I left my job as an editor with an oil industry publication in late April, mainly to take some time off, but also to get ready for the move my wife and I are making to Chicago in early June, where I am starting seminary in the fall.

But I’m not entirely without work. For a couple of hours every morning, I’m editing and rewriting local news for the Saudi Gazette, an English-language newspaper in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. I’ve worked for these folks before, in Jeddah, and they contacted me earlier this year, wanting to know if I could edit for them. This is something, I think, I can do while I go to school.

Anyway, today I rewrote a piece translated from the Arabic daily Al-Hayat, a lengthy interview — and one of the best I’ve ever seen — with an executioner. As many of you probably know, capital punishment in Saudi Arabia is carried out swordsmen who behead the condemned, and Abdullah Sa’id al-Bishi has been wielding a sword on behalf of the state since the early 1990s. Long before taking it up himself, he helped his father, who was also an executioner.In the interview, he describes what swords he uses (he has a special one for those rare occasions when he needs to execute more than five people in a short time), that swordsmen are not crazed and overly-emotional, that he regularly received death threats, and that he believes in what he is doing because he is following both God’s law and the state’s.

I happen to believe that the state should have no power of life or death in any circumstance, so I’m no supporter of capital punishment. Beheading with a sword may be horrific, but really, is it any more humane for the state, or its agents, to take a man’s life by secluding him away from public view and pumping his veins full of poisonous chemicals?

However, what intrigued me most about this interview (originally in Arabic in an Arabic-language Saudi newspaper) was al-Bishi’s description of his and his father’s roles in attempting to secure clemency for the condemned from the family of the victim. It’s important to point out that in Islam (or, I should say, the Wahhabi-tinged Hanbali leagal school that governs Saudi Arabia), the family of the victim can, independently of any state action, stop the proceedings and pardon the accused/convicted/condemned.

The job of the executioner is not only to carry out the death sentence, Al-Bishi said. The swordsman is also a kind-of counselor, sometimes approaching relatives of a murder victim and reminding them they can pardon the convicted up until the very last moment. Al-Bishi related an incident when his father was an executioner and was preparing to carry out a death sentence on a young expatriate awaiting execution for killing a friend, who was an only son. The mother of the victim repeatedly declined to pardon the killer of her child.

“My father had a hunch that the heart of this bereaved mother could soften up,” Al-Bishi said. “[My father] walked up to her, with his sword in his hand, and told her that the head of the young man awaiting execution would separate from his body in a few seconds’ time, but that she could raise her hand any time before that if she decided to pardon the killer.”

“She was adamant still and as my father lifted the sword for the last time to go through with the execution, the mother of the victim raised her hand to motion to my father that she had pardoned the murderer,” Al-Bishi continued. “The crowd rushed towards her, cheering and saying that God the Almighty is great, and prayed for her to rest in paradise as a reward for her forgiveness.”

Three times, Al-Bishi said he’s been able to convince families of victims to pardon the murderers after everything was ready for the execution.

“I can tell from the expression on the faces of the victims’ family members if they are considering pardon,” Al-Bishi explained.

It got me to thinking of a quote I read recently, I cannot remember where — that justice without the possibility of mercy is simply vengeance. There may be a place for vengeance. But there is also a place for mercy. State-sponsored “justice” is not merciful, and can never be. Only when individual human beings become involved as thinking and feeling individuals can there ever be any mercy.

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