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paul r. powers
OFFENDING HEAVEN AND EARTH:
SIN AND EXPIATION IN ISLAMIC HOMICIDE LAW*
PAUL R. POWERS
Abstract
The Qur"§n clearly condemns homicide and assigns the freeing of a slave
to any who kill accidentally. Classical fiqh manuals, however, display a
remarkable range of responses to and disagreements about this dictate.
Many jurists hold that freeing a slave here is an instance of kaff§ra
(expiation), understood as an antidote to sin. Yet accidental homicide is
widely deemed non-sinful, so kaff§ra is assigned for a non-sin. Further, many
say the sin of intentional homicide cannot be expiated. \anafÊs often add
the idiosyncratic assertion that freeing a slave is not kaff§ra but rather an
instance of “thanking the benefactor,” an altogether different kind of act.
I conclude that freeing a slave in response to homicide is not consistently
treated as the expiation of sin. Further, the jurists’ treatment of kaff§ra
forces a reconsideration of the commonplace assertion that Islamic law
treats murder as more tort than crime.
Introduction
One way of describing the difference between fiqh al-#ib§d§t and fiqh
al-mu#§mal§t is to assert that the former governs relations between
humans and the divine, while the latter governs relations among
humans.1 Most Muslim jurists, of course, work with the premise that
Correspondence: Paul R. Powers, Lewis & Clark College, Dept. of Religious Studies,
0615 S.W. Palatine Hill Road, Portland, Oregon, 97219; E-mail: ppowers@
lclark.edu
*
I am thankful to Kenneth Garden, Maurice Pomerance, Marion Katz,
A. Kevin Reinhart, and the Editors and readers at Islamic Law and Society for
their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.
1
Such a description is commonplace, especially in scholarly works intended
for a general audience. See, e.g., Frederick Mathewson Denny, An Introduction to
Islam, 3d ed. (Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006), 196-7;
Abdulaziz Sachedina, “Woman, Half-the-Man? Crisis of Male Epistemology in
Islamic Jurisprudence,” in Perspectives on Islamic Law, Justice and Society, ed. R. S.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007
Also available online – www.brill.nl
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