Naskh (tafsir) - Historical Elaboration

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 - "an exception is provided to "). 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", the principle of abrogation (without its naskh terminology) makes one of its earliest documented appearance in the Muwatta' of Mālik:

In his review of the question of whether the Muslim traveler should observe or may postpone the obligation to fast during the month of Ramadān, which involves him in a comparison of conflicting opinion reported from many prominent Muslims of the past, including contradictory reports as to the practice of the Prophet himself, Mālik states that his teacher Zuhrī had told him that the Muslims had adopted as standard the latest of all the Prophet's reported actions... while in another chapter Mālik himself actually states that of the two relevant Kur'ān rulings, one had replaced the other. Elsewhere, Mālik rejects the notion that a ruling remains valid despite the reported withdrawal of the wording of the supposed Kur'ān 'verse' said to have originally imposed the ruling in question.”

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. 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, on par with and of even greater importance than Sunna or Qur'ān! 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!