comes across a narration that someone claims has been abrogated yet does not find it recorded in this booklet, let him realize the flimsiness of that assertion. I have examined the matter and found that it contains only twenty-one hadiths.

Moreover, the meticulous scholar Ibn al-Qayyim said in Iʿlām 3/458: “The cases of abrogation found in the hadith literature upon which the entire ummah is agreed do not even reach ten narrations—indeed, not even half that number!”

I say: he then listed those narrations, and none of the previously cited hadiths appears among them. The claim that they might have been abrogated is therefore shown to be weak—let alone the certainty that they were. Ibn al-Athīr likewise hinted at the frailty of this allegation in al-Nihāyah when, commenting on the aforementioned hadith of Asmāʾ, he wrote: “It has been said that this occurred before abrogation, for the permissibility of gold for women has been established.” The phrase “it has been said (qīla)” is, as is well known, a linguistic marker of doubt.

The eminent scholar Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAlī ibn ʿAlāʾ al-Ḥanafī, after quoting the foregoing words of Ibn al-Jawzī, remarked: “This is precisely what sound reason testifies to as true, provided it is free from…"