Statistically, this is the first known case over a decade, but the acid is thrown at women in India, Pakistan, Bangaldesh – regardless of their religion, and seldom the culprits are revenged equally but they have been punished in general for the crimes, usually against women.
This is the story of goodness triumphing over the revengeful attitude. Sharia laws were compiled with the intent of serving justice and not revenge or retaliation.
I am glad Qisas, an eye for an eye is not practiced in 50 of the 56 Muslim majority nations, it is rather a practice of control freaks, rather than Muslims. Forgiveness is the most important aspect of Islamic practice and not retaliation.
God’s favorite is one who forgives! Glad the victim chose to forgive. I cannot figure how a doctor was willing to disfigure another human? Something seriously flawed in Iran, Saudi and possibly in Pakistan. Though rare, it is primitive.
Qisas (Arabic/Persian) is an Islamic term meaning “retaliation,” and follows the principle of an eye for an eye, or lex talionis, first set forth by Hammurabi, and subsequently included in the Old Testament and later legal codes. In the case of murder, it means the right of the heirs of a murder victim to demand execution of the murderer.
O you who believe, equivalence is the law decreed for you when dealing with murder – the free for the free, the slave for the slave, the female for the female. If one is pardoned by the victim’s kin, an appreciative response is in order, and an equitable compensation shall be paid. This is an alleviation from your Lord and mercy. Anyone who transgresses beyond this incurs a painful retribution. The Quran also allows aggrieved parties to forfeit the right of qisas as an act of charity or an act of atonement for sins.
Qisas is enforced today in countries which follow Sharia, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan. But rarely any one is revenged.
In Dallas Rais Bhuiyan showed remarkalbe goodness of forgiving the man who made an attempt to shoot him to kill after 9/11. Governor Rick Perry seem like a villian here by not listening to the victim.
Mike Ghouse
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http://news.yahoo.com/iranian-blinded-acid-pardons-her-attacker-153631250.html
The man waited on his knees and wept.
“I forgave him, I forgave him,” she responded, asking the doctor to spare him at the last minute in a dramatic scene broadcast on Iran’s state television.
Bahrami, whose face remains visibly burned, was a glimpse of her former self, wearing a touch of pink gloss on her lips and a loosely wrapped headscarf to the hospital where the sentence was to be carried out. She was helped into the building by two women who held both her hands.
“It is best to pardon when you are in a position of power,” Bahrami said, explaining that she did not want revenge.
The sobbing man, Majid Movahedi, said Bahrami was “very generous.”
“I couldn’t imagine being blinded by acid,” Movahedi said, as he wept against a wall.
In the trial of Bahrami’s attacker, the court ruling allowed the woman to have a doctor pour a few drops of the corrosive chemical in one of Movahedi’s eyes as retribution.
A few months after the November 2008 ruling, Bahrami told a radio station in Spain, where she traveled for treatment of her wounds, that she was happy with the sentence.
“I am not doing this out of revenge, but rather so that the suffering I went through is not repeated,” she said in that March 2009 interview.
Though she was blinded in both eyes, she said in the radio interview that the court ruled she was entitled to blind him in only one eye.
After undergoing treatment in Barcelona, Bahrami initially recovered 40 percent of the vision in one eye, but she later lost all her sight.