What are zina laws?

By W.B.

GO TO any women’s prison in the west-African country of Mauritania and you will find inmates whose only offence is to have been raped. Some are children. Often pregnant and unable to prove coercion, they find themselves branded criminals for having sex outside marriage. The reasons why are linked to cultures that routinely ignore women’s testimony and a set of Islamic laws, known as zina, that are enforced to different extents across the Muslim world.

Zina is an Islamic legal term, meaning illicit sexual relations, that can be found in the Koran and the hadith (the collected words and acts of the Prophet Muhammad). Muslim empires like the Ottomans, the Mughals and the Safavids defined zina in different ways. But it usually refers to adultery and extramarital sex. In the past, punishments for breaking zina laws included whipping and even death by stoning. Now, even as much of the Muslim world becomes less conservative, abuses of zina laws may still incur a prison sentence and fines. The use of the laws diminished during the anti-colonial struggles of the mid-20th century because emergent states generally modelled new criminal laws on European statute. But things changed after that. Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Vanja Hamzić of London’s School of African and Oriental studies say that, thanks to the spread of Islamism across the Muslim world at the time of the Iranian revolution, the last quarter of the 20th century saw a rise in the application of zina laws in several Muslim-majority countries.

Sometimes the laws are enshrined in state law. Sometimes they are enforced by the community, or even by the family, in the form of honour killings. In Iran, after the 1979 revolution, zina was codified in particularly brutal terms, with detailed descriptions of how men and women should be punished for zina offences. In Pakistan, the laws were introduced in 1979 as part of the re-Islamisation of the country by the military ruler, Zia-ul-Haq. Sex outside marriage was to be considered a crime against the state. According to a local lawyer, Zafar Iqbal Kalanauri, thousands of Pakistani rape victims ended up in jail as a result.

All too often the laws hit vulnerable women the hardest. In some Gulf states like Kuwait and Qatar, hundreds of female migrant workers have been punished and imprisoned for zina offences. Often their crime is to have been raped by their employers. Sometimes the laws are enforced by conservative provinces that choose to defy reformers in the capital. In Indonesia’s westerly Aceh province, for example, unmarried people may be whipped for showing signs of affection in public. According to a survey by the Mauritanian Association for the Health of the Mother and Child, an NGO, 40% of female prisoners are in jail for having sex outside wedlock. Many victims do not report being raped for fear of being punished. The rapists do not always avoid punishment, but it is easier for them to deny guilt. Turkey shelved an attempt to reintroduce zina-inspired anti-adultery and extramarital sex laws when it tried to join the European Union. But local reports say that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is reconsidering introducing a zina-inspired anti-adultery law to appease his conservative voter base.