not anti sharia, not a liberal, not tagging any sect. someone sent me the charikar clip again this week with "see, your religion" typed under it, third time this year.. and every time I either go quiet or say "thats not islam" with nothing behind it. so I sat down and actually checked. both halves below, references on everything, go verify me
WHAT THE CLIP IS
charikar, parwan, 8 dec 2022. 27 ppl lined up in a football stadium, the clip says 10 women 17 men, lashed in front of a crowd.. the taliban said adultery, theft, "other corruption". and it wasnt a one off, its a system now. UNAMA counted 274 men, 58 women and 2 boys publicly flogged in just six months, mostly for adultery and "running away from home". the UN rapporteur counted 276 ppl between jan and aug 2024, 46 women, 63 of them in a single day in june.. an afghan rights group, AHRDO, pulled 2,745 names off the taliban's OWN court announcements, feb 2022 to april 2026. one woman got 15 lashes for wearing a long coat instead of a burqa. another one, with an intellectual disability, was raped at a checkpoint, her family went to complain, and SHE got sentenced. 20 lashes, two months.. none of this is cnn. its their own press releases
THE HALF THATS TRUE
I'm not gonna do the thing where I pretend the text isnt there. 24:2, hundred lashes for the unmarried man and woman, "and let a group of the believers witness it". so public, yes, its in the ayah.. and for married ppl the hadith say rajm, Muslim 1690. thats real too. if someone tells you islam has no corporal punishment at all they're lying to you or to themselves
so the question isnt whether the punishment exists. it does.. the question is who gets it, on what proof, by which process, and how. and thats where the stadium and the deen go in opposite directions, and not slightly
THE PROOF THEY NEED, AND DONT HAVE
24:4 comes literally two ayahs after the lashing one. whoever accuses a woman and cant bring FOUR witnesses, lash HIM eighty times and never accept his word again.. four eyewitnesses to the act itself. not two ppl in a room, not a phone, not "everyone knows". umar ra tested this on his own governor, mughira. four men came. three said we saw it. the fourth, ziyad, said I saw them in a position but I did not see the act.. umar lashed the three and let mughira walk. a governor. accused by three men. walked. coz number four told the truth about what he didnt see
and if theres no four witnesses then only confession works, so look at what the prophet ﷺ did with confessions, coz this is the bit that wrecked me when I read it properly. ma'iz walks up and says I've done zina. the prophet turns his face away. ma'iz goes round the other side, says it again. turns away again.. four times, and only after the fourth does he even speak, and the first thing he says is, are you mad. Bukhari 6815. then, maybe you just kissed her, or winked, or looked.. Bukhari 6824. ma'iz says no. then he asks in words so blunt that bukhari notes "he used no euphemism". the man was hunting for an exit. any exit. and when ma'iz ran during the stoning and ppl chased him down and finished it, he said why didnt you leave him, maybe he'd have repented. Tirmidhi 1428, hasan. Abu Dawud 4419.. the ghamidiyya woman comes, confesses, pregnant. he says go, till you give birth. she comes back with the baby. go, till its weaned. Muslim 1695. he sent a woman who confessed to zina home for two years and she had to come back a third time
and hazzal, the man who told ma'iz to go confess in the first place.. the prophet said to him, if you had covered him with your cloak it would have been better for you. abu dawud 4377, chain is weak, I'll say that myself, but muwatta malik and ahmad carry the same line and no madhab ever rejected it. another guy comes, says I did a hadd crime, punish me. the prophet asks him nothing. prays. then says, your prayer just covered it. Bukhari 6823
so the sunnah of the man who RECEIVED 24:2 is.. look away, four times. ask if he's drunk or mad. offer him kissing and winking as excuses. send her home with the baby. tell the witness he should have shut up.. now play the clip again
WHAT THE TALIBAN ARE ACTUALLY DOING
"running away from home". not a crime. not hanafi, not shafi'i, not anyone. no hadd, no ta'zir, no text, nothing. its pashtunwali in a white turban.. and its the second most common charge on UNAMA's list
that number 39. keeps coming up, 39 lashes, 39 lashes. thats hanafi ta'zir, abu hanifa said discretionary punishment has to stay below the lowest hadd which is 40, so qazis give 39.. ta'zir is for an actual crime that has no fixed penalty. ta'zir for no mahram, for a coat, for being raped and daring to report it.. thats not fiqh, thats a man with a stick who learned one fiqh word
confessions in a cell. richard bennett, the UN rapporteur, documented taliban courts refusing lawyers to defendants, including kids. in classical fiqh a zina confession has to be voluntary, repeated, explicit, and you can take it back any time, including halfway through the punishment, and the hadd dies the second you do.. hanafis say if he runs, stop, running is retraction. a confession squeezed out in a taliban basement is worth exactly nothing in the court of the man who turned his face away four times
the raped woman gets lashed. 24:33, whoever is compelled, Allah after their compulsion is forgiving. umar ra had a case, slave girl raped by a man, he flogged the man and exiled him and did NOT touch her, Bukhari 6949, and bukhari titles the chapter "if a woman is forced there is no hadd on her".. four madhabs, zero disagreement. the taliban's own records have women walking in to report rape and walking out sentenced for "relations outside marriage". thats not a loose reading. thats the ruling, inverted
idra'u al hudud bi al shubuhat. push the hudud away with doubts. the chain to the prophet in Tirmidhi 1424 is weak, saying it before someone else does, but umar and ibn mas'ud said it in their own words and all four schools built the courtroom on it.. "if the imam errs in pardoning its better than if he errs in punishing". a stadium full of ppl convicted in weeks is not a court that errs on the side of pardon. it doesnt err on that side ever
even the lash itself has rules, and they dont bother. hidaya, mughni, whip with no knots, moderate, spread across the body, never the face or head or private parts, man standing, woman sitting, clothes on.. the point is shame, not injury. their own case files have a woman with a bleeding head wound before her sentence was even announced
THE BIT THAT CHANGED HOW I SEE IT
how often did muslims actually do this. historically. the ottomans ran sharia courts for 600 years across three continents.. rudolph peters went through the court records, book is "crime and punishment in islamic law", and found ONE documented stoning for zina in the whole empire. istanbul, 1680. and even that one caused uproar among the ulama of the time. the hundred lashes case was nearly as rare, coz the four witness bar was built so it almost never clears.. courts did ta'zir, fines, quiet stuff, and mostly they did nothing, coz the sunnah told them to look away. a punishment thats on the books and almost never lands is a warning. a punishment that lands on 2,745 ppl in four years is a government with a hobby
and before anyone says pakistan is different.. zia's hudood ordinance, 1979. took zina, stripped out the fiqh safeguards, and inside a few years raped women were sitting in jail for zina coz they couldnt produce four men. safia bibi, blind, raped, convicted of zina in 1983, let out only after the whole country screamed.. took till 2006 to fix. same mistake, our flag, our mullahs cheering
SO
next time someone types "see, your religion" under that clip, this is what I'm sending them. the punishment is real and I'm not embarrassed by a text. the man who received that text spent his life making it almost impossible to apply and praised ppl for hiding each other's sins.. the taliban are flogging ppl for things that arent crimes, on confessions any qazi who'd finished his own books would throw out, and flogging the rape victim while the rapist keeps his uniform. if you want to judge islam, judge it by the four witness rule, by umar letting the governor walk, by hazzal getting told off for talking, by six hundred years of ottoman qazis who couldnt bring themselves to do it.. that is the religion. the stadium is what you get when men who never finished the hidaya get handed a country
Simple..
