the Two Ṣaḥīḥs (1) in the narration of Ibn ʿAbbās, where ʿUmar ibn al-Khattāb said: “Among what Allah revealed was the verse of stoning. We recited it, absorbed it, and understood it well. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ carried out stoning and we stoned after him. I fear that, as time passes, someone may say, ‘By Allah, we do not find stoning in the Book of Allah,’ and so they will go astray by abandoning an obligation Allah revealed. Stoning is, in truth, found in the Book of Allah and is due upon every previously married man or woman who commits fornication, once the evidence is established—whether by witnesses, pregnancy, or confession.”
The wisdom behind abrogating the wording while leaving the ruling is to test the ummah’s readiness to act upon a command whose wording they no longer read in the Quran, and thereby to affirm their faith in all that Allah has sent down. This is the opposite of what the Jews did when they attempted to conceal the text on stoning in the Torah.
Third: instances in which both the ruling and the wording are abrogated, such as the abrogation of the requirement of ten sucklings mentioned earlier in the report of ʿĀʾishah.
Abrogation, viewed in terms of the text that does the abrogating, falls into four categories:
- Quran abrogated by Quran; the two verses on steadfastness are a clear example.
- Quran abrogated by Sunnah; I have found no sound example of this.
- Sunnah abrogated by Quran; for example, facing Jerusalem—established by the Sunnah—was replaced by facing the Kaʿbah through Allah’s words: “So turn your face toward the Sacred Mosque, and wherever you are, turn your faces toward it” (Q 2:144, 149-150).
- Sunnah abrogated by Sunnah, illustrated by his ﷺ statement: “I had previously forbidden you…"