2/106 — Abrogation
"If We remove the ruling of a verse or cause it to be forgotten, We bring one better than it or its like. Do you not know that God has power over all things?"
نَسَخَ — root n-s-kh: to remove a thing, to erase; and at the same time to copy, to transfer (nuskha, istinsākh come from here). The two senses together are interesting: both to lift and to transfer. What is lifted does not vanish; another takes its place.
How widely the word "abrogation" is to be understood is one of the most exaggerated matters in the history of exegesis.
In the early period the word "naskh" was used very widely: one verse's specifying another (narrowing its scope), qualifying it, or the limiting of a general principle by a particular ruling were all called "naskh" as well. Because of this wide use, some old lists counted hundreds of "abrogated verses".
As later scholars narrowed the concept, these numbers dropped rapidly. The numbers reached by scholars who use the term in its technical sense — a ruling being wholly lifted and another put in its place — are very small; some have brought them down below twenty, some to the fingers of one hand.
The stance adopted in this commentary: a claim of abrogation can be advanced only where two verses are genuinely irreconcilable and where an order in time can be established between them. If two verses can be reconciled, reconciling them is preferred to claiming abrogation. This is also the measure I relied on in assessing the claim of abrogation at verse 62 of the sūra.
The verse does not present the change of ruling as an arbitrary intervention; it sets down a qualification: "We bring one better than it or its like." The change, that is, is always towards what is equal or better.
The principle underlying this is one that appears elsewhere in the sūra: a ruling is adjusted to what the one addressed can bear. The gradual prohibition of wine and the gradual granting of permission to fight are always explained by this logic. A doctor's changing the dose in the course of a treatment is required by the process, not by the illness.