STONE AGE

The stoning of adulterers was once aimed at preventing illegitimate births that might muddy the male tribal bloodlines of medieval Arabia. Now it is taking place in a world where more and more women demand reproductive freedoms,equal pay and equal status with mein parts of the Islamic world as well as throughout the West.

Those clashing perspectives became apparent last month when Brazils president,Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,offered to grant asylum to Ashtiani,the Iranian woman convicted of adultery. An online petition for her release drew hundreds of thousands of signatures. The Iranian authorities quickly redefined her crime as murder,in an apparent effort

to legitimise their case against her.

The Taliban,by contrast,are not vulnerable to shaming. They defined themselves in the 1990s largely through the imposition of an incredibly harsh and widely disputed version of Islamic law,under which stoning for adultery became common.

There is no way to say how many stonings took place,but it was widespread when the Taliban ruled, said Nader Nadery,a senior commissioner on the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

Stoning is not practised only among Muslims,nor did it begin with Islam. Human rights groups say a young girl was stoned to death in 2007 in Iraqi Kurdistans Yazidi community,which practices an ancient Kurdish religion. The Old Testament includes an episode in which Moses arranges for a man who violated the Sabbath to be stoned,and stoning probably took place among Jewish communities in the ancient Near East. Rabbinic law,which was composed starting in the first century A.D.,specifies stoning as the penalty for a variety of crimes.

Stoning is a legal punishment in only a handful of Muslim countriesin addition to Iran,they include Saudi Arabia,Somalia,Sudan,Pakistan and Nigeria,but it is very rarely put to use.

Stoning is not prescribed by the Koran. The punishment is rooted in Islamic legal traditions,known as hadiths,that designate it as the penalty for adultery. Adultery was considered to offend some of the fundamental purposes of Islamic law: to protect lineage,family,honor and property, said Kristen Stilt,an associate professor at Northwestern University who has written about Islamic law. It was a tribal society,and knowing who children belonged to was very important.

That may help explain the link between sexual crimes and stoning. A crime that seemed to violate the communitys identity called for a communal response. Some scholars even argue that the stoning penalty is meant more as a symbolic warning against misbehaviour than as a punishment.

In any case,societies evolve. The move to implement severe penalties like stoning known collectively as hud after the Arabic word for limitsis ultimately a matter of policy,not religious orthodoxy.

In Iran,the empowerment of political Islam after the 1979 revolution brought a new criminal code that included stoning. Anyone who survives a stoning is set free without further punishment. But that is unlikely,given that victims are usually bound in cloth and have their hands tied before they are buried in the ground. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently said that very few people were sentenced to stoning,and that the judiciary did not release any information about stoning cases.

Between 2006 and 2008 at least six stonings took place,all of them in secret,said Hadi Ghaemi,the director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. Currently at least 10 people are in Iranian jails under stoning sentences,seven women and three men,he added.

There is a vigorous domestic campaign against stoning in Iran,largely led by women.

In Afghanistan,by contrast,stoning seems to be on the rise,despite its unpopularity.

You do see an increase in these so-called applications of justice by the Taliban in morality cases, Nadery said. Over the last seven months,200 people have been killed for showing disapproval or criticising actions by the Taliban.