Someone asked me about the following statement:
“One act of zina is less sinful than watching ten seconds of porn”
Here are just four cars involved in this trainwreck:
- Punishments reflect the severity of an act’s harms in this life and the afterlife: Zina has a prescribed punishment; watching porn does not and merits a disciplinary punishment [ta’zir].
- Rulings established through textual evidence that is both indisputably established and univocal have a higher rank than rulings established through evidence that do not combine all those qualities: Zina’s unlawfulness is established through a univocal verse of the Quran; the unlawfulness of watching porn is through analogy or other indirect methods.
- An act that involves or extends to other individuals is greater than one that is limited to the actor: An act of zina involves two direct participants; an act of porn watching involves one direct participant.
- An act that is wrong without exception is greater than one that has exceptions: Zina is wrong without exception; intentionally watching zina is wrong though there is a limited exception if a potential witness watches with the intent to testify in court.*
* This does not provide a loophole for porn watching since testimony is limited to first-hand information.
UPDATE. Edited and reposted with a new URL. The article’s title and quotation did not match the original quote. I guess even my nafs found it so bizarre that it automatically corrected it. And success comes only from Allah.