The Muslim judges who applied the rules of fiqh also took the command of the Prophet ﷺ to ward off the Hudud by ambiguities as a divine command. All indications are that the Hudud punishments were very rarely carried out historically. A Scottish doctor working in Aleppo in the mid 1700's observed that there were only six public executions in twenty years. Theft was rare, he observed, and when it occurred it was punished by bastinado.[48] A famous British scholar of Arabic in Egypt in the mid 1800's reported that the Hudud punishment for theft had not been inflicted in recent memory.[49] In the roughly five hundred years that the Ottoman Empire ruled Constantinople, records show that only one instance of stoning for adultery took place (contrast this with colonial America/USA, where over fifty people were executed for various sexual crimes between 1608 and 1785).[50]
Jurists' theories of far-fetched ambiguities found real life application. A Muslim woman in India in the late 1500's whose husband had died in battle was suddenly found to be pregnant and was accused of fornication. She claimed that her husband had been miraculously brought back to life every Friday night, when he would visit her. Jurists of India's predominant Hanafi school of law were consulted on the case and replied that it was indeed technically possible for such a miracle to have occurred.[51]
The concept of non-invasiveness (i.e., avoiding tajassus) and covering up faults (satr) also became real practices. Wine drinking, fornication, prostitution and homosexuality became widespread in medieval Islamic civilization. Yet Muslim scholars could do little more than complain about this.[52] One scholar in Mughal India himself strayed into wonton ways, taking up womanizing and throwing drinking parties. When the market police climbed over the wall of his house to break up one such party he reprimanded them by reminding them of the caliph Umar's lapse. The police left the scholar's house in shame (the scholar later reformed himself, reports his biographer).[53]
Instances in which thieves did have their hands cut off were shocking to local populations. The famous Moroccan scholar and traveler Ibn Battuta (d. circa 1366) recounts how, in Mecca, when a judicial official had ordered a young man's hand cut off for stealing, the youth later murdered that judge.[54] The Mughal emperor Akbar the Great (d. 1605) was furious when he found that his chief judge had carried out the execution of a man convicted of a Hudud offense, citing the principle of avoiding this through ambiguities. The judge fell from imperial favor and eventually died in exile.[55]