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Islam Files, No. 5 — The Meccan Verses Say There Is No Compulsion in Religion. The Medinan Verses, Which the Classical Law Treats as Later, Say to Fight Those Who Do Not Believe.

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The Complaints Department

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Islam Files, No. 5 — The Meccan Verses Say There Is No Compulsion in Religion. The Medinan Verses, Which the Classical Law Treats as Later, Say to Fight Those Who Do Not Believe.
Photo by Aoun Abbas / Unsplash

Qur’an 2:256: “There is no compulsion in religion.” It is the verse on the pamphlet. Qur’an 109: “To you your religion, and to me mine.” Meccan, early, recited when the preacher had no army.

Qur’an 9:5: kill the polytheists wherever you find them. Qur’an 9:29: fight those who do not believe until they pay the jizya. Qur’an 47:4: when you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks. These are Medinan, later, recited when he did.

Classical tafsir did not leave the two sets sitting side by side as a paradox for undergraduates. It developed naskh, abrogation. The later verse specifies or cancels the earlier one. Al-Suyuti and the standard handbooks count the sword verse among the texts that overtook the earlier restraint. The legal schools then wrote the result into the chapters on jihad, jizya, and apostasy. A modern speaker who says “context” is not discovering a new method. He is asking to stop the clock in 620 and throw away 630.

The biography on which that clock depends is the same late sira audited in File No. 4. If the chronology of revelation is itself a ninth-century reconstruction, the neat Meccan-then-Medinan ladder is a literary device. If the chronology is accepted, the ladder is a doctrine: tolerance when weak, jurisdiction when strong. Either way the pamphlet verse is not the governing verse in the books that trained the judges.

The franchise still prints both. It puts 2:256 in English on the folding table. It puts 9:29 in the chapter the qadi actually uses. That is not a misunderstanding. It is a filing system.

Filed from the primary texts and the public record:

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