Dried Up Blood and City upon a Hill

It could not be any better. Twenty-eighth years have passed since they introduced flogging and stoning and amputating body parts as punishments prescribed by the Islamic penal code. They claimed that this was necessary for creating a city on a hill. Where is that city on a hill?

The latest victim of the promised city upon a hill was “Jafar.” Women’s rights activist Asieh Amini traveled to Takistan in Ghazvin province to witness the tragedy with her own eyes. She went and saw the pit that was full of the victim’s dried up blood, mixed with dirt. She went and saw the left-over gloves of the murderers. They had left their gloves at the scene after removing the body. Were they able to wash their hands? Are those hands even washable?

In today’s world, with all of its information highways and international human rights principles, stoning is not punishment but a criminal act. Even if the country’s laws allow it and hundreds of parliaments vote to sustain it, stoning is not punishment but a criminal act. Those who travel from Iran to places like Harvard and try to calm down wary students by telling them stoning is a punishment are not telling the truth.

Stoning is a criminal act. Whoever participates in this criminal act is a criminal: the judge who issues the sentence, the person who digs the pit, the person who throws the first rock, all of those who pretend not to know about the act but do, those who argue that judges are independent in passing verdicts – they all are criminals. The lawmaker who shuts his or her eyes on the human, social, national and international considerations to uphold the so-called Islamic penal code is not trustworthy. Several grand ayatollahs have ruled that there are enough reasons to repeal stoning. But who is there to listen?

Ayatollah Shahroudi’s [head of Iran’s judiciary] recent actions imply that he has at last understood that laws need to be changed. But he is too conservative and, like many “moderate” post-revolutionary ayatollahs, takes one step forward before taking a step back. Nevertheless, if one examines Ayatollah Shahroudi’s speeches in the past two years, he will easily understand that the ayatollah believes in reforming the country’s penal laws, which have caused unnecessary hardship, mis-education and insecurity for the country.

The critics of the country’s penal system point to the Islamic penal code, which is at the center of controversy: instead of controlling violence it promotes and rewards violence.

You can ask Ayatollah Sanei about this. Or you can ask other ayatollahs who say that the Islamic penal code has not descended from the heavens, but is a man-made construct. It consists of a number of commands, written by a group of people who thought that they were the only true discovers of Islam in the universe. It is full of grammatical and spelling errors, let alone conceptual ones. It is a priority for anyone to demand reforming these laws. No more delay is acceptable!