the prescribed ḥadd, not retaliation or qiṣāṣ. In addition, it shuts the door to corruption and blood–shed, eradicates fraud and deceit, and blocks every path that leads to covert murder. In this way the Qur’anic text that generally obliges execution as qiṣāṣ is restricted and applied to all forms of deliberate killing except ghīlah.
- Decision of the Council of Senior Scholars on execution for ghīlah: Resolution (38) dated 11/8/1395 AH:
Praise belongs to Allah alone, and may blessings and peace be upon the Prophet after whom there is no prophet. To proceed:
Pursuant to the resolution of the Council of Senior Scholars in its sixth session instructing the Permanent Committee for Scholarly Research and Fatwas to prepare a study on ghīlah, the study was completed and placed on the agenda of the Council’s seventh session, held in Ṭāʾif from 2/8/1395 AH to 8/11/1395 AH. The study was presented, read before the assembly, and the Council discussed the statements of scholars concerning the linguistic and juristic definitions of ghīlah, as well as the punishment for the killer—whether it should be qiṣāṣ or a ḥadd—before exchanging views.
The scholars have stated that killing by ghīlah is deliberate and aggressive, achieved through stratagem and deception, or at a moment when the victim feels completely safe from the killer’s harm—whether the motive be financial gain, violation of honor, fear of scandal and exposure of a secret, or anything similar.
Examples include: deceiving a person until he trusts the killer, then taking him to a secluded place where no one can see and murdering him; seizing a man’s wealth by force and then killing him for fear that he will reclaim it; killing a man to take his wife or daughter; a wife murdering her husband in his bedchamber to rid herself of him—or the reverse—and anything of that sort.
For these reasons the Council resolved—unanimously, except for Shaykh Ṣāliḥ ibn Ghuṣūn—that whoever commits murder by ghīlah is to be executed as a ḥadd, not as qiṣāṣ, and no one may pardon him. The foundation for this ruling lies in the Qur’an, the Sunnah, the precedent of the early generations, and sound legal reasoning.