التعزير
al-Taʿzīr
Discretionary punishments that the Islamic judiciary decides as fitting for an offence that has no fixed penalty in the law
What it means
Taʿzīr names the punishments that a judge or ruling authority fixes by judgement. They apply to offences for which the Quran and the Sunnah lay down no set penalty, and they range from a warning to a fine, imprisonment or a lesser physical penalty, decided according to the offence and the offender. Jurists distinguish taʿzīr from the ḥudūd, whose penalties are fixed by the text, and from qiṣāṣ, retaliation in cases of bodily harm. The judge is bound by the principle of proportion and the public good, and the details differ among the schools of law. The root means to discipline or to rebuke.
Often misunderstood as
That every Islamic punishment is fixed by text, when a large share of the penal law is left to the discretion of the judge.
Term and Arabic as listed in Ismail al Faruqi, Toward Islamic English (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1995), p. 53, listed as AL TA'ZĪR. The definition is restated here.