Claim: A Sharia council in Pakistan determined a rapist’s sister should be raped by the victim’s brother in front of 40 witnesses. This is known as ‘revenge rape’ in Sharia law.
Fact: While this incident occurred, the decision followed tribal customs and was not determined by a Sharia council. Sharia law does not allow for “revenge rape”.
On 16 September 2024, a user on X (formerly Twitter) posted an image (archive) of a headline from the British tabloid The Daily Mail. The image reads, “Rapist is let off for sexually attacking a woman after agreeing to allow his sister to be raped by his victim’s brother in Pakistan.”
The post is captioned, “PAKISTAN: a woman was raped, and instead of arresting the rapist, the Sharia council determined that the rapist’s sister should be raped by the victim’s brother. The innocent teenage girl was publicly raped in front of 40 people in what is called ‘revenge rape’ in Sharia law.”
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check first conducted a search using keywords from the headline and was able to locate the original article. It was written in 2018 and detailed an incident in the Toba Tek Singh region of Punjab, Pakistan. The article noted, “A man had been accused of raping a woman in Pir Mahal in the Toba Tek Singh district on March 20. Local news reports that the suspect’s family had approached the victim’s family for ‘pardon and reconciliation’. The victim’s family agreed to pardon the rapist, on the condition that ‘her brother would commit the same act with the suspect’s sister’.” Soch Fact Check also found credible reports of the incident by local news outlets Dawn News and Geo News thus confirming the incident.
While the incident is true, the article makes no mention of a Sharia council aiding in the decision as claimed in the viral post. In fact, it explicitly mentions that “a dozen people attending a meeting between the two families agreed to the terms” and the event was only brought to light when a “police officer found out about the case when the two families prepared legal documents agreeing not to press charges against each other.”
While neither Dawn News nor Geo News mentioned a Sharia council being involved in the incident, Geo News did report that a ‘four-member panchayat’ mediated the agreement and ordered the rape. Panchayat, which means local council, refers to a group of local village elders and not Islamic jurisprudence experts who would be expected in a Sharia council.
The practice of local village councils mediating conflicts of this nature is common in Pakistan, with the councils operating under different local titles such as ‘jirga’ and ‘panchayat’. In a report titled the ‘Jirga System in Pakistan’, The Research Society of International Law defined it as, “an all-male council which settles conflicts through local customs and laws” that has operated in Pakistan since the pre-colonial era. It added that jirgas often prescribe solutions such as, “‘swara’, ‘vanni’ or ‘sung chatti’ which involve the barter of women as settlement.” Specifically important to this case would be ‘vanni’ which, according to the report, “applies in cases of kidnapping, murder or rape whereby the closest virgin female relative of the accused is handed over to the other family as punishment.”
These councils have often been reported as prescribing revenge rape as a method of resolving conflicts between families. Only months before the case in the claim, in July 2017, another rape revenge case was widely reported. In this instance, a 16-year-old girl was raped on the orders of a panchayat, in revenge, after her brother raped a 12-year-old girl. NPR reported, “In the July incident, the family of the 12-year-old girl appear to deeply adhere to the rules of tribal justice. After she was raped, her mother appealed to the panchayat in their area of the city of Multan, known as Muzaffarabad.”
Amnesty International released a report on this 2017 revenge rape case noting, “Pakistan’s failure to protect women against the arbitrary and cruel decisions of so-called village and tribal councils has been the subject of longstanding scrutiny by the United Nations’ human rights bodies,” and that the “Pakistani government was asked by the UN Human Rights Committee to detail steps it has taken to regulate parallel ‘justice’ systems, such as jirgas. The committee said it had received several reports of discrimination and violence against women at the hands of these parallel systems.”
Importantly, in the case of the claim, none of the reports on either case made mention of a Sharia council. Instead, they noted the issue is due to the widespread use of local village councils.
These local councils have since been declared unlawful by the Pakistan Supreme Court. In a seminal 2019 case, the Court declared that jirgas and panchayats violated Pakistan’s international obligations under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. It also found traditional systems unconstitutional, breaching Articles 4, 8, 10-A, 25, and 175(3) of the Constitution, as they operated outside the law and attempted to adjudicate civil and criminal matters. The verdict stated that any orders or decisions by such groups were illegal, as no individual or group could assume the authority of a court without legal jurisdiction. However, they could still operate to solve civil disputes within the permissible limits of the law.
This claim is proven further false as “Sharia councils” do not exist in Pakistan. Pakistan has a Federal Shariat Court, a constitutional Islamic court, which examines laws and cases to ensure they align with Sharia law. The Shariat Court consists of eight judges chosen by the President with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court’s consultation. Of these eight judges, only three must be Ulema (ie Islamic scholars) the rest are typically retired High Court or Supreme Court justices. However, the case in the claim was never heard nor appealed in the Shariat Court.
The final part of the claim comes from the caption which states this practice is known as ‘revenge rape’ in Sharia law. Sharia literally translates to “the clear, well-trodden path to water”. It is the guidance followers of Islam find and is derived from the Quran, Hadith (sayings and actions of Prophet Muhammad), and interpretations by Islamic jurists, which provide strict guidelines. Because Sharia is reliant on interpretation, there is no fixed Sharia law.
While Sharia law is interpretive certain aspects of the law have been fixed such as rulings surrounding rape. Rape comes under the category of “Zina”, and this encompasses crimes of a sexual nature or unlawful sexual intercourse, crimes that come under Zina include rape, prostitution, bestiality etc. The way legal scholars have interpreted punishment surrounding Zina is actually via the categorization of it as a “hudud” sin or “sin against Allah”. These crimes are mentioned along with their (typically harsh) punishment in the Quran, as stated, “And whosoever transgresses the boundaries of God (hudud), such are wrongdoers (zalimun)” (Q 2:229). In the case of Zina the Quran states, “And those who protect their private parts except from their spouses or those whom their right hands possess, such are without blame. And whosoever desires beyond that, such are transgressors (Q 23:5-7).
The main difference in how rape is viewed in different Islamic schools of law stems from the concept of it being solely a crime against God (hudud) or a dual violation against God and man. According to the Mālikī, Ḥanbalī, and Shāfiʾī schools of law, rape is considered as two separate offenses. Firstly, it violated a “right of God” (ḥaqq Allāh), which warranted the ḥadd punishment. Secondly, it violated a “human” or interpersonal right (ḥaqq ādamī), necessitating monetary compensation. Thus the punishment for rape depends on the virginal status of the rapist. If the rapist is a virgin (before the rape) they get 100 lashes and are required to pay the victim financial compensation. If the rapist is not a virgin they are either stoned or crucified to death and are required to pay the victim financial compensation.
Pakistani laws around rape however follow the Hanafi school of thought which views rape as a moral and theological sin. As such the Hanafi school of thought differs on the requirement of financial compensation likening it to prostitution. As Dr Hina Azam, associate professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas, Austin writes, “For Hanafıs, the primary rights to be taken into consideration in evaluating sex acts and in determining associated penalties were divine rights, not interpersonal rights. Accordingly, any claims to monetary compensation for sexual violation were limited by the moral context in which the sex act occurred”. Thus Hanafi scholars have therefore defined the consequence for this Zina as solely a hadd/hudud punishment. As renowned Hanafi scholar al-Quduri wrote, “The man’s coercion (ikrah) of the woman to zina: Our companions have said that if the man coerces woman to zina, then upon him is the hadd, but there is no mahr on him.”
Pakistan’s own laws for rape reflect this. In 1979 the country passed the Offence of Zina (Enforcement Of Hudood) Ordinance. Under this ordinance, in Section 5(2) the punishment laid out for Zina was either stoning to death or 100 lashes from a whip. However, in 2006 the Protection of Women (Criminal Laws Amendment) Act was passed, changing the punishment. It stated under S.376 that anyone guilty of rape would face death or imprisonment for a minimum of 10 years and was liable to a fine. In cases where rape is committed by two or more persons, the punishment was death or imprisonment for life.
In 2016, the government amended the laws once again with the Anti-Rape Laws (Criminal Amendment Bill). This amendment strengthened the punishments further stating under S.1 that the “rape, gang rape, rape of minors and/or persons with disabilities is punishable with imprisonment for life and fine.”
Thus nowhere in Sharia or Islamic jurisprudence is revenge rape prescribed as a solution. Nor is it a prescribed punishment in Pakistani law.
Additionally, while revenge rape is an ongoing concern in Pakistan, both NPR and Amnesty also noted that the problems do not stem from religion or Sharia but from local patriarchial customs. Amnesty International’s Pakistan Campaigner Nadia Rehman was quoted saying, “No cultural traditions can justify attacks on women. Violence against women is always the opposite of justice.” And NPR wrote, “The panchayat that ordered the rape is led by influential landlords who settle disputes according to tribal customs that predate Islam.”
Virality
Soch Fact Check found the claim on Facebook here, here, and here.
The viral X post also garnered 5 million views. Notably, Elon Musk, owner of X, commented under the post writing, “That is horrifying”.
Conclusion: Thus while the case of revenge rape reported in the viral headline is true, it occurred under the orders of a local village council, not a Sharia council. The concept of revenge rape does not exist in Sharia law nor Pakistani law.
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