Ottoman criminal law made the punished body a readable public text
Evidence
In this respect Mehmed Ali and his authorities were not real innovators. The sharī’a, as is well known, uses the body of the culprit in a similar way to bring about some kind of connection between the crime committed and its appropriate punishment. Theft, for example, is punished by amputating the hand. Similarly, the old Ottoman criminal code introduced by Süleyman the Lawgiver (r. 1520–66) expanded on the corporal punishments mentioned in the sharī’a to include such cases as “castration for abducting … a woman, girl, or boy … and for sodomy; … the branding of the forehead for procuring and for fraud … the branding of the vulva of a woman or girl who voluntarily elopes with a man; the slitting of the nose or cutting off of the ear of an army deserter, and … the cutting off of the nose of a professional procuress.” The intention of all these punishments that exhibited itself so spectacularly on the body of the culprit was, in one sense, to make the body of the culprit a book to be read, as it were, by the illiterate spectators, urging them to draw connections, however vague, between the crime committed and what was believed to be its appropriate punishment. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 673
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- DEFINE: Explains the didactic function of corporal punishment: the body as a text for illiterate spectators.