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198chapter fourcut a long story short’, ‘to cut off a relationship, or ‘to cut downexpenses’, the verb ‘to cut’ is used both literally and metaphorically;and it does not always require a knife or a sword to cut somethingoff. In addition to the root meaning of ‘to separate’ or ‘to set apart’,q-t-# can also acquire completely different connotations in the Arabiclanguage, for example, ‘to sell’, ‘to save’, or ‘to suffocate’. The wordis so polysemic that it beggars belief how often ‘to cut off’ is simplyunderstood as ‘amputation’ (for which, incidentally, the Arabic languagehas an entirely different term, which is al-batr). The commonunderstanding that q-t-# means ‘to cut off’ the left hand of a thief(bizarrely not his right hand!), contradicts the above quoted verse,which clearly uses the plural ‘hands’: (‘his or her hands [aidiyahum§]’),indicating that the best way to keep a thief’s hands(!) off society isto send him or her to prison. Surely, to cut off both hands of a thiefwould be a barbarity that not even the most scrupulous fuqah§" haveever contemplated.A clear mistake by the jurists was to associate q-t-# with a completeamputation of the entire (one) hand. However, other verses of theBook, in which q-t-# of hands is discussed, prove that alternative readingsare possible. In verse 31 of Sårat Yåsuf we hear, for example,of women who accidentally cut their hands after they became ecstaticover the beauty of Joseph’s face:When she heard of their malicious talk, she sent for them [women ofthe city] and prepared a banquet for them: she gave each of them aknife. And she said (to Joseph), “Come out before them.” When theysaw him, they did extol him, and (in their amazement) cut their hands[qaãa#na aidiyahunna]: they said, “God preserve us! No mortal is this!This is none other than a noble angel!” (Yåsuf 12:31)Note that in this situation the women were already equipped withknives, provided by Potifar’s wife, the host of the banquet, whichthey used in order to peel the fruit served at the buffet. And yet,when, in their amazement, they ‘cut their hands’ they did not ‘cuttheir hands completely off ’, but only caused some minor cuts thatcertainly must have hurt but did not mean a loss of their hands.Other verses support our thesis that the term q-t-# does not necessarilymean the amputation of a part of the body. Verse 49 of Såratal-Shu#ar§", for example, in which Pharaoh is depicted as threateninghis court magicians with severe corporal punishment, makes it logicallyand anatomically inconceivable to understand the term as ‘tocut off’: