Nasa'i 4078 records the canonical qiṣāṣ framework for murder. The Quranic mandate (Q 5:45) explicitly establishes lex talionis as Islamic legal principle. The hadith elaborates the operational rules.

The substantive issues are addressed in entries d05 (gender halving), d18 (religious differential), t20 (kafir not equal). The Nasa'i contribution: cross-collection attestation of the canonical qiṣāṣ framework.

Key features:

1. Lex talionis. The framework is 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.' Equal punishment to the offence is the principle. This is pre-modern legal logic; modern systems generally distinguish proportional from identical punishment. Robert Spencer, in The Critical Qur'an (Encounter Books, 2022) — a verse-by-verse commentary drawing on classical Islamic commentators — treats Q 5:45 as establishing lex talionis as a prescriptive Quranic mandate, noting that the mainstream exegetical tradition reads the verse as binding Islamic law rather than a mere report of earlier Mosaic legislation.

2. The victim's family discretion. The qiṣāṣ system gives the victim's family three options: (a) demand retaliation (execution or equivalent harm), (b) accept blood-money (diyya), (c) pardon. This places significant power in the victim's family rather than in the state. Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), identifies a critical structural feature of the qiṣāṣ framework: unlike hadd offences — which are treated as "rights of God" and therefore belong to the state to prosecute — qiṣāṣ is classified as a "right of man" (ḥaqq al-ādamī), meaning prosecution, settlement, and pardon belong entirely to the victim's heirs. This categorisation explains why the system is structurally resistant to uniform state enforcement and why the state cannot override a family's decision to pardon or accept payment.

3. The differential factors. The framework intersects with the gender and religious differentials (entries d05, d18, t20): qiṣāṣ for a woman victim's male killer may not be straightforward; qiṣāṣ for a non-Muslim victim's Muslim killer is not always permitted. The majority position in classical fiqh — held by the Shafi'i and Hanbali schools — is that a Muslim may not be executed in qiṣāṣ for killing a non-Muslim, on the basis of the hadith "A Muslim is not to be killed for [killing] a disbeliever" (reported in al-Bukhari and Nasa'i 4745, among other collections). The Hanafi school took the contrary view for protected non-Muslims (dhimmis) under Muslim governance. Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2005), documents how this classical jurisprudential disagreement was never resolved uniformly across the Sunni schools, producing divergent outcomes across Muslim-majority jurisdictions.

4. Modern application. Saudi Arabia and Iran continue to apply qiṣāṣ. Recent cases include public executions where the victim's family demanded retaliation. The 'family discretion' element has produced some high-profile cases of last-minute pardon (often accompanied by substantial financial payment). Peters (2005) surveys the reintroduction of Islamic criminal law in Iran, Pakistan, the Sudan, and northern Nigeria during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, observing that qiṣāṣ statutes have frequently been deployed in ways that produce results inconsistent with internationally recognised human rights standards — particularly where the religious and gender differentials built into classical doctrine remain operative.

5. Comparison with modern criminal law. Modern legal systems generally remove victim-family discretion in favour of state prosecution. The qiṣāṣ framework retains family-discretion as central, which has both advantages (family healing) and disadvantages (inconsistent application, vendetta dynamics).

The analysis from entries d05, d18, t20 applies fully here.