Last updated: April 30th, 2025 at 12:21 pm · Est. Reading Time: 2 minutes
The punishment for theft was the chopping off of a hand in late pre-Islamic Arabia.
Recognition of the Crime
Theft was a crime in the eyes of the Arabs since ancient times. An inscription found at Hatra dates from December 151 CE. It reads, “Anyone who will steal inside this store and inside the outer wall, if he is a man of the community, he shall be killed by the death of the god, and if he is a foreigner, he shall be stoned.”1 The inscription determines the definition of the crime, i.e. taking possession of another person’s property, without the owner’s permission, without any right to do that, and without any intention to return it. The inscription also sheds light on the punishment for the crime in ancient Arabia. The crime was so heinous that it was punishable by death. The death could be inflicted by god, in case the community was unable to punish the person, or by stoning to death if the community had any power over the culprit.
History of the Punishment of Hand Chopping
The earliest example of chopping off a hand for theft comes from Code 253 of Hammurabi’s law: “If a man hires a man to oversee his farm and furnish him the seed-grain and intrust him with oxen and contract with him to cultivate the field, and that man steals either the seed or the crop and it be found in his possession, they shall cut off his fingers”.2
Punishment of Theft in Late Pre-Islamic Arabia
Pre-Islamic Arabs used to chop off the hands of thieves. In one anecdote recorded by Ibn Ishaq, Quraysh chopped off the hand of Duwayk, a freedman of the Mulayḥ clan of Khuza’a (Khuzā’ah خُزاعَه) for being involved in theft of treasure from the Ka’ba in pre-Islamic times.3 Awa’il literature attributes the first cutting of the hands to a well-known Quraysh figure, “The first to cut for theft was Walīd bin Mughīrah……the Quraysh used to prescribe that.”4
Delivery of Justice
The Tribal Zone of Arabia had two mechanisms to impose justice: Tribal assemblies and arbiters. Yet, they did not have the means to apply it universally. In the event quoted above, they could apply it to the freed man of Khuza’a tribe but did not apply it to the Quraysh implicit of the crime, according to Ibn Ishaq.
Further Reading
History of Islam, Social Structure of Pre-Islamic Arabs, https://historyofislam.org/social-structure-of-pre-islamic-arabs/
Footnotes
- Jabir Khalil Ibrahim, Pre-Islamic Settlement in Jazirah, (Baghdad: Ministry of Culture & Information, 1986), 195.
- Robert Francis Harper, The Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon about 2250 B.C. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1904), 89.
- Muhammad Ibn Ishaq. The life of Muhammad, ed. and trans. Alfred Guillaume. (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 79.
- Abu Hilal al-Ḥasan ibn ‘Abd Allāh Al-‘Askari, Kitāb al-Awāil, ed. Muḥammad al-Sayyid al-Wakīl (Medina: 1385/1966), 34.