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August
26, 2002, 9:00 a.m. By Amir Taheri |
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efore
the summer is out Aleptekin Caqmaq will be out of a job.
Having sat idle in his office for 18 years, mostly doing crossword puzzles, Caqmaq has told journalists that he is happy to retire. Caqmaq is the official hangman in a high-security prison in Istanbul, Turkey. This month the Turkish parliament eliminated his job by abolishing the death penalty.
The historic decision removes the threat of execution from 49 prisoners, some of whom have been on death row since 1984, when then Prime Minister Turgot Ozal imposed a moratorium on capital punishment.
The Turkish decision has relaunched the decades-old debate on whether or not Muslim countries can do away with capital punishment.
A campaign to abolish the death penalty is already taking shape in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, with tacit support from President Megawati Sukarnoputri. A petition calling for an end to capital punishment, signed by over 600 intellectuals, is attracting massive support throughout Iran, including among members of the Islamic majlis (parliament).
Capital punishment has already been suspended in a few predominantly Muslim countries, including Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Malaysia, with pressure building for outright abolition.
Campaigners for abolition also hope that a number of smaller Arab states, notably Oman, Qatar, and Bahrain may soon introduce at least a moratorium on death sentences.
Not surprisingly, opposition to abolition remains strong in the Muslim world.
According to most surveys, almost 70 percent of all legal executions in the world during the past two decades have taken place in the Muslim world. The overwhelming majority of those executed had been convicted of so-called "political crimes," which means opposing the regimes in place. In Iran alone at least 28,000 people were executed between 1979 and 2000.
Opposition to the abolition of capital punishment comes from both religious and secular elements in Muslim societies. Most secular groups, including the Turkish Nationalist Party, present arguments often used by opponents of abolition in the West, notably that the death penalty is a powerful deterrent against capital crime. Radical fundamentalists argue on less rational grounds, claiming that the idea of abolishing capital punishment is part of "a Jewish conspiracy" to deprive Islam of an "effective means of eliminating its enemies."
"Those who preach abolition [of the death penalty] would also oppose the fatwas needed to cleanse the earth from those who cause corruption on it," says Ayatollah Muhammad-Ali Shahroudi, the Iranian Chief Justice. "They are the same people who also condemn the heroic acts of Palestinians who commit suicide while wiping out large numbers of Zionist evil-doers."
More moderate religious groups argue that the death penalty is an integral part of the system of qissass (retribution) that is common to all three Abrahamic religions. What they miss is that qissass was designed to set the maximum — not the minimum — limits of punishment. The proverbial "eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth" is a symbolic way of saying that punishment must be proportionate to the crime, and should certainly not exceed it. In other words, if a member of your tribe loses a tooth in a fight with a member of another tribe, this does not give you the right to go and massacre all the members of the rival tribe. The most that you can demand is to break one tooth of the guilty man.
When it comes to the death penalty, even greater caution and circumspection are required. The mechanism under which a blood tithe (diyeh) is paid to the family of the victim is designed to obviate the need for putting the culprit to death.
Some religious scholars argue that although capital punishment is allowed as an extreme measure, its exercise is subject to so many rules as to make it impossible to use except in exceptionally rare cases.
Sadly, the Turkish decision came without a serious and genuinely popular debate at the national level. It was railroaded into legislation in the final session of a moribund parliament and as part of a complex package of economic and political reforms. Many of the parliamentarians approved the abolition because they supported other items in the package. And, Turkey is eager to gain EU membership, an impossible goal for a country that allows the death penalty. Whatever the motivation, the move is in line with the Turkish tradition of imposing long-overdue reforms from above.
Nevertheless, the Turkish decision has broken one of the taboos of the Muslim world and could open the way for a frank debate about capital punishment.
What is now needed is to explain the Turkish decision to the Muslim masses both in Turkey and throughout the Muslim world to ensure that long-overdue reforms, including the abolition of the death penalty, are not issues of concern only to Westernizing elites.
One issue that should be debated is a moratorium on all death sentences pronounced for capital "crimes." In fact, sentencing anyone to death simply because of his opinions and political activities is certainly anti-Islamic. There is nothing in Islam to give any government the right to murder its peaceful opponents. In time all states should abolish the death penalty, at least in the case of political "crimes."
Muslim public opinion may not yet be ready for an outright abolition of the death penalty. But it is certainly ready for a debate on the subject.
— Amir Taheri, an Iranian author and journalist, is editor of the Paris-based Politique Internationale.