:: Farrukh Dhondy

A wide-eyed look at an ancient law

By Farrukh Dhondy

Mar 14 : "The only thing worse

Than being used by a lover

— is not being used by a lover."

From Look at the State of Your Creation, Oh Lord by Bachchoo

I wonder if Muslims in general know that the injunction which asks for an eye in return for an eye does not enter the jurisprudence of Sharia through the word of the Quran or the acts of the Prophet Muhammad, but through the book of Deuteronomy, the word of Moses (Or Elohi/Illahi/ Allah through Moosa-alleh-salaam) in the Old Testament, the holy book of the Jewish faith.

Moses asked, famously, for an eye in return for an eye and a tooth in return for a tooth. It seems, on the face of it, a fairly just demand or legal injunction. After all he is not asking for six eyes or a hundred in revenge for the damaged one. The justice seems evenhanded and seeks to maintain a sort of balance in the universe. Its mathematical nature, the resemblance to an equation is clearly a formula to be followed in courts and the administration of justice. It was probably intended as a principle of punishment or the rules of law, a sort of Geneva Convention for the chosen people. It cannot have been a prescription for natural occurrences or emotional outbursts. It is clearly not something that applies to bacteria or other agencies that cause cataracts or lead to blindness through their mechanisms. Bacteria can’t be expected to sacrifice their eyes for causing blindness in the eye of a human being through their life-supporting proclivity to chew away at optical tissue. No! The eye business is a prescription for a legal exchange.

The dental prescription is altogether more puzzling. Apart from bicycle accidents and the medical extractions performed by dentists on volunteers, the only examples one comes across in life of teeth being knocked out of someone’s jaw are in boxing bouts or street fights. I have personally suffered dental injuries in bicycle accidents and have witnessed the loss of several teeth in street fights. The victims who lost their teeth seemed in those cases to have little or no regard for the laws prescribed by Moses. They ventured a retaliation which would knock out as many teeth from the jaws of their opponents as they could manage. The more the merrier.

The point is that I can’t really see anyone going to court to demand that a displaced tooth be paid for by a similar limited displacement. In which circumstances known to the interaction of humans would such a situation arise?

Now, contrary to the opinion of some readers of this column, I am not stupid! (Lahol billa kuwat! A friend recently pointed out to me that some people have taken to express very low and even offensive and abusive opinions of my character and intellect on something called the Internet!). I know through constant usage myself the function of the metaphor, synechdoche (hah! You didn’t know that one, did you?) and of symbolic expression. When Moses said "tooth" he may not have meant just a tooth! He may have intended the tooth to stand for a leg or an arm or even a testicle. That way, all mortal combat which resulted in injury would be open to his even-handed jurisprudence.

Not very many courts in the Western world are called upon to consider the original Mosaic equation, but in November in Iran, a state court acting under Sharia law passed sentence on a man who had thrown acid in the face of a woman who had spurned his requests for betrothal and blinded her in one eye and damaged her other eye’s capacities by 60 per cent. The poor woman left the country and had herself surgically attended to in Barcelona, Spain where she still lives. She is now blind in both eyes, a parasitic infection having assaulted her weakened frame and put the other eye out. She lies in darkness and relies on the munificence of the Spanish state and on the charity of friends.

The Iranian courts passed judgment on her monstrous assailant and demanded an eye for an eye. Part of the argument in the case was that "since women are worth half the value of men, the loss of both eyes for the woman should result in the blinding in one eye of the convicted criminal".

The poor victim, speaking from Spain, has this week demanded that her assailant be blinded by the Iranian justice system, his eyes being put out by acid corrosion under anaesthetic. The argument about one or both eyes is still current in the Iranian courts and newspapers. In an even later development the blind woman victim, who was awarded $25,000 from the wealth of the perpetrator’s family, has been ordered to pay that money back if she wants the man to be blinded. It would appear, though the judgments I have read don’t make it clear, that she can either have the cash or have revenge by getting him blinded.

This is, to say the least, a very strange case in our modern world. There was, some years ago, the bizarre occurrence of blindings by the Bihari police of some bandits. It was a national Indian scandal and Prakash Jha, a Bihari himself, made a film called Ganga Jal about it. The guilty policemen were prosecuted under the Indian Penal Code which doesn’t follow the Mosaic or Old Testament Judaic law.

Moses wouldn’t have known the value of 25,000 American dollars. He would probably have counted wealth in numbers of sheep or camels or the like. Yet we don’t find in Deuteronomy any reference to an eye for sixty sheep or a tooth for one and half camels. It means that he didn’t consider the loss of an organic entity tradeable for material wealth. If the Iranian law does, then it has been influenced by some materialistic intrusion from outside the word of God as given to Moses. Money for eyes, money for lives, is now part of that jurisprudence. I wonder then what price this legal jurisprudence would put on a tooth.

In the 1970s one of my hippy friends in London was down and out and sold his body to a medical trust for dissection when he died. The sole of his foot was tattooed with a notice which declared the body to be the property of this medical trust and enjoined the public to deliver it to the buyer when the time came. I think my friend was paid five pounds.