1.

Despite the 27 seven years that have passed since that time, I still can’t forget about my brother’s cut hand… Why does everyone say that the word “human” is a mixture of “fondness” and “forgetting” in Persian? Why do they call humans, creatures that quickly become fond of something, and forget about stuff sooner than the others…? I have neither forgotten nor have I become fond of anyone other than Reza. During all these years, I’ve never thought that my work could capture someone’s attention… And now, a young idealistic girl’s sitting here and daydreaming about things that are so familiar to me. It’s like I don’t even know that I’m staring at her.

“Sorry, am I speaking too fast?” she asks uncomfortably.

“No, no! Excuse me. My mind was wandering around for a bit.”

“I’m sorry I’m a rolling stone…”

“No, it’s fine. Continue please.”

She’s a law student, working on her dissertation.

“Well, all that I’m trying to say through this paper is this… The justice angel cannot serve justice with closed eyes… This whole image of the justice angel that we have is wrong… We can’t interpret law with closed eyes… If it is the ruler’s right to want people to act according to social rules, people also have the right to ask something in return; justice is a two-way street. You can’t serve penal justice without taking care of social justice. It’s some kind of an Unbearable Obligation; the idea indeed comes from western books… I’m mentioning this ‘cause one of the professors decided to challenge me on it when I was defending my thesis proposal; nevertheless, I was able to find a connection between this so-called western idea and religious beliefs… I mean I found the main idea of that part about the two-sided relationship between people’s and the government’s rights and responsibilities in one of Imam Ali’s letters to Malik al-Ashtar which goes like: people have rights upon the ruler, just as the ruler has rights upon them. On the other hand, the fact that you can’t serve penal justice without taking care of social justice can also be observed from different aspects in religious beliefs; from the necessity to conditions put on cutting off hands punishment[1] such as it not occurring during a drought year… Well, don’t you think that with all these sanctions, over-priced goods, and the high number of people live in slums, this situation counts as a drought, too? Of course, you know this stuff way better than I do… Sorry, can you please tell me when you start to get bored?”

“No, it’s fine. Your words sound interesting to me… I feel like I’m in class all over again, after so many years…”

She squirms on the chair. She’s overwhelmed because of my words. Her cheeks are slightly blushed. She’s constantly checking to see if her hair’s still covered properly by her scarf. She gets so excited when talking; her whole body starts moving. Her short hair peaks from under her scarf, frequently. It’s obvious that she’s nervous I might find her appearance unsettling and decide not to help her. She speaks without pausing for breaths. I can tell that the topic of her dissertation is so important to her… She’s just as naive and idealistic as her peers… She thinks she can save the world with her ideas… Oh, how I envy this nice feeling… this cheerfulness and passion of being young…

“Well, during this year, I’ve been trying to go over visionary challenges and holes that might make people want to label me as a westernized person and cover them properly… My supervisor believed that I should look for instances in which the judges were able to find harmony between social and penal justice by interpretation of law… Actually, I came across instances that were the complete opposite of social justice, more than ones that could find harmony… Like the judge’s acted like a total machine and for example, sentenced all of the petty larceny criminals to 18 months in jail, without paying heed to the individuals and their characteristics… And then, I found out about Ali’s case… You certainly remember him… I mean I know that… I am sure that… you remember him… You’ve been the only person who’s sentenced people as if you’re aware of this idea… or as you’re acting completely according to it… Honestly, it was because of Ali’s case that I was able to find you and after that, actually, I went on about finding some of your other cases and studied them.”

She stutters a bit. Her pupils are dilated. She continues unsure and a little scared, “I’ve actually achieved your cases with the help of some of my students and professors… in an illegal way, which I hope you won’t tell anyone about.”

She had acted as something of a detective, somehow.

Upon seeing my smile and continued silence, she gets confident again and starts off with her lost passion,

“I found out that your methods of judgment are way different compared to the other offices in your range… And now I want to claim something in my dissertation about this, which some people might not like; that opposed to what people say about the fact that judges have to act objective and remain neutral, this never happens in real life. The fate of people’s cases depends strongly on the judges’ personalities… In my opinion, the judge’s personality affects the case way more than the criminal and social conditions of the guilty person… It’s just my opinion though… I think that, based on what I’ve seen, the judge’s default thoughts, what he gets from the crime scene, the amount of fear he feels because of that particular crime, and his personal judgment – which depend on the judge’s social, cultural, and economical status – affect the difference between the title of the crime and the real incident, sentencing the criminal, the penalty, etc. That’s how I managed to contact you through my professor, Dr. Qasemi, who used to be a classmate of yours… Well, could you please tell me what do you think about my opinions so far?

 

2.

My mother clawed at her face, sobbing loud and crying, “we’ve lost out our dignity! What the hell was this?! Dear God, why did this happen to us?! Oh god…!”

My dad laid against the wall, his eyes closed. His shoulders were shaking even though no tears ran down his cheekbones… He was crying… It was the first time I saw him cry. The house was a mess… I had heard the news before I got home… Reza had stolen something… He had gone on a robbery with some of his friends… I didn’t get the whole thing. Robbery? What does it even mean? It was as though I’d lost my ability to comprehend the word’s meaning at all… “Robbery” kept on repeating in my head… Robbery? Didn’t it belong to people who came out of bad families? Isn’t it something only the poor would do? Did Reza’s life lack something?

Reza was my younger brother. He was handsome and built, compared to me who was lean and small; born a shy introverted kid. He was big and strong even as an infant… Four years younger than me, but at the age of 15, his height was longer than mine by seven to eight centimeters. He was the center of attention among mother and father, and obviously my dear brother. He was the sweet younger brother who knew about me not being popular among others because of my face. That’s why he always got my back although he was younger. My appearance was unpleasant. I was healthy and okay, but the best word to describe me was improper… Before Reza was born, during one of her last days of pregnancy, I overheard my grandma who said, “What if this one ends up ugly and weak like the other, too? These people would humiliate you to death!”

That day I realized what my problem was, for the first time… When Reza was born, even my young and inexperienced self could distinguish how beauty and pleasant features looked… My mother cried happy tears, saying, “God made my wish come true… I asked desperately from Ali al-Akbar to help this one be pretty and healthy so that people would stop humiliating me.”

I didn’t get sad listening to those words… I’ve always surrendered to my physical flaws and all of the scoldings I had to bear… On the contrary to what everyone thought and labeled me as, after Reza’s death, I’ve always loved him truly and deeply. My flaws never made me jealous of Reza. They actually helped me enjoy his beauty and strength, and see the world as more of a beautiful place. Reza’s birth got me out of my solitude and our sad house, out of its downright silence.

Staring at the yellow telephone, I refused to move a muscle. It was ringing non-stop. The sound was as if the ringtone was longer than any other time. I was still dazed by the word “robbery”; as sharp as the ringing voice in my head…

My mother called me out in the middle of her grieving. “Are you deaf?!”

My senses came back and I jumped as I sat. They wanted to talk to my father.

“Dad! It’s uncle Taghi…”

My father took the phone. “Yes, brother?” he said with a barely-there raspy voice. And then, there was the sound of crying…

He said “yes, yes!” a few times and continued, “no they didn’t accept the bail… They say his crime is a Hadd[2] type… It’s a new rule… Became like this after the Islamic Revolution…”

The sounds of my father crying and falling apart continue… They might cut off his hand… My mother screams… My hair stands on ends… Once again, I was dizzy… My mind had concentrated so hard on what my father said that I didn’t even think about giving a glass of water to my mother…

“No, brother, they say he’s matured… It’s the coming of age that matters… No, brother… No…!”

And more and more cries… and my mother fainting…

A few days later, they brought Reza back home… His hand was bandaged. I looked at him; timid and afraid. Reza was full of anger. He wasn’t ashamed. He was a ball of fire. Everyone acted as if I was the one who should’ve gone through that, not him. Maybe it was only me who thought that way at the bottom of my heart. No one ever said anything… Maybe I was the one who thought Reza shouldn’t have experienced that with all of his popularity and sweetness. I’m not sure. This feeling kept me out of gatherings and mostly in my own room. I couldn’t stop thinking about Reza’s cut hand. Took me a while to find out about the fact that they hadn’t cut his whole right hand and his thumb was still there. They’d removed four of his fingers. My mother and father aged so much overnight.

During the short period of Reza being alive after his hand was cut off, I never dared to ask anything; neither from him nor from my parents. I half-heartedly found out that Reza and two of his friends had gone to a heist at his friend’s uncle’s house with masks. They had three big bags, and they decided to have fun by imitating an action movie and throwing whatever they found in their bags. Then, they ran away. Later on, when I became a law student, I found out that they had every required condition for a had type theft and the penalty for the first time is to cut the person’s hand in our law… It means that four fingers of the right hand are removed, but the whole palm and the thumb would remain. When our professor was teaching this topic in class, no one knew what was going on inside my head, despite being silent.

Reza and one of his friends had to go through the penalty, and their other friend who had only helped them in breaking in and moving the stuff they had stolen, was sentenced to a period in jail. The whole ordeal spread through the city.

Everything about this incident affected our family on a high level. The loss of dignity was huge. The pain was immense. However, there always is a “worse” situation than the one at hand. There always is a bigger one waiting ahead.

My mother and father decided to sell the house. They wanted to move to a bigger city like Mashhad or Tehran so that no one would know us or label us because of that incident. Although its pain didn’t seem to fade away at any point. And our enormous pain became even more intolerable…

My mother sobbed, crying that, “God! You gave him to me because of my desperate prayers! What the hell was this that you brought upon me?!” And I started thinking that maybe Reza was only born to give fifteen years of sweet memories to me and my parents. Maybe that was his mission. I’d never know.

Regardless of that, the kid couldn’t take the pain of his removed fingers so he cut any part of his body that he thought would help him end his life with my father’s razor, and killed himself. It wasn’t even 40 days after his death that my mother had a heart attack and died. The only ones remaining were me and my father who didn’t even speak a word. I couldn’t pass the University Entrance Exam. I went to military service.My father was a bit older and more broken whenever I got time off.

During my service, I met Abbas Qasemi. He had a Bachelor of Law degree and was us Diploma degrees, supervisor. I once asked him about the hand removal penalty. He started explaining casually as if he weren’t talking about human fingers… “What’s the point of this penalty?” I asked him. He answered with a philosophical vibe, “for punitive reasons.” And then, lowered the bar to my knowledge level, “for the criminal to behave properly afterward.” I wasn’t familiar with the basics of law back then. “What if the criminal decided to steal something out of pure need? Removing his hand wouldn’t end up in him not being able to even work? What kind of correction is this if living his life’s going to get impossible for him afterward? Doing this, even if he can continue living upon it, wouldn’t push him towards committing more crimes?” I asked him.

But Abbas didn’t get what I meant. Since Reza’s death, all I did was to imagine what would’ve happened if he were still alive. What would the punishment turn the aggressive Reza into? Could he continue his studies? Was he able to go back to his previous life?

“Well if the theft’s got the required limits to be called a Hadd one, his hand needs to be removed. If it’s a petty theft then he’s off to jail…”

“But ordinary people have no idea what different kinds of theft are! They won’t go stealing something by choosing their kind of robbery! Sometimes they steal because they’re in need and sometimes it is because of the fact that they’re young and excited… They won’t think about the rest…”

I’m not sure if he thought I wasn’t able of comprehending, or he just wasn’t in the mood to explain more. He even may have not seen it the way I did.

“It’s not as easy as you think. You need to study law to understand the different degrees of penalties… If I explain now, you’d get nothing… A part of the penalty is to humiliate the person… he’d be degraded in front of the society so that the others could learn a lesson and not steal anything moving on…”

“A thief wouldn’t even think about these things… He’d just go on his thing without properly thinking about it.”

But oh how nice it is that he didn’t explain further that day. During my whole two years of service, my mind wandered around understanding criminal law. I became even closer with Abbas during the last months. He was getting ready for the Master’s degree’s exam. Through the nights, his head was buried in his law books. I sometimes borrowed his books and read them. I didn’t understand lots of the words. Most of the sentences were complicated and weird.

“Actually, why don’t you study law after your service ends?” Abbas asked me one day.

I’m not sure if Abbas’s sentence changed my life or the things that happened to Reza. At first, I started studying law because I wanted to change the rules. However, I have no idea how I ended up in the world of judgment. I forgot why I had decided to study law in the first place… I cannot deny the fact that I’d spend more time on cases related to people at Reza’s age at that time… It was as though I wanted to prevent them from ending up as Reza did… I wanted to be their families’ salvation angel… I wasn’t able to do anything for my own family… I was only a burden… The most painful thing that rang through my head after Reza’s death was what my mother said. “What if we had broken this child’s heart and that led to what had happened to Reza? What if it was because we made this one sad and alone?”

Maybe I saw myself as the guilty person in this ordeal, and I wanted to fix it… Anyways, I think this young girl’s going the right way… I think all of our fate depends on our judger personality and these judgments form our destiny…!

 

3.

 

“Well, could you please tell me what do you think about my opinions so far?”

“It’s an interesting dissertation. Your words are also interesting. How can I help?”

“Well, you can help a lot… if you could spend time with me. But before that, what do you mean by “interesting”? Interesting in a good way? Or a bad one? Interesting as in you agree or interesting as in you think I’m saying nonsense? Are my ideas even practical? I mean they are, ‘cause you’ve made them work…”

She’s babbling non-stop; without giving me time to respond.

“If you don’t agree with me, why did you talk to the complainant of Ali’s theft case? Why’d you stepped in? You knew that he had actually stolen from them, then why is the title of the crime “taking of another person’s property without the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it”? It is because you wanted to postpone his penalty, isn’t it? ‘Cause, you didn’t want him to end up in jail? You found out about Ali’s talent in wood-carving when working on his case… Honestly, before I started speaking to you, I once saw the wooden eagle in the corner of your room… That’s the one Ali carved during the time he was in detention… That’s why you ordered probation for him? Learning how to do a job? Am I right? Have you heard of him recently? He said himself that he hasn’t heard anything about you for seven to eight years… He’s become a very good carpenter… He pays for her sister’s needs… He carves wooden sculptures as well as making cabinets, tables, and chairs… He’s a well-respected person in their neighborhood… Got married two years ago, and his wife’s pregnant… He mentioned you respectfully… It means that you cared about his life’s condition and not just acting according to the rules… You don’t want justice to be an act of revenge… You believe in a corrective and reforming justice…… Just as Braithwaite did … you believe in a restorative justice. You, consciously or subconsciously, believe that it isn’t fair to sentence people who are not treated fairly, to penalties. Am I right?”

I smiled. I didn’t even think that someone would actually carve so deep into my work to find out about details. I was actually a bit afraid… In the meantime between her two probable sentences, I asked her, “well, do you need my answer or you prefer to go on asking questions?”

She looked ashamed. She collected her thoughts with that same overwhelmed attitude I got used to during the first 30 minutes of our meeting. “I’m sorry… I talk non-stop when I get excited all the time,” she said.

The smile widened on my face…

She got shyer this time around.

“I won’t talk anymore, I’m all ears from now on…” she continued.

 

The end

Mashhad – 2021 January 9th

[1] Hadd crimes are considered to be “claims against God”, and they are punishable by a mandatory, fixed sentence that was laid down in the Koran and Hadith. If theft is considered a had the punishment for (sirqhat-e-haddi): 1st offense, amputation of the 4 right fingers; 2nd offense, amputation of the 5 left toes; 3rd offense, life imprisonment; 4th offense, death penalty. There are numerous mitigating factors, such as poverty, repentance, failure, if it was public property, if it was not in a secure place inside of a house/store, and such. As a general rule, Iranian judicial authorities do not carry out amputation.^{[citation needed]} In Iran, amputation as punishment was described as “uncommon” in 2010,^[39] but in 2014 there were three sentences of hand amputation, and one of eye gouging in 2015.^[40] Fingers, but not the complete hand, were amputated as punishment four times in 2012-13.^[40]

Wikipedia contributors. (2020, December 22). Judicial system of Iran. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:26, January 22, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Judicial_system_of_Iran&oldid=995628723

[2] Hudud (Arabic: حدود Ḥudūd, also transliterated hadud, hudood; plural of hadd, حد) is an Arabic word meaning “borders, boundaries, limits”.^[1] In the religion of Islam it refers to punishments that under Islamic law (shariah) are mandated and fixed by God. These punishments were rarely applied in pre-modern Islam,^[2][3] and their use in some modern states has been a source of controversy. Some types of theft (Sariqa, السرقة). Punished with amputation of a hand.

Wikipedia contributors. (2021, January 16). Hudud. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17:43, January 22, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hudud&oldid=1000716607