Seizure, Theft, and Why the Hand Is Not Always Cut Off

Ghaṣb carries a similar meaning: unlawfully confiscating someone else's property does not make it one's own, and it is ḥarām. Sirqah, theft, is treated with severity in Islamic law: a hand is cut off in public as its punishment. Islam is not, for this, cruel. Where every need of a person is met — food, shelter, clothing — and he lives with dignity among honest people, there is no reason for him to steal except a disease within him. In the sharīʿah, a person who is hungry, whose children are starving, and who steals under that necessity, does not have his hand cut off, because it is the government's own duty, under an Islamic sharīʿah, to ensure that nobody goes hungry in the first place; nobody is sent to Australia for the term of his natural life for stealing a loaf of bread, as happened to many of the convicts transported from England — ordinary hungry people, not hardened criminals. Islam does not commit this ẓulm. But theft of any kind, in any form, remains ḥarām, ḥarām, ḥarām.