Diyah

Diyah, the “blood-money,” is the compensation prescribed in Islamic law for homicide or bodily injury, paid by the offender or his kin to the victim or to the heirs of the slain in place of, or alongside, retaliation. Drawn from the pre-Islamic custom of the Arabs but regulated and reformed by the Qurʼān and the sunnah of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ, the diya belongs to the law of homicide together with qiṣāṣ, the right of retaliation, and it figures in the sīrah both in the ordering of relations among the Muslims at Madīnah and in the Prophet’s ﷺ dealings with the tribes and the People of the Book.

Among the Arabs of the Jāhiliyya, the slaying of a man set in motion the duty of vengeance upon his kin, and the feuds that arose from killing were a chief cause of the wars between the tribes; the alternative to vengeance was the acceptance of a payment in camels, the blood-price, by which the matter might be settled without further blood. Islam retained the institution of the blood-money but set it within a law of justice and mercy, regulating its amount and its circumstances, restraining the excesses of vengeance, and commending the remission of the diya as an act of charity. The Constitution of Madīnah, the compact drawn up by the Prophet ﷺ among the people of the city, made provision concerning the blood-money and the mutual aid of the clans in bearing it.

The standard diyah for the killing of a free Muslim man was fixed at a hundred camels, or its equivalent in other property—gold, silver, cattle, or sheep—according to the wealth of the region and the means of those liable. The law distinguished the diyah of intentional homicide, which was heavier and due at once, from that of accidental or quasi-intentional killing, which might be lighter and paid over a term; and it assigned the burden of the blood-money for unintentional killing not to the offender alone but to his kindred group, the ʻāqila, who shared it among them, a provision continuing the old solidarity of the clan within the new order of the law.

The Qurʼān laid the foundation of the law in the verse of Sūrat al-Nisāʼ concerning the believer who kills another by mistake, prescribing the freeing of a believing slave and the payment of the diya to the family of the slain, unless they remit it as charity; and in the verse of Sūrat al-Baqarah on retaliation, which permits the heirs of the slain to accept compensation in place of qiṣāṣ, calling this an alleviation and a mercy from their Lord. The sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ elaborated the law in detail, fixing the amounts of the diyah for the various injuries—for the loss of a limb, an eye, a tooth, and the like—in the famous letter on the blood-money sent to ʻAmr ibn Ḥazm with the appointment over Najrān, which set out the shares for the several members and wounds.

The Prophet ﷺ himself paid and adjudicated the diyah on various occasions, and the sīrah preserves several such cases: his settlement of the blood-money in the affair of the slain man of the Anṣār at Khaybar, in which he himself advanced the payment to still the matter; and his judgments concerning the killings that arose among the tribes. He commended the acceptance of the diyah and the forgiveness of the offender over the exaction of vengeance, and he forbade the old excesses by which the kin of a slain noble had demanded more than a single life, establishing the equality of men in the blood-price. By these rulings the institution of blood-money was set upon a footing of justice and restraint.

In the sīrah tradition, the diyah is remembered as the blood-money by which Islam regulated the ancient law of vengeance: the compensation prescribed for the slain and the injured, fixed in its amounts by the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ, borne in cases of error by the kindred group, and commended to remission as an act of mercy. Grounded in the Qurʼān and in the conduct and the letters of the Prophet ﷺ, and bound up with the ordering of the community at Madīnah, it stands among the institutions by which he replaced the feuds of the Jāhiliyyah with a law of justice, restraint, and reconciliation.

## References

1 Qurʾān 2:178–179; 4:92; 5:45. 2 Abū ʻAbd Allāh al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, “Kitāb al-diyāt,” nos. 6878–6917. 2 Abū al-Ḥusayn Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, “Kitāb al-qasāma wa-al-muḥāribīn,” nos. 1669–1682. 3 Mālik ibn Anas, al-Muwaṭṭaʼ, “Kitāb al-ʻuqūl,” nos. 1560–1618. 4 Abū Dāwūd al-Sijistānī, Sunan Abī Dāwūd, “Kitāb al-diyāt,” nos. 4564–4595. 5 Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra al-nabawiyya, trans. Alfred Guillaume as The Life of Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 231–33, 341. 6 Ibn Qudāma, al-Mughnī (Cairo: Maktabat al-Qāhira, 1968), 8:367–420. 7 E. Tyan, “Diya,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1965), 2:340–43.