Islamic criminal jurisprudence

[6][7] Crimes against God are prosecuted by the state as hudud crimes, and all other criminal matters, including murder and bodily injury, are treated as disputes between individuals with an Islamic judge deciding the outcome based on Sharia fiqh such as Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanbali and Ja'ari followed in the Islamic jurisdiction.

[9] In practice, since early on in Islamic history, criminal cases were usually handled by ruler-administered courts or local police using procedures which were only loosely related to sharia.

[12][13] The following statement in the Quran is thought to be the general rule of testimony in Islam, except for crime and punishment - for example, debt, shopping, etc.

The jurisprudence of later periods stipulates that witnesses must be men, covering all hadd crimes and people who did not have credibility and honesty in society (slaves, non-adl; sinners, infidels) could not testify against believers.

[22] Classical jurists discussed not whether the person who did not pray should be killed or not, but what class of punishment was the punishment given, such as hudud or tazir, and also the situation of apostasy of him or her, which led to secondary consequences such as the confiscation of the property of this person after the killing and the burial of his or her body in a Muslim cemetery according to Islamic traditions.

[23] Even if today's dominant understanding defines the abandonment of worship as sinfulness and does not approve of giving worldly punishment for them, in governments under sharia, their testimony against a devout Muslim may not be accepted, they may be humiliated and barred from certain positions because of this tag.

[25] During the 19th century, sharia-based criminal laws were replaced by statutes inspired by European models nearly everywhere in the Islamic world, except some particularly conservative regions such as the Arabian peninsula.

[12][13][36] The Islamic revival of the late 20th century brought along calls by Islamist movements for full implementation of sharia.

[13][37] Reinstatement of hudud punishments has had particular symbolic importance for these groups because of their Quranic origin, and their advocates have often disregarded the stringent traditional restrictions on their application.

[13] In practice, in the countries where hudud have been incorporated into the legal code under Islamist pressure, they have often been used sparingly or not at all, and their application has varied depending on local political climate.

The Quran specifies the principle of Qisas (i.e. retaliation), but prescribes that one should seek compensation (Diyya) and not demand retribution.