Stoning and hand-amputation : the pre-Islamic origins of the ḥadd penalties for zinÄ and sariqa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Determining whether stoning for adultery and hand-amputation for theft were practiced in pre-Islamic Arabia represents the first phase in exploring the origins and evolution of these penalties in Islamic law. Should both punishments prove to predate Islam, then it would appear the Qur'an broke with stoning and confirmed amputation of the hand. An extensive survey of pre-Islamic, Near Eastern legal materials in search of parallel penalties has thus been attempted in this thesis. Remarkably, not only stoning and hand-amputation, but nearly the entire range of Islamic adultery and theft legislation have pre-Islamic parallels. The nature of these parallels, however, does not conform to the paradigm of 'borrowing' from 'foreign' sources. Rather, Arab customary law---a major contributor to Islamic law in general---appears to have diverged from an ancient Semitic 'common source' once shared with other Near Eastern cultural entities. Most major elements of Islamic criminal law, including stoning and hand-amputation, therefore represent the culmination of an ancient Semitic common law.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".