In Muslim countries, is it religion, more than anything else that prevents the abolition of the death penalty?
Maryam Namazie: The death penalty exists in quite a large number of countries and is a form of social control still exercised by states, not all of them ruled by Islamic laws (I wouldn’t call them Muslim countries any more than I would call Britain and France Christian ones). The U.S. and China are good examples of this. However, the majority of countries where executions are taking place are ruled by sharia law and there is a direct association between Islam and executions. Iran, for example, has the highest number of juveniles on death row. Of course, Islam is fundamentally no different from other religions in that death is prescribed for a large number of transgressions in all of them; however, because it is linked to a political movement with state power in many instances, the medievalism of religious rule becomes the law of the land. So in Iran, for example, stoning is a legally sanctioned form of execution with the law even specifying the size of the stone to be used in killing s
