Naskh (tafsir) - in The Canon

In The Canon

The stem n-s-kh occurs four times within the Qur'ān: at Q.7:154, Q.45:29, Q.22:52, and Q.2:106. The first two occurrences come in the context of texts and scribal activity: "in the writing thereon" (Q.7:154) and "For We were wont to put on Record all that ye did" (Q.45:29). These uses, combined with the secular Arabic usage nasakha al-kitāb- "he copied the book"- led some to equate naskh with transfer (nql)- as in the transfer of an activity from one legal category (e.g. allowed) to another (forbidden). Overall, though, these verses were of marginal importance for the exegesis of naskh.

More significant is the occurrence at Q.22:52:

Never did We send an apostle or a prophet before thee, but, when he framed a desire, Satan threw some (vanity) into his desire: but God will cancel anything (vain) that Satan throws in, and Allah will confirm (and establish) His Signs: for Allah is full of Knowledge and Wisdom —20px, 20px

This verse, cited by Tabarī in connection with the incident of the so-called "Satanic Verses", supported an interpretation of naskh as eradication (izāla) and thus made acceptable the idea of naskh as the nullification of a verse without any replacement- naskh al-hukm wa-'l-tilāwa. In Tabarī's interpretation (Tafsīr):

The āyas concerning which God here announces that He will endorse them are without any doubt, the āyas of his revealed Book. It is thus clear that what the devil had cast into that revealed Book is precisely what God announces that He has removed from it and suppressed. God then endorsed His book by removing that utterance from it.

The "hint of dualism" in this passage (even Satan, Tabarī seems to say, plays a meaningful role in the dialectical process of God's revelation) is more apparent than real. In order to enlist Q.22:52 as incontrovertible proof of naskh's eradicatory facility, Tabarī must gloss over the essential difference between the activity pledged within it and those forms of abrogation considered the legitimate expressions of naskh- namely, the authentically divine provenance of the latters' abrogated material. Thus his incentive to construe the divine eradication of Satanic material as a purposeful, even constructive, activity, rather than a wholly reactive and defensive one. Later exegetes such as Makkī would carefully guard this distinction, though:

Q.22:52 does not "indicate" the intellectual acceptability of naskh. It merely shows that God eradicates what the Devil insinuates into the Prophet's recital. It does not indicate the occurrence in the divine revelations of the naskh of what God considers to be part of his truth.

Thus Q.22:52 was relegated to merely lexical significance.

It was Q.2:106 which served as the chief Qur'ānic "proof-text" for naskh, and indeed it lent the concept its very name:

None of Our revelations do We abrogate or cause to be forgotten, but We substitute something better or similar: Knowest thou not that Allah Hath power over all things? —20px, 20px

Opinion as to naskh's technical meaning here oscillated between replacement (ibdāl) and nullification (ibtāl). This despite the fact that the former meaning would make the coordinate clause's "We substitute something better or similar" tautological. To work around this problem exegetes such as Tabarī interpolated hukm (ruling) in place of the word āya, arguing that if a ruling is replaced the preservation or not of its wording in the mushaf is immaterial, thus letting the verse confirm the two main types of naskh. Alternate interpretations were also suggested for the subordinate clause's "cause to be forgotten" (aw nansahā), such as defer or leave. This was primarily motivated by flight from the theologically repugnant idea of prophetic forgetting, with Q.15:9 cited as evidence of its impossibility. Yet verses Q.17:86, Q.18:24, and Q.87:6–7 explicitly endorse its feasibility. Thus "Qur'ān-forgetting is clearly adumbrated in the Qur'ān". Many ahadith also attest to the phenomenon: entire suras which the Muslims had previously recited, claims one, would one morning be discovered to have been completely erased from memory (cf. Abū 'Ubaid al-Qāsim b. Sallām). In the same spirit of "turning lemons into lemonade" which characterizes much else within the theologizing of naskh, divine purpose was attributed to such incidents; Rāzī, for example, speculates that they may have figured among the Prophet's miracles.

Finally, there exist two important linguistically unrelated verses cited in connection with naskh: Q.16:101- "When We substitute one revelation for another"- and Q.13:39- "Allah doth blot out or confirm what He pleaseth". Besides confirming the two major modes of abrogation (i.e. suppression and supersession), the former verse is employed by Shāfi'ī in his theory of abrogation between sources as proof that a Qur'ān verse can only be abrogated by another Qur'ān verse.