‘Nigeria’s justice system has failed woefully’

Bookshelf: Why did you write a book on the Concept of Justice under Islamic Criminal Law?Muhammad Fari: The main purpose of writing this book is to provide all Muslims and non-Muslims with material, a comprehensive and all-embracing view on the concept of justice under Islamic criminal law. To my humble understanding, Islamic Criminal Law has […]

Bookshelf: Why did you write a book on the Concept of Justice under Islamic Criminal Law?
Muhammad Fari: The main purpose of writing this book is to provide all Muslims and non-Muslims with material, a comprehensive and all-embracing view on the concept of justice under Islamic criminal law. To my humble understanding, Islamic Criminal Law has become more relevant today than any time in human history. Today, crimes have virtually forced our nation to its knees, a lot can be learnt from Islam on how best to curtail it completely or reduce it drastically.
So the book is purely on Islamic Criminal Law?
  Yes. Islamic Criminal Law cannot be properly understood without having recourse to the entire Islamic socio-economic and political systems.
What are the basic contents of the book?
  The book began with analysis of the various aspects of Islamic Criminal Law such as Legal, Political, Social and Economic Justice. The book also looked into the Islamic concept of justice under major criminal offences and how Islam formulated the justice which set the conscience of the society at rest by providing peace, unity, stability, brotherliness, economic progress and security. Finally, the book pointed out the Islamic concept of justice under minor offences.   
There are those people among the Muslims and non-Muslims who argued that Islamic criminal law cannot be relevant today.
 There is another aspect of Islamic law that has been so vilified and misrepresented as the Islamic criminal law. It is seen as an ossified body of laws that bears little or no relationship to the modern times. It has been variously presented as barbaric, archaic, harsh, inhuman and even irrelevant to the modern era. It has been presented as an intellectually sterile body of knowledge that belongs to distant history rather than the present and the future. The vehemence and abhorrence of the Islamic criminal law by its antagonists make me wonder whether their opposition is as a result of genuine misunderstanding or out of mere mischief to settle old and new scores with Islam. Sometimes, I personally, do agree with the latter proposition. I personally wonder if the claims by the antagonists of Islamic criminal law are based on any reality and fact. The question begging for answer is that, did the modern and most advanced legal system provide solution to the human quest for justice? Those who advance the logic that Islamic criminal law is barbaric and outdated do not see the flaws in the very legal system they operate. Why? They collect facts and figures on the geometric rise in crime wave, of the predicament of victims of crimes and yet fail to appreciate that only the divine laws of Allah can offer lasting solutions. The modern legal system has not been able to provide solutions to the prevailing injustice in their areas of operation, more often than not, today the weak are subjected to oppression by the rich and justice is not easily accessible to the vast majority since most people do not have the wherewithal to pursue their remedies in the court of law. Justice under Islamic criminal law is a unique concept. In its broad outline, no less than it details, it represents an outstanding and timeless innovation for which mankind is yet to produce a parallel.  
  How can justice be achieved since the majority of people are oppressed?
Justice however rudimentary is a necessary ingredient to the human setting. Man’s quest for justice has been a continuous struggle since the beginning of the fifth century B.C, because justice cannot be achieved by the conjecture, thinking and imagination of a human being. This is because the human nature and mind is restricted by many factors. This is why no human society today in the world that operates man-made laws has been able to achieve ideal justice and that is why human societies have persisted on injustice and persecution all over. Islamic criminal justice is a higher scale of justice which if ultimately realized would be potentially applicable to the entire humanity.
  Some Northern States of Nigeria are practising Sharia law; is it not the same criminal law you are talking about?
 The concept of sharia is not just forced into the narrow constraints of court verdicts, but limited even further to only one or two segments of its legal precepts by most of these states. Therefore, those aspects of the sharia which deal with crime and punishment figure a great deal in the implementation of the sharia in the respective states and also in the work and thoughts of the contemporary traditional and modern scholars that form the sharia implementation committees of the various sharia states. Therefore, fragmenting the sharia in this way and by ignoring its overall ethical goals by the Muslim scholars and contemporary lawyers destroy its essential and holistic nature and presents it in a grotesque manner.     
Some people criticize executives, some criticize judiciary while others blame lawyers for injustice, where is exactly the problem?
The problem is from the system itself, the system has failed woefully. Courts are littered with cases, which ought to have been disposed off at least in matters of hours, days or months at most, but they last for years due to long adjournments, cumbersome procedures or several other artificial obstacles, at the end, the litigants are frustrated, the criminals most times escape, undue detention always increase and unnecessary prolonged imprisonment become the legal right of the judges. Today almost all the courts of law have turned to shops of law where the doors are only closed to those who are not in the position of buying the services. Meanwhile, in sharia, justice is not a business but a moral duty of every judge. A great service of which no fee should be charged for it. Under sharia, justice in all its ramifications and indeed its upholding is not the exclusive preserve of the court of law or judicial system alone, but a duty of all, the ruler and the ruled, the judge and the litigant, the witness and everyone in the society.
Those criticizing Islamic Criminal Law mostly focused particularly on the form of retribution; can you shade light on it?
There are countless examples where only one life was lost, at the end several lives were wasted in retaliation, these cases are rampant especially in Northern Nigeria. If the killer kills and survives it, tomorrow he/she will kill again and criminals would have license to kill, knowing fully that they cannot be killed. But in a situation where the killer is killed, he/she cannot kill again since he/she is dead already. And whoever wants to kill would not kill because he/she knows very well if he/she kills, he/she would also be killed. This would serve as a deterrent to all killers and assassins. Let us recourse to the Qur`anic verse which said, “In the law of equality there is saving of life to you, o men of understanding: That you may restrain yourselves.” [Qur`an 2:179] The verse was revealed on Wednesday 13th Jimada-Ula, 4 A.H at about 1pm  [ba`da zawali al-shamsi min kabadis sama`i]. That is to say today the verse has 1,430 years, 2 months, 17 days and 6 hour with revelation. It will interest you to know that the whole punishment can be remitted if the aggrieved party agrees or out of brotherly love. But there should be no subterfuges, no bribes, no unseemly bye-play; otherwise the whole interest of mercy and peace is lost.
The Islamic criminal law and the all other laws are intended to achieve justice, so what is the difference?
The contemporary philosophers maintained that men/women have unlimited and unconditional rights to make, interpret and execute laws. If law is understood as nothing more than the command of a man/woman with the construction from the concept of divine justice, then there is a very big problem. According to the advocates of natural law like Greek philosophers, positive law and some pre-Socratic philosophers like Democritus maintained that the example of law is like  that of “wild animals, fish and birds because they devour each other because law is unknown to them.” This clearly shows that the human faculty of thinking and reasoning is limited by countless factors; this is to say human being is imperfect. Thus, it is only God that is perfect and by extension it is only God’s laws that can achieve absolute justice. This is the difference.