Determining whether stoning for adultery and hand-amputation for theft were practiced in pre-Islamic Arabia represents the first phase in exploring the origins and evolution of these penalties in Islamic law. Should both punishments prove to predate Islam, then it would appear the Qur'an broke with stoning and confirmed amputation of the hand. An extensive survey of pre-Islamic, Near Eastern legal materials in search of parallel penalties has thus been attempted in this thesis. Remarkably, not only stoning and hand-amputation, but nearly the entire range of Islamic adultery and theft legislation have pre-Islamic parallels. The nature of these parallels, however, does not conform to the paradigm of 'borrowing' from 'foreign' sources. Rather, Arab customary law---a major contributor to Islamic law in general---appears to have diverged from an ancient Semitic 'common source' once shared with other Near Eastern cultural entities. Most major elements of Islamic criminal law, including stoning and hand-amputation, therefore represent the culmination of an ancient Semitic common law.

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