Abrogation (naskh) and the Sword Verse: 5 facts to know

The verse says “kill the polytheists wherever you find them,” and the words are there. Any honest answer starts by conceding that. The dispute is over who is meant, when and under what conditions.

Surah 9 opens by ending the treaties of specific tribes who had broken them, with four months of open travel granted first (9:1-2). Verse 9:4 then exempts those polytheists who kept their agreements and orders that their treaties be honoured to the end of their term. Verse 9:7 spares those bound by a treaty at the Sacred Mosque so long as they stay upright. Verse 9:13 gives the reason for the war: a people who broke their oaths and “began it against you first.” Verse 9:5 itself ends by letting go anyone who repents, and 9:6 orders that a polytheist who asks for protection be granted it and escorted to a place of safety.^[1] A text that protects treaty-keepers and travelling listeners within the same passage is hard to read as a general order against every unbeliever everywhere.

The doctrine rests on 2:106: “We do not abrogate a verse or cause it to be forgotten except that We bring one better than it or similar to it.” A related verse, 16:101, speaks of one verse being substituted for another.^[2] The critic says this makes the Quran unusable, since any verse might be cancelled without warning.

The classical theory is narrower than that. It applies to legal rulings, and not to reports of events, promises or matters of belief, since a statement of fact cannot be replaced by another. Standard examples are the widow’s waiting period of a year in 2:240, replaced by four months and ten days in 2:234, and the change of the direction of prayer in 2:142-144.^[3] Jurists required a clear conflict that cannot be harmonised and a known order of revelation. Later writers also observe that the earliest generations used the word naskh loosely, to include qualifying a general rule or limiting an absolute one, and that the later legal theory narrowed it.^[4]

The claim that the Sword Verse cancels over a hundred verses has a source. Some compilers of lists of abrogated verses counted very widely, and 9:5 appears in such lists as the verse that overrides earlier calls to forbearance. A critic who cites this is describing a view that some scholars held.

It was never the only view. Al-Suyuti, in his work on the Quranic sciences, reduced the list to about twenty verses.^[5] Shah Waliullah of Delhi reduced it further, to five.^[6] Abu Muslim al-Isfahani is reported to have denied that any Quranic ruling is abrogated, and al-Razi discusses his argument when commenting on 2:106.^[7] Many of the verses on the long lists are cases where a general rule was qualified or a hard circumstance passed, which the narrower scholars refused to call abrogation. So the figure of 124, given by Hibat Allah ibn Salama, marks one end of a range, and a reader needs to know which scholar is being quoted before accepting that it represents the teaching of Islam.

Verse 2:256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion; right has become distinct from error.”^[8] The critic says that 9:5 abrogated it. That view is on record: the commentaries of al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir report that some early authorities took the verse to be abrogated, and that others restricted it to the People of the Book who accept the protection of the Muslim state.^[9] Both works also record the other readings. Al-Tabari himself rejects the claim that the verse was abrogated by the permission to fight, and holds that it protects everyone allowed to keep his religion under the protection of the Muslim state.

The reported occasion of the verse supports the plain reading. Abu Dawud relates that some women of the Ansar, the Medinan helpers, had sons who had been raised as Jews, and the verse came when the families wished to make them Muslims by force.^[10] The same principle is stated elsewhere in the Quran: “Would you compel people until they become believers?” (10:99) and “let whoever wishes believe, and let whoever wishes disbelieve” (18:29).^[11] Faith is a matter of conviction, and a conversion extracted by force cannot supply it. Verse 9:6, in the same surah as the Sword Verse, protects a polytheist who listens and then leaves unconverted.

Verse 5:69 says that those who believe, and the Jews, the Sabians and the Christians, whoever believes in God and the Last Day and does good, will have no fear and will not grieve. Verse 2:62 is close to it in wording.^[12] The critic holds that later verses cancelled this promise. Al-Tabari reports a saying attributed to Ibn Abbas that 2:62 was abrogated by 3:85, “whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted from him.”^[13] That is a real report, and it shows that a classical position of this kind existed.

Other commentators took the promise as standing. The Quran uses islam for submission to God in the sense that earlier prophets practised it, and it calls Abraham and the disciples of Jesus muslims (3:67, 3:52).^[14] On that reading 3:85 does not cancel 5:69; it defines the same condition of faith in God, the Last Day and good conduct. The scholars do differ on whether a person to whom the message of Muhammad has clearly come can rely on this promise. The point here is that the verse was never simply deleted from the Quran’s teaching, and the sources preserve a plain disagreement.