Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Islam critiqued gets tangled in his warped world; has 2:256 been abrogated?

In answer to the video "No Compulsion in Religion"

2:106 speaks of N-S-KH meaning a) to write an exact copy, or b) to write over as in replace. 16:101 says baddalna aya makan aya/we replace an aya in the place of an aya. Sura 16 by the way is Meccan and according to the proponents of the idea, the first case of abrogation occurred in Medina. Both verses speak of the physical replacement of the abrogated, with the abrogating and this is not the case of Quranic abrogation according to which both types of verses are still present within the Quran. It is talking of the Quran's ayat superseding the ayat of previous scriptures, replacing them, which precisely is one of the oft repeated functions of the Quran. Another verse misused by the proponents of Quranic abrogation is 13:39. It speaks of "mahw" which means effacement and total removal; this again disagrees with the advocates of that theory according to which both the abrogating and the abrogated verse remain in the Quran.

No consensus exists on whether the doctrine is a reality. The identification of abrogated rulings in the Quran has been in the past and still is an act of biased interpretation. We see cases of companions, even after the prophet's death giving different opinions on whether a verse is abrogated or not, as is the case for 2:184 with ibn Umar arguing for and ibn Abbas against its abrogation. Scholars of abrogation, fuqaha’ havent been able to refine the principles of abrogation so as to give them universal shape. Different scholars have come up with their own standards of abrogation. This doctrine was introduced decades after the Prophet and was developed in full over three centuries by many scholars. In other words, abrogation is not a genuine Islamic doctrine. Most verses proposed as subject to abrogation do not even conform with the rule of an aya replacing another aya; for example scholars on the subject argue that the "verse of the sword" 9:5 abrogates 2:256 yet they conveniently omit that 2:256 contains information that cannot be replaced and so they are forced to select even within an aya what is abrogated and what is not. Further the verse of no compulsion was revealed in Medina after the first command to perform jihad 2:190-5. It is a reiteration of an Islamic principle present long before in Meccan verses, including in 18:29. This means the application of that principle of freedom of religious choice, and its validity, are unaffected by the political superiority of the Muslims. No authentic report of the prophet mentions the theory or the existence of abrogated verses within the Quran. Not a single verse of the Quran indicates that a ruling has been overruled by another.

Something else to note is that even the traditional adherents to the notion agree that there are no abrogated verses present in the Quran. This is seen from the various ahadith which speak of passages people used to recite and that were absent from the prophet's final recital of the Quran. People explained that phenomenon through the theory of abrogation. Even when some scholars speak of abrogated verse still present in the Quran, they dont argue that these verses become obsolete, rather they carry a new meaning.

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