Naskh (tafsir)
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Naskh, an Arabic language word usually translated as "abrogation" and alternately appearing as the phrase al-nāsikh wal-mansūkh ("the abrogating and abrogated [verses]"), is a technical term for a major genre of Islamic legal exegesis directed at the problem of seemingly contradictory material within or between the twin bases of Islamic holy law: the Qur'ān and the Prophetic Sunna. In its application, naskh typically involves the replacement (tabdīl) of an earlier verse/tradition (and thus its embodied ruling) with a chronologically successive one. The complete suppression (izāla) of a regulation so that not even its wording remains is recognized as well, though only in the case of the Qur'ān.

The emergence of naskh (initially as practice and then as fully elaborated theory) dates back to the first centuries of Islamic civilization. Almost all classical naskh works, for instance, begin by recounting the incident of the Kufan preacher banned from expounding the Qur'ān by an early 'ilmic authority figure (usually 'Alī but sometimes also Ibn 'Abbās) on account of his ignorance of the principles of naskh.^[1][2] Whatever the dubious historicity of such traditions:

More precisely:

In time, more complex philological, theological, and philosophical theorizing accrued to this doctrine^[5], and in general the amount of material recognized as either nāsikh (abrogating) or mansūkh (abrogated) has over time decreased as a result, from the 200+ verses cited by the high-medieval jurists to the 20 recognized by the late medieval al-Suyūti and the mere adduced 7 in one modern study.^[6][7]

Theory

Naskh employs the logic of chronology and progressive revelation. The different situations encountered over the course of Muhammad's more than two decade career as prophet, it is argued, required new rulings to meet the Muslim community's changing circumstances. Or, from a more theologically-inflected stand-point, the expiration points of those rulings God intended as temporary all along were reached. A classic example of this is the early community's increasingly belligerent posture towards its pagan and Jewish neighbors:

Yet despite its dependence on chronology, naskh is in no way a historiographical enterprise:

Naskh applies to only the regulative parts of God's revelation. In Tabarī's words:

In particular, the central tenets of the faith are excluded from this process.

Between sources

Abrogation is applicable to both sources of Islamic law: the Qur'ān and the Prophetic Sunna. A Qur'ānic verse may abrogate another Qur'ānic verse, and a Prophetic Sunna may likewise abrogate another Prophetic Sunna. The possibility of abrogation between these two sources, though, was a more contentious issue precipitated by the absence within a source of the appropriate abrogating (nāsikh) or abrogated (mansūkh) material necessary to bring concordance between it and the Fiqh.^[11]

In Shāfi'ī's source theory the possibility of abrogation between the Sunna and the Qur'ān was vehemently denied:

This stance was a reaction to larger developments within Islamic jurisprudence, particularly the reformulation of the Fiqh away from early foreign or regional influences^[13] and toward more eminently Islamic bases such as the Qur'ān. This assertion of Qur'ānic primacy was accompanied by calls for an abandonment of the Sunna. Shāfi'ī's insistence upon the impossibility of contradiction between Sunna and Qur'ān can thus be seen as one component in this larger effort of rescuing the Sunna:

Later scholars, writing when the juridicial legitimacy of the Sunna could be taken for granted (thanks largely to Shāfi'ī's efforts!), were less inclined to adopt his inflexible stance. To their minds the reality of this sort of inter-source abrogation was proven by several "indisputable" instances: the changing of the qibla towards Mecca and away from Jerusalem, and the introduction of the penalty of stoning for adultery. The following passage from Qurtubī (al-Jāmi' li ahkām al-Qur'ān) is representative in this regard:

Al-Ghazālī employs the same 3 examples in his Mustasfā.^[17]

One outcome of these disputations was the proposal of a mode of naskh known as naskh al-tilāwa dūna al-hukm ("abrogation of the wording but not ruling") in order to provide a Qur'ānic nāsikh, or abrogator, for Q.24:2 (see below).

Modes

Three modes of naskh were proposed by the classical exegetes:

• naskh al-hukm dūna al-tilāwa: abrogation of the ruling but not the wording, or supersession. A regulation- embodied within either a Qur'ānic verse or a hadith report- is replaced but its wording remains- in the former case, as text within the mushaf.

• naskh al-hukm wa-'l-tilāwa: abrogation of both ruling and wording, or suppression/erasure. Applicable only to the Qur'ān. A ruling is voided and its text omitted from the mushaf. Evidence that the verse ever existed is preserved only within tradition.

• naskh al-tilāwa dūna al-hukm: abrogation of the wording but not the ruling. Again, applicable only to the Qur'ān. The text of a still-functional ruling is omitted from the mushaf. Proof of the verse's existence is preserved within tradition (i.e through a hadith report) as well as in the Fiqh.

Of these three modes of naskh, it was the first- naskh al-hukm dūna al-tilāwa- which received widespread recognition.^[18] The second mode, naskh al-hukmwa-'l-tilāwa, was also generally acknowledged, in part due to the many alleged instances of revelatory erasure:

In all, 564 verses were alleged to have been expunged from the mushaf, or 1/11th of its total content.^[20][21]

The third mode, naskh al-tilāwa dūna al-hukm, was accepted by only a minority of scholars.^[22] The most prominent alleged instance of this sort of abrogation is the naskh of the so-called āyat al-rajm, or stoning verse. Adduced to exist from a tradition derived from the caliph 'Umar, the verse provided Qur'ānic sanction for the penalty for adultery found within the Fiqh (i.e. stoning) in contravention to the penalty prescribed by Q.24:2 - flogging.

The postulation of this mode stems (indirectly, however) from Shāfi'ī's source theory which rejected abrogation between sources:

Though Shāfi'ī thus never in fact postulated the existence of a "stoning verse", in one particular instance he did acknowledge the probability of "abrogation of wording but not ruling":

Implicit in the latter two modes of naskh is the distinction between the Qur'ān as temporally contingent document-i.e. the mushaf- and the Qur'ān as the unity of all revelation ever sent down to Muhammed. According to some exegetes this latter conception is not a wholly abstract one, but in fact corresponds to a heavenly reality, with the Qur'ān existing as a celestial archetype within the Mother of the Book (umm al-kitāb) (Q.43:4) or upon the Preserved Tablet (Q.85:21). Thus those verses omitted from the terrestrial mushaf may yet be said to still endure in Heaven.^[26]

External naskh

A fourth mode of naskh, deemed "external," is that between dispensations. In Islamic prophetology, a messenger may abrogate certain ritual and social laws handed down by his predecessors in order to lighten Man's burden, make lawful what had previously been unlawful, and therefore demonstrate God's mercy for His creation.^[27] According to Burton, "that Muhammad accepted a doctrine of external naskh cannot be doubted", and indeed naskh's Qur'ānic "proof text", Q.2:106, coming as it does right after a series of verses abrogating many aspects of the Jewish Halakha, may intend this sort of naskh.^[28]

In the Canon

The stem n-s-kh occurs four times within the Qur'ān: at Q.7:154, Q.45:29, Q.22:52, and Q.2:106. The first two occurrences come in the context of texts and scribal activity: "in the writing nuskhah thereon" (Q.7:154) and "For We were wont to put on Record nastansikh all that ye did" (Q.45:29). These uses, combined with the secular Arabic usage nasakha al-kitāb- "he copied the book"- led some to equate naskh with transfer (nql)- as in the transfer of an activity from one legal category (e.g. allowed) to another (forbidden). Overall, though, these verses were of marginal importance for the exegesis of naskh.

More significant is the occurrence at Q.22:52:

This verse, cited by Tabarī in connection with the incident of the so-called "Satanic Verses", supported an interpretation of naskh as eradication (izāla) and thus made acceptable the idea of naskh as the nullification of a verse without any replacement- naskh al-hukm wa-'l-tilāwa. In Tabarī's interpretation (Tafsīr):

The "hint of dualism" in this passage (even Satan, Tabarī seems to say, plays a meaningful role in the dialectical process of God's revelation) is more apparent than real. In order to enlist Q.22:52 as incontrovertible proof of naskh's eradicatory facility, Tabarī must gloss over the essential difference between the activity pledged within it and those forms of abrogation considered the legitimate expressions of naskh- namely, the authentically divine provenance of the latters' abrogated material. Thus his incentive to construe the divine eradication of Satanic material as a purposeful, even constructive, activity, rather than a wholly reactive and defensive one. Later exegetes such as Makkī would carefully guard this distinction, though:

Thus Q.22:52 was relegated to merely lexical significance.

It was Q.2:106 which served as the chief Qur'ānic "proof-text" for naskh, and indeed it lent the concept its very name^[31]:

Opinion as to naskh's technical meaning here oscillated between replacement (ibdāl) and nullification (ibtāl). This despite the fact that the former meaning would make the coordinate clause's "We substitute something better or similar" tautological. To work around this problem exegetes such as Tabarī interpolated hukm (ruling) in place of the word āya, arguing that if a ruling is replaced the preservation or not of its wording in the mushaf is immaterial, thus letting the verse confirm the two main types of naskh.^[32] Alternate interpretations were also suggested for the subordinate clause's "cause to be forgotten" (aw nansahā), such as defer or leave. This was primarily motivated by flight from the theologically-repugnant idea of prophetic forgetting^[33], with Q.15:9 cited as evidence of its impossibility. Yet verses Q.17:86, Q.18:24, and Q.87:6-7 explicitly endorse its feasibility. Thus "Qur'ān-forgetting is clearly adumbrated in the Qur'ān".^[34] Many ahadith also attest to the phenomenon: entire suras which the Muslims had previously recited, claims one, would one morning be discovered to have been completely erased from memory^[35] (cf. Abū 'Ubaid al-Qāsim b. Sallām). In the same spirit of "turning lemons into lemonade" which characterizes much else within the theologizing of naskh, divine purpose was attributed to such incidents; Rāzī, for example, speculates that they may have figured among the Prophet's miracles.

Finally, there exist two important linguistically-unrelated verses cited in connection with naskh: Q.16:101- "When We substitute tabdīl one revelation for another"- and Q.13:39- "Allah doth blot out or confirm what He pleaseth". Besides confirming the two major modes of abrogation (i.e. suppression and supersession), the former verse is employed by Shāfi'ī in his theory of abrogation between sources as proof that a Qur'ān verse can only be abrogated by another Qur'ān verse.

Historical Elaboration

Like other technical terms within Islamic exegesis (e.g. asbāb al-nuzūl), naskh attained its formal meaning through a process of theoretical refinement in which early applications of the concept were abandoned upon further logical or religious consideration. Tabarī's ambivalent use of the term for the eradication of Satanic material has already been noted. Among naskh 's other, ultimately discarded, uses in early works of tafsīr are: the abrogation of a ruling from pre-Islamic (i.e. jāhilī) Arabia, and the juridicial deflation of a broadly applicable ruling by a succeeding one which narrows its scope (nasakha min [al-āya]- "an exception is provided to [the verse]").^[36] The latter usage was reformulated by Shāfi'ī as takhsīs (specification/exception), resulting in a marked decrease in the amount of material considered mansūkh.

Putting aside dubiously attributed works such as the Naskh al-Qur-ān of "al-Zuhrī"^[37], the principle of abrogation (without its naskh terminology) makes one of its earliest documented appearance in the Muwatta' of Mālik:

The impetus for this principle, seen already in Mālik's day, was the need to harmonize the regional variants of Islamic law both with one another as well as the putative sources of Islamic law. That the starting point for these local fiqhs was in fact neither the Qur'ān nor the Sunna (in its later sense of the Sunna of Muhammad) has been shown by Schacht. As authority for local views began to be attributed back in time to the Companions and eventually Muhammad himself (documented by what Schacht terms the "backward growth" of isnāds) the contradictions in regional fiqh became irreconcilable.^[39] Naskh allowed for the alleviation of these tensions by the claim that, in the case of two "soundly" documented traditions contradicting one another, one had come later and abrogated the other.

Yet even after the need to ground their legal theories in either Sunna or Qur'ān became apparent to the jurists, the regional fiqhs were not discarded, but became the third source in reformualting Islamic law^[40], on par with and of even greater importance than Sunna or Qur'ān!^[41] This can be seen in the postulation of "lost" verses whose rulings were still operative and conventiently corroborative of the jurist's own school of fiqh (e.g. the "stoning" and "suckling" verses). It is also evinced in Shāfi'ī's remarkable admission that but for the guidance of the Sunna the Muslims would have had no choice but to carry out the rulings of the Qur'ān!^[42]

In non-Sunni Islam

The principle of naskh is acknowledged by both Sunnis and Shī'a^[43], completely outside of the latter's allegations (which in any case would not conform to the principle of naskh proper) that material favorable to 'Alī was expunged from the 'Uthmān mushaf.^[44] Among those groups that did reject naskh were the Mu'tazili, on the rationalist grounds that the word of God could not contain contradictions, and the much later Ahmadī's, who argued that all Qur'ānic verses have equal validity in keeping with their emphasis on the "unsurpassable beauty and unquestionable validity of the Qur'ān".^[45] The harmonization of apparently incompatible rulings is resolved through their juridical deflation in Ahmadī fiqh, so that a ruling (considered to have applicability only to the specific situation for which it was revealed), is effective not because it was revealed last, but because it is most like to the situation at hand.^[46] In this way Ahmadī's were able to contend that Q.9:5 (the sword verse) had not abrogated all verses calling for peaceful co-existence with the non-Muslims.

Theology

Naskh stimulated several lines of theologizing to reconcile this "reality of the Fiqh" with Islam's core religious doctrines.

Probably the most immediate concern was explaining the very existence of progressive revelation. What could account for God's turn to this expedient outside of limits to His omniscience (subsequent rulings are "better" because they are informed by superior knowledge) or inconstancy in the divine will? Both prospects were repugnant to orthodox theologians (at least of the Sunni variety; compare this to the Shi'ite doctrine of bada', however) and so other rationales were put forth. One of these relied upon the tried apologetic technique (see the argument for theodicy from free will, for example) of reconstruing apparent limitations in the Creator as expressions of solicitude towards His creatures, and indeed as tokens of His mercy towards them. This was formalized in the doctrine of tahkfīf and is frequently expressed by commentators such as Tabarī, who argued in his exegesis of Q.2:106 that one motivation for naskh was God's desire to lighten the ritualistic and legal burdens He had imposed upon mankind:

Yet tahkfīf is equally applicable where the nāsikh introduces a more onerous requirement- for example, the extension of the ritual fast from a few days (Q.2:184) to the entire month of Ramadan (Q.2:185)- as its performance is "better" for men on account of it helping them attain greater reward in the Hereafter, or even when the change is indifferent, such as the switching of the qibla, as the reward will not change.^[48] Clearly, then, the criteria of tahkfīf is unfalsifiable, completely useless for distinguishing nāsikh from mansūkh, and therefore entirely dogmatic in character.

Another, much more specifically Islamic, problem was raised by the doctrine by mu'jaz- or the literary perfection and inimitability of the Qur'ān. How could one āya be replaced by one which is better than it, as Q.2:106 explicitly promises, if all āyat or inimitable and therefore incommensurable? This issue was side-stepped by interpolation; the superior replacement is the verse's ruling, not the verse's wording, and so no violation of the doctrine of mu'jaz is entailed.

Lastly, there is the issue of abrogated material whose wording is preserved in the mushaf (naskh al-hukm dūna al-tilāwa). Since the verse's ruling is inoperative, what purpose is served by retaining its wording? One common rationale, expressed here by Suyūti (Itqān) and mirroring the tahkfīf argument was:

Overall, though, the Muslim commentators demonstrate a remarkable degree of complacency in the face of naskh 's more theologically disturbing implications, supremely confident (as expressed in the following gloss on a famous Ā'isha hadith) that whatever the mechanisms used to expurgate or cancel the Divine revelation, what has ultimately come down to us is exactly what Allah intended mankind to have:

Such complacency reflects the important constitutive effects of naskh's eventual theological santization. Once the genuineness of God's abrogation of His own commandments was accepted, the fact that no intelligible pattern underlay His sequence of actions was taken as indicative of important facts about the nature of the Creator, as well as the proper duties of His creatures. In particular this reinforced the extreme deontological currents within Islamic philosophy and ethics:

Literature

In addition to being discussed within general works of jurisprudence, naskh would generate its own corpus of specialized legal manuals. These treatises invariably begin with an introduction designed to impress the importance and high Islamic credibility of the science, often by an appeal to 'ilmic authority figures of the past (as in the story of 'Alī and the Kufan preacher). As is made clear in these stories, "none may occupy judicial or religious office in the community who is not equipped with this indispensable knowledge and who is incapable of distinguishing nāsikh [abrogator] from mansūkh [abrogatee].^[53]

The remainder of the introduction then typically treats the various modes of naskh, naskh 's applicability between Sunna and Qur'ān, and- in appeasement of theological scruples- why naskh is not the same as badā', or inconstancy of the Divine Will. Following this comes the core of the treatise, an enumeration of abrogated verses in sūra order of the Qur'ān.^[54] In their consideration of nāsikh wal-mansūkh the taxonomic predilections of these authors comes out, evinced in their discussions of special verses considered "marvels" ('ajā'ib) of the Qur'ān, such as the verse which abrogates the greatest number of other verses (Q.9:5), the verse which was in effect longest until it was abrogated (Q.46:9), and the verse which containts both an abrogatee and its abrogator (Q.5:105).^[55]

The following is a list of classical examples of the genre:

• "al-Zuhrī", Naskh al-Qur-ān
• Abū 'Ubaid al-Qāsim b. Sallām (d. 838), Kitāb al-nāsikh wal-mansūkh (Book of the Abrogating and Abrogated [Verses])
• al-Nahhās (d. 949), Kitāb al-nāsikh wal-mansūkh
• Hibat Allāh ibn Salāma (d. 1019), Kitāb al-nāsikh wal-mansūkh
• al-Baghādī (d. 1037), al-Nāsikh wal-mansūkh
• Makkī b. Abū Tālib al-Qaisī (d. 1045) al-Īdāh li-nāsikh al-Qur'ān wa-mansūkhihi
• Ibn al-'Atā'iqī (d. 1308), al-Nāsikh wal-mansūkh
• Ibn Hkuzayma al-Fārisī, Kitāb al-mujāz fī'l-nāsikh wa'l-mansūkh
• Ibn Al-Jawzī, Nawāsikh al-Qur-ān

Modern examples include:

• Mustafā Zayd, Al-Naskh fil-Qur'ān al-Kari-m, Cairo: Dār al-Fikr al-'Arabī, 1963

Instances

The amount of material recognized as abrogated by Muslim exegetes and jurists varied, partly as the result of the continuous refinement of the concept (e.g. Shāfi'ī's introduction of the distinction between naskh and takhsīs), partly as a result of the normally disputatious process of elaborating the law. Hibat Allāh, for example, lists 239 instances of abrogation across 71 suras, with Q.9:25 accounting for almost half of the mansūkh verses. Many modern Muslim scholars have proposed more stringent criteria, arguing that only material which directly (and exactly) contradicts previous rulings can be said to be abrogating (nāsikh).

Frequently cited examples of intra-Qur'ānic abrogation are:

• Verse: Q.8:65
  • Abrogator (nāsikh): The immediately succeeding Q.8:66, which lightens the ratio of enemies the Muslims are expected to vanquish from 10:1 to 2:1 .

• Verse: Q.2:180
  • Abrogator: Q.4:10-11, which provides specific allotments for a deceased's relatives. These verses constitute a perfect example of what later exegetes would claim to be takhsīs (specification).

• Verse: 2.219
  • Abrogator: Q.4:43, whose more explicit disapproval of drunkenness is in turn abrogated by Q.5:90, which institutes a complete ban on the consumption of alcohol:

• Verse: Q.9:5 (āyat al-sayf, the "sword verse")
  • Abrogatee (mansūkh): Literally dozens of verses enjoining the umma's peacable conduct towards outside groups: Hibat Allāh and al-Nahhās cite 124 and 130 verses, respectively^[56]. Ibn al Jawzī and Mustafā Zayd count 140 verses^[57]

• Verse: Q.9:29
  • Abrogatee: "Nahhās considers 9:29 to have abrogated virtually all verses calling for patience or forgiveness toward Scriptuaries"^[58].

Examples of inter-Qur'ānic abrogation, where one of the rulings comes from the Sunna, are:

• Verse: Q.2:150
  • Abrogatee: The Sunna which established Jerusalem as the direction of prayer (qibla).

• Verse: Q.24:2
  • Abrogator: For those unwilling to countenance the existence of a "lost" āyat al-rajm (e.g. Qurtubī, Al-Ghazālī), the Prophetic Sunna which establishes stoning to death as the penalty for adultery.

See also

• Bada'
• Raf'
• Tafsir
  • Asbab al-nuzul
• Fiqh
  • Usul al-fiqh
• Muhammad ibn Idris ash-Shafi`i
• Hadith of the Verse of Rajm

Notes

References

• "Naskh". Encyclopaedia of Islam (CD-ROM v. 1.0). (1999). 
• John Burton (1970). "Those Are the High-Flying Cranes". Journal of Semitic Studies 15: 246-264. 
• John Burton (1985). "The Exegesis of Q.2:106 and the Islamic Theories of Naskh: Mā nansakh min āya aw nansahā[sic] na'ti bi khairin minhā aw mithlihā". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 48: 452-469. 
• John Burton (1990). The Sources of Islamic Law: Islamic Theories of Abrogation. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 0-7486-0108-2. 
• Andrew Rippin (1984). "Al-Zuhrī, Naskh al-Qur'ān and the Problem of Early Tafsīr Texts". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 47: 22-37. 
• Andrew Rippin, editor (1988). Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur'ān'. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-826546-8. 
  • David S. Powers. "The Exegetical Genre nāsikh al-Qur'ān wa mansūkhuhu": 117-138. 
• Andrew Rippin (1988). "The function of asbāb al-nuzūl in Qur'ānic exegesis". Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 51: 1-20. 
• Moshe Sharon, ed. (1997). Studies in Islamic History and Civilization in Honour of Professor David Ayalon. Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 965264014X. 
  • Yohanan Friedmann. "Jihād in Ahmadī Thought"": 221-236. 
• John Wansbrough and Andrew Rippin, ed. (2004). Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-59102-201-0. 

External links

Islamic

• "Abrogation?" Islamic scholar GF Haddad answers some questions
• "Naskh (Abrogation)", by Suheil Laher
• Load-Islam.com's Refutation on Peaceful verses being abrogated by Swordvers
• Submission.org's claim against the Qur'an-Abrogation

Non-Islamic

• "Answering-Islam" about Abrogated Verses
• Robert Spencer about abrogation