“this was revealed before the command to fight,” such a claim would first require proof of that chronology, and then proof that the subsequent command to fight abrogated the verse. Neither point has been substantiated, and it is in fact well known that the claim is erroneous.

Surat al-Baqarah is entirely Medinan, and it contains more than one verse that commands jihad—among them, “Fighting has been prescribed for you” (2:216). How, then, can anyone say that it was revealed before the order to fight?

Further, the reason for the verse’s revelation shows that it came down some time after the command to wage jihad. Scholars have recorded four accounts of its occasion of revelation, all of which indicate this. The most famous is what Ibn ʿAbbās and others related:

A woman from the Anṣār who had repeatedly lost her children—none of them lived—would vow that if a child of hers survived she would make him a Jew, for the Jews possessed a Book, unlike the idolaters, and were therefore closer to knowledge and religion than the pagans. When Banū al-Naḍīr were expelled, among them were some of those children of the Anṣār, so they said