What they had newly invented—the punishment of flogging and blackening the face—flatly opposed God’s unequivocal command. They said among themselves, “If he rules for you with flogging and blackening, accept it, and you will have an excuse before God on the Day of Resurrection that a prophet gave this verdict on your behalf. But if he rules for you with stoning, beware of accepting it from him.”

God, exalted be He, condemned them for this corrupt intention, which was driven only by base motives and the following of caprice, not by the true religion. He said:

“How is it that they come to you for judgment when they have the Torah, wherein is God’s judgment? Then they turn away after that; such people are not believers. Indeed, We sent down the Torah containing guidance and light; by it the prophets who had submitted judged for the Jews, as did the rabbis and the scholars, for they were entrusted with the preservation of God’s Book …” (al-Mā’idah 43–44).

For this reason, when the Prophet ﷺ ruled that they be stoned, he said, “O Allah, I am the first to revive Your command after they had allowed it to die.” He asked them what had driven them to this, and why they had abandoned God’s ordinance that was in their very hands. They replied, “Adultery has become widespread among our nobles, and we could not enforce the penalty upon them, though we used to stone those of our lower ranks who committed it. So we said, ‘Come, let us adopt a halfway measure that we can apply to both high and low alike,’ and we agreed upon flogging and blackening the face.”

This is one example of their distortion, alteration, tampering, and false interpretation. They tampered only with the meanings, while the wording about stoning remained in their scripture, as the sound ḥadīth indicates. Hence some scholars said that their alteration affected only the meanings, whereas the wording is still extant and stands as proof against them; for had they upheld everything in their Book, it would have led them to embrace the truth and follow the Messenger Muḥammad ﷺ, as the Exalted said:

“Those who follow the Messenger, the unlettered Prophet, whom they find written with them in the Torah and the Gospel: he enjoins upon them what is right, forbids them from what is wrong, makes lawful for them the good things, forbids them the vile things, and removes from them their burden and the shackles that were upon them …” (the verse).

He also said: “If only they had upheld the Torah and the Gospel and what was sent down to them from their Lord, they would surely have eaten from above them and from beneath their feet …” (al-Mā’idah 66).

And He said: “Say, People of the Scripture, you stand on nothing until you uphold the Torah, the Gospel, and what has been sent down to you from your Lord …” (al-Mā’idah 68).

This view—that the alteration occurred only in the meanings and not in the wording—was reported by al-Bukhārī from Ibn ʿAbbās at the end of his Ṣaḥīḥ, and he transmitted it without rebuttal. The distinguished scholar Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī likewise cited it in his Tafsīr from the majority of theologians. (4) Jurists of the Ḥanafī school held that a person in a state of major ritual impurity is not permitted to touch the Torah while lacking ablution; al-Ḥaṇāṭī mentioned the same view from some adherents of al-Shāfiʿī, though it is exceedingly unusual. Other scholars adopted a middle position between these two views, among them our teacher, the Imām, the erudite scholar Abū’l-ʿAbbās Ibn Taymiyyah—may God sanctify his soul—who said: “As for those who maintain that it …”