Al-Barā’ ibn Āzib said—as reported in the two Sahīh collections—“They are the Jews.” Then Allah, glorified be He, said:

“Say, ‘To Allah belong the east and the west. He guides whom He wills to a straight path.’”

He thus mentioned that abrogation depends on the divine will and that the later command may be more beneficial and conducive to good. His words, “He guides whom He wills to a straight path,” explain what is more beneficial and conducive to good, while “whom He wills” refers the matter back to His will.

All the speculative theologians rely on some aspect of this verse when they say that religious obligations depend either on divine will alone, as some maintain, or on benefit, as others maintain. On either view, abrogation is possible.

Then He, glorified be He, demonstrated that abrogation had occurred through the Torah’s prohibition of things previously lawful: He had made certain things lawful for Israel, then prohibited them in the Torah. This permission had been established by divine law through a pronouncement. They had not merely deemed those things permissible by retaining their original status, such that withdrawing that permission would not constitute abrogation, as some of them claim. He commanded that the Torah be brought concerning this matter. This is indeed what we have found in it, as converts to Islam from among the People of the Book have related to us on more than one occasion.

The same applies to debating Sabian philosophers, polytheists, and others like them. For if a Sabian philosopher cites the statements of the ancient Sabian philosophers—which were rendered and translated into Arabic—and presents them either unaltered or in the form their later followers gave them through additions or omissions, expansion or abridgment, rejection of some of their content, and the introduction of ideas