Tolerance Verses Versus Sword Verses, and the Problem of Abrogation
Browse all parts & issues
“There is no compulsion in religion” (Quran 2:256) and “to you your religion, to me mine” (109:6) sit alongside “kill the polytheists wherever you find them” (9:5) and “fight those who do not believe in Allah… until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued” (9:29). Classical jurists resolved the tension chronologically: the Medinan sword verses abrogate the earlier irenic ones. Ibn Kathir’s tafsirtafsirClassical Quranic exegesis — the commentary tradition (al-Tabari, al-Razi, Ibn Kathir, etc.) that explains and contextualizes the text.Full glossary → on 9:5 cites al-Dahhak: it “abrogated every agreement of peace between the Prophet and any idolater.” The internal problem is twofold: the Quran both contains the contradiction and contains the abrogationnaskhAbrogation: the principle that a later Quranic revelation can cancel or replace an earlier ruling. Classical scholars catalogued dozens to hundreds of abrogated verses.Full glossary → mechanism (2:106) that institutionalizes it — and Quran 2:106 responds to the accusation of substitution (16:101: “when We substitute a verse in place of a verse… they say, ‘You are but an inventor’”) by affirming that substitution occurs.
Common Muslim Responses
Modernist scholars (following Muhammad Abduh and others) reject the abrogating status of 9:5: its immediate context (9:4, 9:6–7) exempts treaty-keeping polytheists and commands safe conduct, so the verse addresses only specific treaty-breaking Arab tribes; the peaceful verses remain operative, and abrogation, if real at all, concerns a handful of legal details.
Counter-Rebuttal
The modernist reading may be the more humane one, critics respond, but the internal critique targets the tradition as a whole: for over a millennium the dominant juristic schools held the opposite, building the fiqhfiqhIslamic jurisprudence — the human science of deriving legal rulings from the Quran, sunnah, consensus, and analogy.Full glossary → of offensive jihad on exactly these verses, and they did so using the Quran’s own stated mechanism of abrogation. A revelation whose “clear verses” (3:7) yielded a thousand years of consensus that modernists now call a misreading is, at minimum, not perspicuous — and the disagreement over which verses even remain in force (counts of abrogated verses range from 5 to 247 among classical authorities, per al-Suyuti’s al-Itqan) is itself an internal incoherence in the doctrine of a preserved, eternal message.