The Role of Islamic Criminal Law in Cultivating Islamic Moral Values in the Society

Inattention to the bonds between the Islamic criminal law and Islamic ethics in principles, purpose, contents and administrative mechanisms, the attenuation of various ethical aspects of Islamic criminal law and also casting doubts on the rationality and efficiency of the Islamic criminal law, have all resulted in a call for exclusion or alteration of some impeachments and penalizations. By employing an analytic-descriptive research method and library-research data collection methods, the present research aims at explaining one of the principle bonds between Islamic criminal law and Islamic ethics, i.e. the role of Islamic criminal law in cultivating Islamic moral values in the society. It is hoped that through this study, some aspects with regard to the rationality and efficiency of the Islamic criminal law be explicated and its ethical capacities and capabilities be further activated. It must be noted that impeachments and penalizations in Islamic criminal law serve, one the one hand, the purpose of informing and teaching the people the basic and minimal Islamic moral values by drawing the boundary lines of moral values in the society, and training individuals and hence the whole society based on the values by hurting the offenders of the basic moral values on the other. Furthermore, the legislation and administration of Islamic penalties convey the message that the more a behavior approximates and resembles the prohibited actions, the higher its degree of nastiness and immorality will be, though it might not have reached a prohibited criminal degree. This will in turn lead to an increased effect of Islamic impeachments and penalizations in teaching moral values.