He then gave the iqāmah and led the noon (ẓuhr) prayer; after that he gave the iqāmah again and led the mid-afternoon (ʿaṣr) prayer, offering nothing in between. Thereafter the Messenger of Allah—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—mounted and went on to the standing-place, and the narrator related the remainder of the report.
The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, declared: “Every matter of the Age of Ignorance is laid beneath my feet—abolished.”
This statement encompasses all the customs and acts of devotion they practised, such as their rallying cries, “O for So-and-so!” “O for So-and-so!” their festivals, and every similar affair of theirs.
After that comprehensive ruling he specifically mentioned blood and wealth that had been deemed permissible on the basis of Jāhiliyyah beliefs—usurious sums still owed by certain people, or a person slain in the pre-Islamic period before either the killer had embraced Islam or the slain person had embraced Islam. He singled these out either to give them special emphasis after the general statement, or because the ruling here was the cancellation of particular claims thought to be legitimate rights, not the abrogation of their general social practices. Hence such claims are not covered by the first, general wording—just as debts arising from a valid sale, a loan, and the like were not included.
Likewise, the phrase does not cover practices from the Jāhiliyyah that Allah confirmed in Islam, such as the pilgrimage rites, the blood money for a slain person being one hundred (camels), the procedure of oath-taking (qasāmah), and similar matters; for the understood meaning of “the affair of the Jāhiliyyah” is whatever they observed that Islam did not ratify, and thus it applies only to