Photo by Julia Kadel on Unsplash

Barbaric Penalties of Stoning, Whipping, Enforced In Iran, Elsewhere

Americans are arrested for peeling the paint from the reflecting pond debacle in Washington, D.C., gladiators draw blood on the White House lawn, and the best soccer players in the world compete, while Iran is quietly using the most barbaric methods of stoning and whipping to eliminate adversaries who seek nothing more than the freedom to dress as they please.

The evil leaders of Iran have ordered thousands of protesters killed while others were whipped or stoned to death for violating Islamic revolutionary laws. The world may seem civilized and long removed from the bloodlust and violence of past centuries but barbarian practices remain both abroad and at home.

Trump claimed that his invasion of Iran would change the regime of the murderous Islamic republic. But trump failed to uproot the leadership and the carnage has escalated as Iranian authorities have killed thousands of protesters.

The latest example of state-sanctioned violence is a clear sign that religious intolerance is becoming even more deadly in Iran and that the rulers may feel emboldened by their victory after the US and Israeli invasion.

In 2022, large protests erupted throughout Iran over increasing human rights abuses and the persecution of women. The mass protests followed the death of Maqhsa Amini who had been arrested by the country’s Public Morality Security Police for violating the hijab law. The state responded by killing hundreds of demonstrators.

Iranian protests resumed in 2025 and 2026, aimed at rising inflation, widespread shortages and government mismanagement. The protests were the largest uprising in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Senior officials used live fire on protesters, leaving thousands of protesters dead in the largest massacres in modern Iranian history.

A report by Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) and Paris-based Together Against the Death Penalty (EPCM) found that the Islamic regime has executed the highest number of detainees since 1989, with an estimated 1,639 detained in 2025.

Last week, after a closed trial, a popular 29-year old Iranian singer was sentenced to be flogged or whipped in public 74 times because she performed in 2024 before an audience of men and women and did not wear the headgear as required under Islamic revolutionary law. The singer, Parastoo Ahmadi, and her band also will be barred from leaving the country or performing for two years.

Ahmadi was sentenced at a closed trial in Qom Province along with eight band and crew colleagues. The singer was arrested after a video showed the she was not wearing the required hijab as she performed patriotic songs wearing a simple black dress with her arms and shoulders uncovered.

The court ruled that Ahmadi had offended “public decency through the production and publication of obscene and immoral content on cyberspace platforms.”

The concert by Ahmadi, titled “Caravanserai Concert”, had more than 100,000 views on YouTube. Ahmadi wrote about the concert on the YouTube channel: “I, Swallow, am the girl I want to sing for the people I love. It’s a right I couldn’t give up: singing for the land I love so much. Here, in this part of our dear Iran, in this piece where our history and myths are connected, hear my voice in this hypothetical concert and imagine, this beautiful homeland…”

The Iranian government has sponsored vigilantes to enlist businesses and private individuals in hijab compliance, portraying it as a civic responsibility. State rhetoric has said the refusal of women and girls to wear the mandatory hijab was due to their lack of awareness or education.

The sentence of lashings has become more common in Iran. In November 2024, 25-year-old activist Roshnak Alishah was lashed 14 times for “disturbing public chastity” by not wearing a hijab in public. Alishah had been arrested in 2024 after a video she posted online showed her without the mandatory hijab, confronting a man on a motorcycle who had sexually harassed her earlier in public.

After defending herself, she posted footage of the incident online. But instead of addressing the perpetrator, authorities focused on Alishah’s choice not to wear the mandatory hijab. Alishah was subsequently sentenced to 74 lashes and a two-year travel ban.

During the November 2022 nationwide protests following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody, Alishah was arrested in Tehran and sereved five months in prison.

In March 2025, prominent Iranian singer Mehdi Yarrahi was lashed 74 times as part of his sentence in connection with a song he wrote during the protests criticizing the mandatory hijab. Yarrahi, 45, is a pop singer, songwriter, and activist known for blending Persian and Arabic influences with outspoken social and political themes. Acclaimed for works like his viral 2014 “Azan,” he later faced bans, arrests, prison and flogging for protest songs such as “Roosarito,” supporting the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. His music often addresses war, environmental crises, and civil rights in Iran.

Released in 2023, “Roosarito” supports women who, by joining the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, remove their headscarves in defiance of Iran’s compulsory hijab laws. Following the release, Tehran’s prosecutor ordered Yarrahi’s arrest on charges related to the song’s publication.

He served a one year prison sentence and was released while the punishment of 74 lashes was suspended after bail was made. In a video published on his personal YouTube channel on February 28, 2025, Yarrahi said he was ready to receive the punishment, as he defended women’s civil liberties in the arts, and criticized gender-based favoritism in Iran’s music industry. On 5 March 2025, His sentence of 74 lashes was carried out on March 5, 2025.

Hijab Persecution

A focus of much of the persecution of women in Iran is the hijab, a head-covering which is seen by some as a symbol of piety, dignity, and identity for Muslim women. Others see the mandatory wearing of the hijab as a symbol of the bloody repression of women.

Women in Islam are told that the hijab brings them closer to Allah and that it makes them safer, more respected and protects them.

After the Iranian revolution of 1979, laws were enacted requiring women to wear the hijab, as a counter to western style clothing. By 1980, veiling was required in government and educational settings, with the 1983 penal code imposing 74 lashes for not wearing the hijab.

Revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini insisted that women dress modestly. In 1979, Khomeini told Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci that “the women who contributed to the revolution were and are women who wear modest clothes.”

Khomeini told the reporter “these coquettish women, who wear makeup and put their necks, hair and bodies on display in the streets, did not fight the Shah. They have done nothing righteous. They do not know how to be useful, neither to society, nor politically or vocationally. And the reason is because they distract and anger people by exposing themselves.”

To Khomeini and his supporters, Iranian women should be the very opposite of the liberal, emancipated women in the West. The revolutionaries not only wanted to free Iran from years of US political and economic influence but also promote the region’s Islamic culture.

In 2024–2025, a new law was aimed at mass repression by using phone IMSI catchers, cameras, drones, civilian agents, subway ticket payment card tracking, to punish people, targeting women who were “improperly” dressed without Islamic hijab. An IMSI or International Mobile Subscriber Identity catcher, also known as a stingray, cell-site simulator, or rogue base station, is a device used to intercept mobile phone traffic and collect location data by pretending to be a legitimate cell tower.

In 2024, Iran opened mental clinics in order to “treat” women who refussed to wear a hijab.

Strict interpretation and draconian enforcement of Islamic law is not restricted to Iran. The UN said that the Taliban arrested 30 women for violating hijab rules in Afghanistan in June. Since seizing power in Kabul in 2021, the Taliban have imposed sweeping restrictions on women and girls, including ​limits on access to education, employment, and sport.

Flogging

Whipping or flogging is a form of corporal punishment where a person is struck repeatedly with a whip, rod, or similar instrument, typically on the bare back or buttocks. As a judicial sentence, flogging is illegal throughout the United States and most Western nations, but it remains legally authorized in around two dozen countries, primarily those applying Islamic criminal law and several former British colonies.

The purpose of flogging is to inflict intense pain and, historically, public humiliation. Some use the words “whipping,” “lashing,” and “scourging” interchangeably with flogging, though flogging usually implies a more formal, repeated beating rather than a single blow.

Flogging has been used in nearly every civilization in history. Ancient Rome relied heavily on the flagellum, a leather-corded whip used primarily to punish slaves. The instrument was brutal enough to kill: its cords were sometimes knotted with bones or fitted with metal hooks, earning the worst versions the nickname “scorpion.”

Flogging was standard in English courts for centuries and spread through the British Empire into military, naval, and colonial settings. In colonial North Carolina, for example, flogging was routine for disobedient sailors, servants, and prisoners.

In England, the Whipping Act of 1530 authorized the whipping of thieves, blasphemers, poachers, men and women guilty of minor offenses, and even the insane. Victims were tied to the end of a cart and whipped until the 1590s, when the whipping post was introduced.

In the American South, whipping was the primary tool slaveholders used to enforce control. Slave codes across the states authorized beatings for offenses as minor as leaving a plantation without permission, and organized patrols carried whips to punish enslaved people found off their owner’s property.

The whip was used in 18th-century Denmark and Holland; German felons were flogged out of town, and warders in the French penal colonies in the 1920s employed riding whips. The Japanese used three lengths of bamboo bound together, which caused multiple lacerations. Japan abolished judicial torture in 1873, but captured Koreans and Formosans were still whipped as were Allied prisoners of war in World War II.

Instruments used for flogging varied by era and region.

The Cat o’ nine tails was a short-handled whip with nine knotted cords, used in British naval and military discipline. Each cord left a welt, and the knots could tear skin.

A Russian knout was a whip made from hardened rawhide strips interwoven with wire, sometimes fitted with hooks or sharpened tips. Punishment with the knout frequently ended in death.

The rattan cane is still used in judicial caning in Singapore and Malaysia. A trained officer swings it at full force against the bare buttocks, and a single stroke can split skin.

The landmark case that effectively ended corporal punishment and flogging in American prisons was Jackson v. Bishop, decided by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1968. Arkansas prisons were still using a leather strap on prisoners but the court ordered Arkansas to stop all corporal punishment in its prison system. No American prison has legally used flogging since.

Delaware is the last U.S. state to use judicial flogging with the final whipping-post sentence carried out in 1952.

Under US federal maritime law, any ship’s officer who flogs, beats, or inflicts cruel punishment on a crew member aboard a U.S. vessel faces up to five years in prison and a fine. For the military, flogging, branding, and “any other cruel or unusual punishment” by court-martial or any other means is prohibited.

Flogging is still judicially imposed in parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The worst use of flogging is in Iran, where the punishment can be used in at least 148 offenses, including alcohol consumption, drug use, theft, and what authorities characterize as violations of public morality. Sentences sometimes exceed 300 or 400 lashes.

In Singapore, more than 160 offenses can trigger caning, and about 65 carry mandatory caning where a judge cannot waive the punishment. The offenses include violent crimes like armed robbery, but also nonviolent acts like vandalism and overstaying a visa by more than 90 days. Malaysia, Brunei, parts of Indonesia (particularly Aceh province), and several northern Nigerian states also impose judicial whipping or caning.

Saudi Arabia was formerly among the worst culprits for ordering flogging for offenses ranging from extramarital sex to breach of the peace. In April 2020, the Saudi Supreme Court abolished flogging, replacing it with fines, jail time, or community service.

In some countries, foot whipping (bastinado) is still used on prisoners. The bastinado, generally used in Asia, involves blows delivered to the soles of the feet with a light rod, knotted cord, or lash.

Foot whipping was common punishment throughout Central Europe until the 1950s, especially in German territories. Throughout the Nazi era, it was frequently used in German penal institutions and labor camps. It was also inflicted on the population in occupied territories, notably Denmark and Norway.

Stoning, also called lapidation, is a method in which a person is killed by stones. In ancient Israel, stoning was standard punishment for offenses like blasphemy, worship of other gods, child sacrifice, violation of the Sabbath and adultery.

In classical Islamic law, stoning was prescribed as punishment for certain forms of illicit sexual intercourse when the offender was a married person. Unmarried offenders typically received 100 lashes.

Today, stoning is legally authorized in Iran, Yemen and Mauritania for same-sex acts between adult Muslim men. The penalty applies almost exclusively to sexual offenses, primarily adultery committed by a married person.

Yemen’s penal code prescribes stoning for both adultery and homosexual conduct when the offender is legally married. In Mauritania, death by public stoning is the sentence for any adult Muslim man who engages in sexual acts with another man, regardless of marital status.

In a stoning, the condemned person is partially buried in a pit. Men are buried to the waist. Women are buried to the chest. Because women are more deeply buried, their ability to free themselves is substantially reduced. Witnesses throw the first stone, followed by the judge and the community.

Pakistan introduced stoning in 1979, which prescribed death for adultery by a married person.

In recent years, the Taliban has carried out numerous public corporal punishments in Afghanistan, including public floggings and stonings for adultery, under a strict interpretation of Sharia law.

Between March 2022 and March 2023, more than 295 people — including 73 women — were publicly flogged for charges such as moral corruption, running away from home, and theft.

From March 2023 to March 2024, 44 individuals, including six women, were flogged on similar charges and from March 2024 to the present, more than 240 people have been publicly flogged, including 26 women.

Specific recent cases include a woman in Kandahar who was flogged in August 2024 for allegedly running away from home, and two individuals flogged in Maidan Wardak, a province in central Afghanistan.

The Taliban Supreme Court has issued 37 stoning sentences in the three years since taking control of Afghanistan in 2021. The sentences are typically for crimes such as adultery, theft, or other offenses deemed violations of moral law under Taliban interpretation.

Flogging and even stoning, are fairly tame compared with other past methods ordered by rulers, courts and others.

Flaying in the Assyrian Empire involved removal of skin from a living person. It was used to punish rebels and intimidate populations.

Scaphism in ancient Persia involved trapping a victim between two boats. The victim is force‑fed milk and honey and left to die from exposure, insects, and infection.

And then there are the creative torture devices of medieval Europe, including the rack which stretched joints until dislocation; the Iron Maiden, an enclosed spiked chamber; and branding to create permanent mutilation.

Another particularly gruesome method in ancient Persia involved lashing the person between two bent trees which were then released, ripping apart the body.

Burning alive was a common method used for heresy, treason, and witchcraft across Europe.