A Command to Write a Will — and the Report That It Was Lifted

A Command to Write a Will — and the Report That It Was Withdrawn

There is a verse in the second chapter of the Qur'an that reads like a direct order. Death approaches; a person leaves wealth behind; and the text says a bequest must be made — for parents, for near relatives, in fairness. It is phrased as a duty. And yet, open almost any classical work of Qur'anic commentary, and beside this verse you will find a single, heavy word: mansukh — abrogated. Lifted. No longer in force.

How does a command in the Book of God come to be described, by the very scholars who revered that Book, as no longer operative? What replaced it? And on what authority — another verse, or a saying of the Prophet? This is one of the oldest and most instructive disputes in Islamic legal theory, and it turns on a question that reaches far beyond wills and inheritance: what, exactly, is permitted to cancel a verse of the Qur'an?