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 Post subject: Re: Types of abrogation
PostPosted: 28 Apr 2010, 00:18 
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Pragmatic wrote:
Al-Jabri briefly states on pages 104-105 of his book an interesting remark. He says that in the early days of the revelation, the Prophet (PBUH) followed some aspects of previous books of revelation, and some of the scriptures that were followed were kept in written form by People of the Book at that time. Al-Jabri postulates that some early Muslims may have confused those with Quranic verses in their mind, hence later claimed that they were abrogated in recitation when they were not included in the text of the Quran. This obviously has no bearing on the abrogation doctrine since the 'verses' are gone, but I haven't read this remark before so I thought it was worth noting.

On page 113, Al-Jabri continues with a similar remark. applied to hadeeth in this case. He quotes a particular alleged verse that was supposedly gone which talks about how man is greedy and wouldn't be satisfied by two valleys of gold, wanting a third. Al-Jabri points out that Al-Bukhari reports this as a hadeeth, and concludes that this is an example of an abrogation claim based on confusing hadeeth and Quranic verses.

Al-Jabri continues to discuss another case where the supplication of Al-Qonut was mistaken for a Quranic verse and discusses the circumstances comparing them to the famous omission of the last two chapters of the Quran by Ibn Masseoud, where he thought they were just supplications. Al-Jabri says that major supplications were often transcribed, hence the confusion by some with Quranic verses.

BTW, maybe this is one of the reasons of having قل (command verb say) in the last two chapters of the Quran, to distinguish them from pure supplications.

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 Post subject: Re: Types of abrogation
PostPosted: 28 Apr 2010, 01:11 
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Pragmatic wrote:
BTW, maybe this is one of the reasons of having قل (command verb say) in the last two chapters of the Quran, to distinguish them from pure supplications.

That's a shrewd observation! Every word in the Quran has at least one vital, intentional purpose. As Ibn Abbaas (RA) has said, "Everything in the Quran has served the purpose God intended for it, even if people do not comprehend it."

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 Post subject: Re: Types of abrogation
PostPosted: 05 May 2010, 03:55 
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Verses that are gone

In the introduction of this book, Al-Saqqa lists on pages 14-17 the narrations that Al-Suyuti included in his book that assert that some Quranic verses that had been revealed were gone from the text of the Quran. Al-Saqqa is adamantly opposed to the notion (and so is Al-Jabri by the way), openly accusing the enemies of Islam of making up these narrations. He provides a simple argument against them, which is the fact that all the narrations are singles, and singles cannot be taken as evidence of Quranic verses.

I am sympathetic to Al-Saqqa's argument, but I still feel that this type of abrogation (abrogation of recitation) is better left unchallenged (and unaffirmed). I have four reasons for this approach

  1. The evidence here solely depends on the authenticity of narrations, and that is currently a qualitative subject, so it cannot be objectively debated.

  2. It has no bearing on the abrogation doctrine, so there is no benefit to the main thesis of this project if one argument or the other prevails.

  3. We risk losing credibility in our main thesis by using less crisp arguments (which all we would have) tackling this type of abrogation.

  4. It is academic in the sense that it is not actionable. Even the stoning 'verse' is academic since advocates of stoning use Sunna narrations as evidence for that anyway.

To be honest, I don't have a verdict in my mind about this type of abrogation. I know it would be more 'neat' not to have it, but the evidence and logic one way or the other is far from conclusive. I would say that I am on the fence after reading the plausible interpretation of 16:101 that does not imply Quranic verses being gone.

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 Post subject: Re: Types of abrogation
PostPosted: 12 May 2010, 07:58 
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On page 263 of his book, Muhammad Al-Khodari discusses the abrogation of a ruling but not the recitation, and vice versa.

  1. He goes through the arguments against abrogation of a ruling but not the recitation, mainly that the text and ruling are tied together and that leaving inoperative text in the Quran would confuse people. He mentions the counter arguments that as long as there is evidence of abrogation there will be no confusion, and that there is a benefit for leaving inoperative text in terms of historical value. It seems that he is discussing this in terms of possibility rather than actual occurrence, so he is arguing the issues in principle.

  2. He dismisses the possibility of abrogation of recitation but not the ruling, and says that he does not understand why God would abrogate the recitation (the text being a sign of God's capability in its own right) when He still wants the ruling to hold.

BTW, most of Al-Khodari's writeup is about intricate technicalities of which abrogation is possible and which is not under various elaborate scenarios. It seems that once scholars accepted the notion of abrogation, they really took it to town.

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 Post subject: Re: Types of abrogation
PostPosted: 16 May 2010, 06:39 
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On pages 54-56 of his book, Nada asserts that there is no "abrogation of recitation and ruling" in the Quran. He focusses on Aisha's narration about the nursing verses, and asserts that narration of singles cannot be taken as evidence about the Quran. He cites Imam Malik as having rejected that narration. He also mentions other narrations about missing verses/chapters and dismisses them as singles, too.

I have a question that may be a bit sensitive. Is there anyway to pinpoint how old Aisha, may God be pleased with her, was at the time of this narration (perhaps can be determined by the identity of the person who quoted her). She lived to an old age, and I think it is prudent to ask this question.

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 Post subject: Re: Types of abrogation
PostPosted: 16 May 2010, 07:07 
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On pages 57-66 of his book, Nada discusses "abrogation of recitation, but not the ruling." He addresses the stoning verse and other alleged verses. The crux of the argument, and he quotes other scholars who are of the same opinion, is that the problem is attribution and accuracy of the statements. He attacks some in the chains of narration as unreliable, and he shows ambiguity in what some of the narrations mean.

Interestingly, he mentions that Ubayy was 80 years old in one of the narrations attributed to him, so he probably was thinking about the same thing I raised in the last post.

Two things are clear from what I have read from anti-abrogation scholars about the types of abrogation other than what is covered by the abrogation doctrine, namely cases of missing verses whether their ruling still applies or not.

  1. All the anti-abrogation scholars I have read so far are also against these types of abrogation, and are adamant about that.

  2. The pro and con arguments are an exercise in debating attribution, authenticity, and authority. I don't see how this can be settled crisply, and I continue to think that reaching no verdict in these types of abrogation is our best strategy since the arguments against the abrogation doctrine itself are far more crisp and scholarly.

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 Post subject: Re: Types of abrogation
PostPosted: 16 May 2010, 18:31 
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Pragmatic wrote:
I have a question that may be a bit sensitive. Is there anyway to pinpoint how old Aisha, may God be pleased with her, was at the time of this narration (perhaps can be determined by the identity of the person who quoted her). She lived to an old age, and I think it is prudent to ask this question.

From what I've read, Lady `Aa'isha, may God have been pleased with her, was born, in all likelihood, around 17 B.H. since her older sister, Asmaa', was ten years her senior and she was born 27 B.H. `Aa'isha died 58 A.H. Other reports say she was born 8 B.H.

She was sharp of mind, knowledgeable of the Quran and fluent with Arabic. People often came to her asking religious questions. She is also the second most prolific Hadeeth narrator.

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 Post subject: Re: Types of abrogation
PostPosted: 27 May 2010, 16:56 
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Commenting of the two types of abrogation involving recitation, Dr. Az-Zalmi, in his book التبيان لرفع غموض النسخ في القرآن, page 34, refutes it with a clever argument. He says that what is Quran is what has been ubiquitously narrated (متواتر) and stated to be Quran. Since all claims that verses were once recited and have since been forgotten or abrogated, all those claims were made in narratives reported by a few then they are not Quran.

I like that. He goes on to criticize the hadeeth about ten sucklings having been a recited verse that was later abrogated, and asks seven questions about it for which there have been no answers. He shows great disappointment in As-Suyooti, who quoted this hadeeth without comment in his book الإتقان في علوم القرآن.

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 Post subject: Re: Types of abrogation
PostPosted: 15 Jun 2010, 02:15 
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Linguistic wrote:
Commenting of the two types of abrogation involving recitation, Dr. Az-Zalmi, in his book التبيان لرفع غموض النسخ في القرآن, page 34, refutes it with a clever argument. He says that what is Quran is what has been ubiquitously narrated (متواتر) and stated to be Quran. Since all claims that verses were once recited and have since been forgotten or abrogated, all those claims were made in narratives reported by a few then they are not Quran.

That may be the reason the majority have rejected the hadeeth attributed to `Aa'isha, may God have been pleased with her, in which she said that there was a verse that set the minimum number of sucklings that establish a suckling sibling as ten, then another verse was revealed and set the number to five. The interesting thing is that the majority agreed that the number is one, but they did not produce any authoritative evidence! This is the question Al-Ghaali poses in his book بالحجة والبرهان لا نسخ في القرآن, pages 31-33: Were all the Sahaaba unaware of this abrogation of a verse but continuation of its ruling? In fact, a hadeeth in Muslim's compilation quotes the Prophet (PBUH) saying, "One or two sucklings do not cause a prohibition."

Al-Ghaali reports that `Aa'isha, Ash-Shawkaani and Ash-Shaafi`i all said this was an example of a verse which was abrogated in recitation but not in ruling and that the ruling is the number of sucklings is five. Ali, Ibn Mas`ood, Ibn Abbaas, Ibn Umar, `Ataa', Taawoos, Ibn Al-Musayyib, Al-Hasan, Az-Zuhri, Mujaahid, Qataada, Abu-Haneefa, Maalik and his fellows, Al-Awzaa`i, An-Nawawi and Al-Layth, all disagreed. The latter three also said that it cannot be used to prove that some verses were abrogated because it's not a ubiquitous hadeeth.

Al-Ghaali finally says that Al-Bayhaqi tried to explain the hadeeth and said that what `Aa'isha meant to say was that the verse was still in circulation and people were not aware of its abrogation.

While this discussion is not directly related to the abrogation doctrine as we define it here in this project, it is relevant to the analysis of scholars opinions and examination of evidence and authentication of hadeeths that imply abrogation in the Quran.

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 Post subject: Re: Types of abrogation
PostPosted: 22 Jun 2010, 05:54 
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On page 74 of his book, Al-Zalmi quotes Al-Zaidi in a footnote saying that the most commonly accepted form of abrogation by scholars is abrogation of both ruling and recitation. Al-Zalmi himself talks less adamantly about this type, but still rejects that it has in fact occurred.

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