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Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 11 (2011)
non-revelation account was followed by a variant tradition describing
khudhū ʿan-nī as divinely revealed words.
Al-Muḥāsibī (d. 243/857–58) cites an awkwardly abridged version of
the non-revelation tradition. 34 It is possible that al-Muḥāsibī knew the
revelation version as it appears in Abū ʿUbayd’s treatise on abrogation,
but he would not cite it because he preferred to justify the stoning
penalty by the Qurʾān. On two occasions, al-Muḥāsibī refers to the
stoning verse (āyat al-rajm): al-shaykh u wa-l-shaykhat u idhā zanayā farjumū-humā
l-battat a (The mature male and female, if they commit zinā,
stone them outright). 35 The verse is said to have been part of the Qurʾān;
its script was eventually withdrawn, but its words remained in the hearts
(rufiʿa rasm u -hu min al-kitāb wa-lam yurfaʿ ḥafẓ u -hu min al-qulūb). 36
The sunna confirms the ordinance of the removed verse (thabata l-rajm u
bi-l-sunna). 37
Al-Muḥāsibī’s attempt to reconcile the sunna and the Qurʾān in the
issue of rajm is not free from contradictions. As noted by Melchert, al-
Muḥāsibī “implicitly considers the precept and the example of the
Prophet…to have a lesser rank than the Qurʾān”. 38 Nevertheless, he
could not disregard the existence of the dual-penalty tradition, which is
legally more comprehensive than the stoning verse. Note the clear legal
conditions set out in the prophetic tradition: sexual transgressors are
divided into two categories—adulterers and fornicators—who incur
separate penalties. Conversely, the stoning verse refers to a single
category of sexual transgressors, shaykh and shaykha. These are
ambiguous terms that may easily foster legal arbitrariness: it is difficult
to define the age whence one becomes shaykh and the relation between
shaykh and bikr is not necessarily antithetic. Moreover, the stoning verse
does not offer a clue on how to punish transgressors who fall outside the
age group meant by shaykh. Al-Muḥāsibī offers a twofold solution to the
latter problem. In his view, Qurʾān 24:2 defines the punishment of the
34 u an u i u
Khudhū ʿan-nī qad jaʿala l-lāh la–hunna sabīl al-bikr bi-l-bikr jald
miʾat in wa-rajm un bi-l-ḥijāra (Al-Muḥāsibī, al-ʿAql wa-Fahm al-Qurʾān, ed.
Ḥusayn al-Quwatlī [Beirut: Dār al-Kindī wa-Dār al-Fikr, 1398/1978], 455). This
version, which literally imposes stoning upon the fornicators, most likely resulted
from an unskillful abridgement, whereby al-Muḥāsibī (or a later transmitter of his
work) removed all but the opening and the concluding clauses of the matn.
35 Al-Muḥāsibī, al-ʿAql, 398, 455.
36 Ibid., 398.
37 Ibid., 401.
38 Melchert, “Qurʾānic Abrogation”, 85.