Punishing the Body or the Person? Why Some Cannot Accept Physical Punishments
By Farish A. Noor
In his book ‘Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Modern Iran’ (1994), the scholar Darius Rejali looks at how the processes of torture and punishment have evolved over the centuries in Iran, from the period of the Qajar dynasty all the way to the regime of the Shah and the Islamic Revolutionary government.
He makes one interesting and important observation which remains relevant to all of those who are concerned about the use of corporal punishment and torture by modern states today: that corporal punishment dates back to the medieval era where the popular perception of punishment was that it was a public spectacle that ought to be enacted upon the body of the individual, and not the subject him/herself.
In this respect, the modes of torture and punishment that were used in pre-modern Iran were no different from the modes of punishment that were used in China, India, Africa or Europe. Throughout the world during the pre-modern era the popular understanding of punishment was that it was meant to be a form of public humiliation, operating through the mode of public violence, that was intended to compel the guilty to repent and alter his/her ways through the threat of violence and force. Hence we see how in medieval Europe, Asia and the Arab world the modes of public punishment were all equally gory and bloody: Heads were chopped off, bodies were impaled, whipped, burned, branded, broken, quartered and sliced to pieces. Most of these punishments were carried out in public, ostensibly as a ‘lesson’ to others. But as many modern psychologists have pointed out, these public spectacles of violence also served the voyeuristic inclination of those who relished the sight of bodies being violated in public, and were thus also forms of bizarre public pornography.
In his study on the evolution of torture and punishment in Iran, Rejali notes how this medieval mode of punishment gradually developed to become a more sophisticated mode of care and policing instead. The violent spectacles of state-sanctioned violence that involved public enactments of torture eventually gave way to the regime of the prison and the culture of pastoral care and reform of the Self instead. Why?
Simply put, the reason behind this evolution lay in the growing consciousness that the medieval modes of punishment of the past were simply barbaric, primordial and missed the point. Particularly after the advent of the Iranian revolution, Iranian lawmakers realised that the aim of law enforcement was not simply to exercise legitimate state violence upon citizens, but to help citizens reach their full potential as rational agents and responsible individuals. Medieval modes of violent punishment could not do that for the simple reason that by abusing and violating the bodies of the condemned, they were targeting the body, and not the conscious Self.
The argument can be illustrated thus: Pre-modern modes of punishment assumed that if an individual had committed a crime or a wrong against society, then the offending organ or part of the body of the individual would pay the price. Hence in many primitive societies we come across instances of bodily abuse and torture that target the organs or parts of the body that were to ‘blame’: The person who lies or slanders, for instance, would have his tongue cut out. The voyeur would have his eyes gauged out. The thief would have his hand cut off. The rapist would be castrated, and so on.
