Principle Twenty-Six: Legal Rulings in Verses That Contain Qualifications
The rule is that a verse whose wording includes a qualifier does not confer its ruling except when that qualifier is present—save for a few, rare passages. This is a subtle principle, for whenever Allah, in His Book, assigns a ruling to something and then binds it with a qualifier or conditions it upon a stipulation, the ruling remains tied to the very attribute that Allah, exalted be He, has described.
Instances of this in the Quran are beyond counting. Our purpose here is only to mention the exceptions to this rule—those verses about which many exegetes, when commenting on them, say: “This qualifier is not intended.” That phrasing warrants scrutiny, for every single word in the Book of Allah is there by His will because of the benefit it conveys, whether that benefit is evident to the reader or hidden. What the exegetes really mean by saying “not intended” is that the legal ruling itself is not dependent on that qualifier.
Know, then, that Allah the Exalted cites legal rulings, both fundamental and subsidiary, at their loftiest level so that He may set them forth before His servants, revealing their beauty when they are commanded and their repulsiveness when they are forbidden.
When you reflect on the verses that belong to this category, this meaning will become perfectly clear.
One example is His statement: “Whoever calls upon, besides Allah, another god for which he has no evidence…” (al-Muʾminun 23:117). It is already known that anyone who invokes another deity alongside Allah is a disbeliever and that he has absolutely no evidence whatsoever. Allah inserted this qualifier only to highlight the atrociousness of polytheism and of the polytheist, and to show that shirk possesses neither textual nor rational proof in any way, and that the polytheist has nothing that could possibly justify it.
The benefit of this qualifier, then, is to deliver a forceful denunciation of the polytheists for their obstinacy and their rejection of both the scriptural and rational proofs,