Corporal Punishment in Medieval Islamic Educational Thought

Abstract

Throughout history corporal punishment has constituted an important element in the method of moral education of children and in teaching at formal educational institutions; it is therefore reasonable to assume that ‘a very large percentage of the children born prior to the eighteenth century were what would today be termed “battered children”’.¹ There is historical evidence for the frequent use of various sorts of instruments for beating by parents and teachers, including special appliances for flogging children at school, such as the flapper, which had a pear-shaped end and a round hole to raise blisters.²