"Kill the Dogs" — The Command in Sahih Muslim, the Black Dog, and the Abrogation Debate

The Woman Who Came in from the Desert

Medina, in the years after the Hijra. A woman arrives from the desert, her dog trotting beside her. Before the day ends, that dog is dead — not by accident, not by a stray arrow, but under a standing order. The Companion Jabir ibn Abdillah remembered the scene decades later, and his memory was recorded in the most authenticated hadith collection after Sahih al-Bukhari: "The Messenger of Allah ordered us to kill dogs, so much so that when a woman came from the desert with her dog, we would kill it."

Then, the same report says, the order stopped. It narrowed to one kind of dog only: the jet-black one. And a reason was given that has been debated for fourteen centuries: "for it is a devil."