On Aug. 17, The News reported on the death by stoning of a couple accused of adultery in Afghanistan. At least 12 Iranian women are awaiting their sentenced deaths by stoning unless an international campaign launched by the children of one of the women forces Iranian authorities to quash the sentences and stop these executions.

These Iranian cases are evidence of the growing use of the death penalty in a country that has already executed more than 100 people this year. But the stoning of women is not simply a judicial punishment; it’s a political tool in the hands of the authorities to threaten and control the citizens, and women are usually the target of these barbaric political acts. This is no different than the Taliban in Afghanistan, which uses the punishment of stoning women to death for leaving the house without being accompanied by a man, as a tactic to keep them confined to their homes.

Though not mentioned in the Quran, the use of stoning is imbedded in Biblical law as a punishment for adultery. If a husband discovers that his bride is not a virgin, the Bible provides “then they shall bring out the girl to the doorway of her father’s house, and the men of the city shall stone her to death.” (Deuteronomy 22:21)

Sadly, death by stoning is not only confined to history. Once carried out privately in remote villages, Iran’s revolutionary government added stoning to its criminal code in 1979. The code of the Islamic Republic of Iran today still dictates that sex before marriage is punishable by 100 lashes, and those accused of sex outside of their marriage are sentenced to death by stoning.

The Iranian Islamic Penal Code is very specific about proper procedures for stoning. Article 102 states that men shall be buried up to their waists and women up to their breasts for the execution. In certain cases, if they can escape from the ground, they will be freed. Since women are buried deeper than men, they are at a disadvantage. According to Article 104, the stones used for execution are to be large enough to cause pain, but not sufficient to kill immediately. While stoning is legal, ironically, throwing the wrong-sized stone is illegal. Although the penal code provides that men can be sentenced to death by stoning, this rarely if ever happens. In fact, the majority, if not all of those who have been killed by stoning in Iran, are women. This shows us that stoning is not used as a reasonable punishment for the commission of serious crimes, but rather as a political weapon to control women’s behavior through the use of repression and fear.

According to the universally accepted Quranic interpretation, a death sentence carries a stringent requirement of proof of the crime. The crime of adultery must be proved by four eyewitnesses to the actual act. Yet in countries where stoning is practiced, the judges—all male—routinely rely on hearsay and their own hunches instead of reliable evidence to proclaim women guilty of serious, capital crimes.

So how has this pre-Islamic punishment crept into Islam? Muslim jurists think that the Quranic punishment in Verse 24-2 applies only to fornication and that in the case of adultery, the Sunnah (habits and sayings) of the Prophet prescribes stoning to death. The most accepted collection of Hadith (traditions of the Prophet) by Sahih al Bukhari has four entries referring to stoning by death. However, in these very clear entries the narrator is silent on the question of whether stoning to death was ordered by the Prophet before or after the revelation of the Verse 24-2.

The Quran was revealed in stages over 23 years. Until revelation on a specific point was received by the Prophet, he followed the Law of Moses or the Traditions of Abraham. But once a revelation was received, there was no question of his substituting it. There is no record of another case of death by stoning carried out under the command of the Prophet. Since it is the firm belief of Muslims that the Quran includes every word that was revealed by God to the Prophet and not a word has been lost or added to the revelation, why is stoning considered Islamic at all?

Apart from the brutality of stoning, there is an element of gender injustice in the operation of the traditional law, which allows the male partner to get off scot-free, even if he has raped the female. If the woman lodges a complaint against the rapist, her complaint is taken as a testimony against herself and, therefore, amounts to admission and requires no further evidence. A possible course can be for the eminent jurists from the Muslim world to reconsider the question of permissibility of stoning on the sound basis that since a Hadith may be unauthentic, it cannot overrule a clear mandate of the Quran.

Since there is no equivalent in Islam of the Synod of the Bishops of the Catholic Church to review questions of Islamic law, I suggest that representatives of all the different sects within Islam gather together to undertake the task. These genius representatives will have to rewrite the Islamic jurisprudence considering the knowledge and wisdom of the five acknowledged founders of Islam, in light of the new questions that have arisen not only on stoning but many other discrepancies between the Quran and the written body of Islamic jurisprudence. Such a task has not been attempted since the gates of Ijtihad were closed in the 10th century, but the vastly changed human landscape in Muslim countries since that time requires this.

Why should we, as Americans, care about whether the stoning of women in Iran is Islamic or not? The answer lies in the dangerous state of

U. S.-Iranian relations. I woke up on Aug. 22 to learn of Iran’s launching of its nuclear maneuvers. Concern over Iran’s development of nuclear weapons capability has generated increasing dialogue on a range of issues between the European Union and Iran. As an American Iranian, I hope the West will not be willing to grant economic concessions to an increasingly authoritarian and repressive Iranian leadership in exchange for guarantees on proliferation issues. The Quran clearly does not require that these women be killed by stoning. It is just the repressive totalitarian extremist regime that is ignoring the Quran’s message of mercy and forgiveness after proving the guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

And as a mediator, I can only hope the West’s dialogue with Iran creates an opportunity to elevate human rights concerns, starting with the death by stoning of women who have committed no real crimes.