And Shaykh al-Islām—may Allah have mercy on him—said:

The words of Allah Most High,

“They ask you about the sacred month—about fighting therein,”

contain an apposition of inclusion. The question concerned only fighting during that month. Why, then, was the month mentioned first, when you have said that people mention first what is more important to explain and what concerns them more?

The answer is that they asked only after fighting had occurred during that month and their enemies had denounced them for violating it and profaning its sanctity. Their concern about the month exceeded their concern about the fighting. Indeed, the question arose because of the month’s sanctity, so it was mentioned first. Giving it precedence thus accords with the principle we have stated.

If it is asked: What, then, is the benefit of repeating the explicit word “fighting”? Why not simply use a pronoun and say, “It is a grave matter”? When you say, “I asked him about Zayd: ‘Is he in the house?’” this is more concise than saying, “Is Zayd in the house?”

The answer is that repeating the explicit noun serves an exquisite rhetorical purpose: it attaches the stated judgment to fighting during that month generally. Had a pronoun been used instead—“It is a grave matter”—one might have supposed that the judgment applied exclusively to the particular fighting about which the question was asked. But that is not the case;