1960; rev. edn Oxford: Oneworld, 1993), p. 131.
1342/c. 1280-1924).
But it should not be overlooked that scholars can still see significant progress in their understanding of the history of state punishment in Islamic societies, whether in terms of longue duree continuities or of spatio-temporal variations. Synchronically speaking, the social matrix in which state punishment was embedded in the various premodern Muslim polities deserves closer inspection, such that the story that is told is not simply one of Oriental despotism, of brute violence perpetrated from the top down upon passive victims, but one that paints a fuller picture of the networks of relations that obtained between the social actors that were involved in the penal process, namely, those who implemented, those who theorised about, and those who suffered punishment by the state.This chapter first reviews the normative bases for penal state violence, in particular for capital punishment and torture, in Islamic law and Islamic political theory. It then moves on to discuss a number of examples from Islamic historiography, first from the reign of the Seljuq sultans of Persia, Iraq and Syria (r. 1040-1194) and then, second, from that of the Mamluk sultans of Egypt and Syria (r. 1250-1517). The Seljuqs and Mamluks exemplify the ‘new Sunni internationalism' of the so-called Islamic Middle Period, a socio-political order based on a delicate balance of the military, religious and mercantile strata of society. Moreover, the few available, book-length studies of crime and punishment in premodern Islam are focused on the Seljuq and the Mamluk periods. In the following text, these studies serve as convenient points of departure.
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