Qiṣāṣ

Qiṣāṣ, “retaliation,” is the principle in Islamic law by which the perpetrator of an intentional homicide or wounding is subjected to a like penalty—life for life, and wound for wound—at the demand of the victim or the heirs of the slain, unless they choose instead to accept the blood-money (diyah) or to pardon. Established by the Qurʼān and the sunnah of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ in the Madīnan period, qiṣāṣ belongs with the diyah to the law of homicide and injury, and it figures in the sīrah as one of the institutions by which the Prophet ﷺ replaced the unbounded vengeance of the Jāhiliyyah with a measured justice restrained by mercy.

The Qurʼānic foundation of qiṣāṣ is the verse of Sūrat al-Baqarah (2:178): “O you who believe, retaliation is prescribed for you in the matter of the slain.” The verse goes on to permit the remission of the penalty in exchange for the blood-money, calling this “an alleviation from your Lord and a mercy,” and the following verse (2:179) declares: “In retaliation there is life for you, O people of understanding, that you may guard yourselves.” In this the Qurʼān set forth both the right of retaliation and the encouragement to its remission, and it grounded the law of retaliation in the preservation of life, since the certainty of the penalty restrains the shedding of blood.

A further foundation is the verse of Sūrat al-Māʼidah (5:45), in which God recounts what He had prescribed upon the Children of Israel in the Torah: “that a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, and for wounds retaliation”—and adds that whoever remits it as charity, it shall be an expiation for him. From this verse the law derived the qiṣāṣ of injuries below homicide, the retaliation for the loss of an eye, a tooth, or a limb, where a like injury could justly be inflicted, and where it could not, the payment of the appointed diyah in its place. The verse of Sūrat al-Isrāʼ (17:33) further affirms the right of the heir of one slain wrongfully, while warning him not to exceed the bounds in the slaying.

The Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ confirmed and elaborated the law of retaliation. The Prophet ﷺ declared that the blood of the Muslims is equal, and that a life is taken for a life, and he carried out qiṣāṣ in cases that came before him, as in the affair of the Jewish man who slew a young woman for her ornaments, whom the Prophet ﷺ ordered to be put to death in retaliation. He also taught the conditions that must be met for retaliation—the intentional nature of the act, the equality of the parties in certain respects, and the demand of the heirs—and he commended pardon and the acceptance of the diyah, holding the forgiveness of the avenger to be meritorious, in keeping with the Qurʼānic preference for mercy.

At the same time the law surrounded qiṣāṣ with restraints absent from the vengeance of the Jāhiliyyah. The retaliation was to be exacted only upon the offender himself, not upon his kin, ending the old practice by which a whole clan might be held to account for the act of one; it was to be like for like, not exceeding the original injury, ending the demand of the proud for many lives in return for one; and it lay with the authority to carry out, not with the unchecked hand of the avenger. By these conditions the Prophet ﷺ transformed the blood-vengeance of the tribes into an ordered penalty of law, bounded by equality and tempered by the encouragement of pardon.

In the sīrah tradition, qiṣāṣ is remembered as the law of measured retaliation that the Qurʼān prescribed and the Prophet ﷺ established: life for life and wound for wound, at the demand of the wronged, yet ever open to remission for the blood-money or to free pardon, which the revelation praised as mercy and expiation. Grounded in the verses of Sūrat al-Baqarah and Sūrat al-Māʼidah and in the practice of the Prophet ﷺ, and bound up with the diyah in the ordering of the law of homicide, it stands among the reforms by which the Prophet ﷺ brought the feuds of the age of ignorance under a justice in which, as the Qurʼān declared, there is life.

## References

1 Qurʼān 2:178-79; 5: 45; 17: 33. 2 Abū ʻAbd Allāh al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, “Kitāb al-diyāt,” bāb qawl Allāh taʻālá anna al-nafs bi-al-nafs, nos. 6878–6882. 3 Abū al-Ḥusayn Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, “Kitāb al-qasāma,” bāb mā yubāḥ bihi dam al-Muslim, nos. 1676–80. 4 Muhammad ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʻ al-bayān ʻan taʼwīl āy al-Qurʼān (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1984), 2:103–18, on Q 2:178–79. 5 4 al-Jaṣṣāṣ, Aḥkām al-Qurʼān (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʼ al-Turāth al-ʻArabī, 1985), 1:165–84. 6 Ibn Hishām, al-Sīra al-nabawiyya, trans. Alfred Guillaume as The Life of Muhammad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 341, 552. 7 Ibn Qudāma, al-Mughnī (Cairo: Maktabat al-Qāhira, 1968), 8:261–366. 8 J. Schacht and [C. Bosworth], “Ḳiṣāṣ,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 5:177–80.