Lashing a doctor for claimed wrong prescription that has led to addiction, or lashing a female teacher 100 times in public and in the presence of all her students and some parents for throwing a shoe at a student, does not do the society any good or deter anybody from making a mistake, notes Iqbal Tamimi.
The maximum number of lashes mentioned in Islamic texts is 100. It is a punishment for what is considered the major crime of adultery. But the latest of shocking news of abusing the punishment system in Saudi Arabia has been reported 31st August 2010 by a number of local Saudi websites including (hrofy.com), claims a Saudi judge at a court of the city of Taef, has sentenced an elderly man in his 90s to 100 lashes. This old man did not commit adultery. He was sentenced to 100 lashes for breaking the windscreen of a car that belongs to the judge of Alqureea Bani Malik’s court during Friday prayers. The old man said he broke the windscreen of the judge's car to take revenge over a previous verdict against him.
In October 2008 a Saudi court in the city of Jeddah, sentenced the Egyptian doctor Raoof Ameen AlArabi who was working in Saudi Arabia to 1500 lashes and 7 years imprisonment. He was accused of prescribing a drug to a female patient that resulted in her becoming addicted to the prescription. Alriyadh Saudi national newspaper warned on 5th April 2009 that flogging punishments has reached an astronomical record in Saudi Arabia; one of such sentences was 40.000 lashes. Another punishment was 4.000 lashes for stealing two lambs.
These punishments raised controversial issues, since such numbers of lashes has never been reported or recorded in Islamic punishments’ system before. The punishment by flogging in Islam has been recorded in three cases and allowed only under tight regulations and conditions. Making the flogging punishment an almost impossible task, such as in the case of adultery, where four witnesses are required to come forward to testify accusing the person of adultery, and they should swear that they have seen personally, without a shadow of doubt the intercourse act was happening in front of all four of them at the same time and that the genitals of both adulterers were fitting like a hand in a glove. Hugging in bed, kissing or seeming like making love does not count in such testimony, making accusing a person of adultery almost an impossible task.
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=41507