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.

Analyzing English Language Teaching and Testing Praxis in Developing Discourse Competence in Eassy Writing

Essay writing is one of the basic and most prized competencies in our post-industrial and global world. One of the serious indictments of the traditional teaching approaches to essay writing is their essential inadequacies and incompatibilities with the present-day pedagogical trends. Writing essays in SL is, indeed, one of the most difficult and most significant tasks we engage our students in as human beings. Writing essays can assist us to find out what we think, and consequently, to know who we are. Not only does it help us to interact with others, but also to participate in our discourse community. Moreover, essay writing also requires from a writer to communicate persuasively in a disciplined way. In short, essays entail creativity of ideas and thoughts which reveal the critical perspective of the writer, and a form which is intelligible, logical and free from errors of lexis, syntax, discourse, spelling and punctuation. The following research study was, in fact, conducted to find out how SL teachers teach essay writing to learners to develop communicative/discourse competence in them to enable them to perform in real-life situations. Further, the study was carried out to realize the assessment practices of the teachers in two of the universities of Pakistan. It was, primarily, a mixed method research, utilizing quantitative and qualitative paradigms of research. For this purpose, the researcher made use of the Common European Framework of Reference 2001 (a worldwide renowned document for teaching and testing of English language) for language teaching and testing as a theoretical framework and designed questionnaires, an interview guide and an observation sheet for data collection. These instruments were pilot tested, and their validity and reliability were established thereby. Later, the questionnaires were administered to learners and teachers. Moreover, the researcher conducted interviews of the teachers and made the classroom observations as well. These three different research tools were used to triangulate, compare, contrast, and validate the data. The quantitative data were analyzed through SPSS (version 21), and the qualitative data were analyzed through thematic analysis. The research findings demonstrate that there exist gaps in the teaching and testing practices. Finally, it has been, therefore, recommended that a student-centered, content-based and task-oriented communicative classrooms ought to be created in such a way that the learners’ linguistic needs and content goals along with communicative/discourse competence in essay writing could develop to deal with the real-life challenges.