Qur'an, Hadith and Scholars:Stoning: Difference between revisions

The [[Qur'an]] does not in any place order that adulterers be stoned, rather their prescribed punishment is being whipped 100 times (24:2). The ulamaa', however, are unanimous in their opinion that the penalty for married men or women who commit adultery is to be stoned to death. This discrepancy is explained by the [[hadith]] as due to the loss of this verse in the Qur'an to a hungry goat which ate the page upon which it was preserved. In point of fact, the Islamic legal tradition largely took form in Iraq, where there was a very large, old and well established school of Jewish halacha or religious law. The prescribed punishment for adultery in the halachah is stoning to death (based on Deuteronomy 23:23-24 and extended by the rabbis to include all cases of adultery) and it is likely that Islamic scholars working in the 8th and 9th century in Iraq were influenced by Jewish law to include this more strict punishment {{citation needed}}, which was not practiced by the believers of Muhammad's time and the first century of his movement. The hadith about the goat eating the verse from the Qur'an, then, is likely a fabrication (as are the vast majority of hadith, which cannot be reliably traced in most cases to before the beginning of the 8th century) and an excuse to include this punishment in the [[shari'ah]] even though it is not found in the Qur'an. As if to underline the point, many of the hadith that record Muhammad ordering stoning include the detail that the men being stoned were Jewish.