Legitimacy of Imprisonment as a Punishment in Sharīa

Throughout known human history, incarceration has been a prevailing practice. Regardless of the nature of the crime, imprisonment is now a widespread phenomenon globally. In Pakistan, as in many other states, detention is employed for a wide range of offenses, including instances where Islamic capital punishments are substituted with imprisonment. The adverse impacts of imprisonment are not limited to the individual offender; rather, they extend to the well-being of the offender's family and the broader society. Furthermore, the efficacy of imprisonment is questioned concerning its purported benefits in terms of reformation, retribution, and deterrence, with an examination revealing potential limitations in achieving these objectives. Considering the aforementioned issues, it is important to explore whether it is according to Islamic law or not? After analyzing all causes and aspects of detention given in the Prophetic time and Rashidun caliphate, it is concluded that in those times, imprisonment was just practiced till the decision taken for the criminal and then, one might set free or granted any hadd or ta‘zīr punishment. Subsequently, the individual could either be released or subjected to specific hadd or ta‘zīr punishments. In Shari'ah, permissible punishments include confining the offender to their residence or banishing them from the locality, with the provision for the latter to be accompanied by their family. Crucially, the absence of a concept of prolonged imprisonment within Sharīa’s code of crimes and penalties underscores the contention that imprisonment is perceived not merely as a punitive measure but as a severe crime against humanity.  This raises questions about the effectiveness of Pakistan's criminal justice system, suggesting that a more tailored and nuanced approach, considering individual circumstances, may be more operative. Keywords: Juristic Approach to Imprisonment, Imprisonment in Islam, detention in Islamic law, incarceration.

On the Capacity of an Everage and Peak Constrained Optical Wireless Relay Channel

Ever evolving bandwidth hungry applications present a gigantic challenge and an unprecedented opportunity for wireless communication. Radio spectrum is already congested. The researchers are vigorously pursuing efficient utilisation of radio spectrum and use of alternate media. Optical wireless is an attractive alternative media that can provide ultra high bandwidth and unregulated spectrum. However, its area of coverage is severely restricted by atmospheric turbulence and misalignment errors. Cooperative relaying can enhance the coverage and availability of optical wireless. This motivates the present study of an optical wireless relay channel (OWRC). Whereas radio frequency wireless relay channel has been widely investigated, study of an OWRC is a novel subject. Focus of this thesis is to develop capacity region by defining upper and lower bounds, the minimum energy per bit required for reliable communication and the outage capacity due to fading induced by scintillation and misalignment errors. An OWRC is the classical three node network comprising source, relay and destination nodes. The nodes are interconnected by optical wireless. The optical wireless links of the OWRC are assumed to be Gaussian. The upper bounds are based on the principle of min-max cut flow. Expectation of the information divergence between an output measure and the channel law over the joint input probability measure is used to derive the bounds. The choice of output measure is critical in obtaining a tight upper bound. The lower bounds are computed in terms of entropy of the input probability measures. Capacity approaching measures are used for obtaining tight lower bounds. The lower bounds also depend on the relaying strategy. Decode and forward, compress and forward, and amplify and forward relaying is considered in this thesis. It is shown that upper and lower bounds tend to converge when peak signal to noise ratio is high. Fading due to scintillation and misalignment is investigated for different relaying strategies. Probability of outage is derived in closed form for the above mentioned relaying strategies. Bounds on the minimum energy per bit required for reliable communication over an OWRC are defined as a function of peak signal level. They are closely related to the lower and upper bounds on the capacity. It is shown that the minimum energy per bit is inversely proportional to the square root of the low signal asymptotic capacity. The results of this thesis provide a comprehensive and novel study of an optical wireless relay channel. It will help in estimating the capacity, coverage and availability issues of optical wireless relay networks in general and relay channels in particular for positioning optical wireless to augment the wireless infrastructure to meet the growing customer needs.