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Andrew Marsham
these locations being public places than with any conscious evocation of
David’s example. 73
Given the contrast between the plethora of penalties listed in the
sources for the pre-Islamic period and the somewhat narrower range of
punishments recorded for Islamic times, one cannot help but suspect that
certain penalties were seen as ‘customary’ and ‘proper’ by the early
Muslims. This may simply have been Arabian custom rather than any
conscious effort to conform to Quranic prescriptions. Certainly, the later
tradition refers to pre-Islamic kings ‘crucifying’ and ‘amputating limbs’,
and both the Qurʾān and Umayyad practice probably do reflect a
distinctive pre-existing Arabian penal culture. 74
121
However, there are also a number of indications that there was more
symbolic meaning to the penalties used by the early Muslims. This
symbolic meaning may have been quite un-classical. Certainly, the
penalties inflicted are not always those that would later be recognised as
strictly Quranic or even ‘Islamic’. Blinding and the cutting out of
tongues (both penalties with many Roman and Sasanian precedents)
occur (nos 37, 42, 49); references to the Prophet mutilating the victims of
the prescriptions of the ḥirāba verse and then prohibiting the penalty for
the future almost certainly reflect ongoing debate about this pre-Islamic
penalty. 75
The penalty of the amputation of limbs, which is Quranic, may have
had particular associations with the killing of Kharijites. In Kharijite
73 See above, n. 53.
74 The Lakhmid king of al­Ḥīra al­Nuʿmān b. Mundhīr (r. c. 580–602) is
said to have used crucifixion as a penalty for ‘highway robbery’: J. ʿAlī, al­
Mufaṣṣal fī l­taʾrīkh al­ʿarab qabl al­Islām (Beirut, 1968–71), v, 608. Cf. al­
Yaʿqūbī, Taʾrīkh, ed. M. Houtsma, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1883), i, 240. Khubayb b.
ʿAdī al­Anṣārī was remembered as the first Muslim to suffer crucifixion (at the
hands of the Meccans in 3/625): Ibn Isḥāq, The Life of Muhammad, tr. A.
Guillaume, 429–33; al­Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh, i, 1436–7 and 1439–40. See further M.
Ullman, Das Motiv der Kreuzigung in der arabischen Poesie des Mittelalters
(Harrasowitz, 1995), 115–9. The only references to crucifixion (ṣalb) in the
Qurʾān apart from the ḥirāba verse and the denial of Christ’s crucifixion in
sūrat al­Nisāʾ, are, like the references to prison, connected to Pharoah (Qurʾān
4.157; 7.124; 12.41; 20.71; 26.49). In three of them amputation of hands and
feet ‘on opposite sides’ (min khilāf) is also mentioned; this is a departure from
the Biblical narrative and therefore may well be reflection of early seventhcentury
Arabian practice. (Cf. the replacement of donkeys with camels in the
same story: Qurʾān 12.65 and 12.72).
75 al­Ṭabarī, Tafsīr, x, 244, and above, 106–8.