OverviewWomen in Islamic cultures, in common with
women in other cultures, are likely to be subject to
distinctly gendered criminal law and process. The
majority of official actors in the criminal legal sys-
tem – whether secular or Islamic – are male; this
includes police officers, lawyers, prosecutors, and
judges, as well as legislators. Another cross-cultural
phenomenon is the under-reporting of crimes of
violence – particularly sexual violence – against
women and girls, including incest, rape, domestic
violence, and sexual harrassment, both because
of the nature of the complaint and prosecution
process that may ensue, and because of shame that
may attach to the victim/survivor in the eyes of
society, community, or family. In the area of crimi-
nal law and women in Islamic cultures, particular
attention is focused on the treatment of crimes
related in one way or another to the sexual conduct
(actual, alleged, or potential) of females and its
control by formal or informal law. In recent years,
a particular focus has developed among activist
women’s groups and among academics on “crimes
of honor” against women, which involve not only
an unwritten law considered by the perpetrator(s)
to sanction a murder, but also the state criminal
legal system (again, secular or Islamic) in viewing
the perpetrator’s claimed motivation with indul-
gence and hence in reducing the protections
afforded by state law to the lives of women citizens.
A further focus, in light of the “Islamization” of the
legal systems of a number of states since the 1970s,
has been the discriminatory impact upon women of
the implementation of the ™addpenalties for extra-
marital sexual relations. In addition, since the 11
September 2001 attacks in the United States,
women in Muslim communities in the United
States and Europe have been disproportionately
affected by state actions – mostly against husbands
and male family members – taken under anti-ter-
rorism criminal and internal security legislation
and criticized by civil society groups as not meeting
due process and other human rights standards.
Since the 1970s, a number of Muslim majority
states have announced programs of the Islam-
ization of laws in which the codification of Islamic
criminal law is a prominent and, according to
observers, highly symbolic feature. These include
Law: Criminal
Libya, Pakistan, Sudan, Yemen, and states in north-
ern Nigeria. Typically such legislative programs
include the ™addpenalties stipulated for specific
offences in traditional jurisprudence (fiqh) on the
basis of the source texts of the Qur±àn and the
™adìth, notably, for the purposes of this examina-
tion, the offence of zinà, unlawful sexual inter-
course, that is, sex between any two persons who
are not (and know that they are not) married to
each other. The offence of zinàis punishable,
according to the traditional interpretations of the
source texts, by the ™addpenalties of stoning to
death for the married offender and by whipping for
the unmarried offender; these penalties are criti-
cized by many on human rights grounds. Although
the penalties apply both to males and females, the
implementation of such statutes has also been crit-
icized inter aliaon grounds of their discriminatory
impact on women. Particular concerns raised in
this regard are evidentiary rules or judicial practice
establishing pregnancy of an unmarried woman as
proof of zinà; the inclusion of the crime of rape
in the zinàstatutes; and the disqualification of
women’s testimony in zinàcases (Sidahmed 2001,
Quraishi 1997).
It is commonly observed that the evidentiary
standards for proving the occurrence of zinàliable
to the ™addpenalty are so high as to be practically
impossible to meet, except in the case of voluntary
confession to the offence; otherwise, the require-
ment of four adult male Muslim witnesses to the
act of penetration brings the offence of zinà, as
Quraishi (1997, 296) points out, very much into
the public sphere rather than treating it as a matter
of private conduct. However, reliance on a minority
juristic opinion allowing pregnancy of an unmar-
ried women to stand as evidence for zinàintroduces
a way of establishing the offence that applies only
to the woman involved, and cannot be used against
her partner. Sidahmed (2001, 203) observes that
“the presumption of zinaon grounds of pregnancy,
whether corroborated by a confession or not, puts
a woman defendant in a disadvantageous position
compared to a man accused of the same offence”
and ponders the implications of a modern-day leg-
islature (in this case Sudan) explicitly introducing
this minority opinion as part of statute law. A pre-
sumption of zinàis also of relevance to the treat-
ment of rape as “forcible zinà” or “zinàunder