Naskh (Abrogation): When Allah Changed His Mind, It Was Always to Solve Muhammad's Sexual Desires or Political Crises

What Is Naskh?

In Islamic theology, Naskh (النسخ) means abrogation, i.e., the cancellation or replacement of one Quranic verse by another revealed later. The doctrine acknowledges that Allah issued a ruling, then changed it. Muslims accept this as part of divine wisdom, arguing that God reveals rules gradually, adjusting them to suit the needs of a developing community.

The Quran itself acknowledges this process:

(Quran 2:106): "We do not abrogate a verse or cause it to be forgotten except that We bring forth one better than it or similar to it. Do you not know that Allah is over all things competent?"

(Quran 16:101): "And when We substitute a verse in place of a verse, and Allah is most knowing of what He sends down, they say: You are but an inventor of lies. But most of them do not know."

The doctrine of Naskh is not invented by critics of Islam. It is confirmed by the Quran itself and elaborated in enormous detail by Muslim scholars over fourteen centuries. What critics have always asked, however, is a simple question, i.e., if Allah is omniscient, why did He need to change His mind?

How Many Abrogations Are There?

Muslim scholars have disagreed dramatically on this question, and their disagreement is itself revealing. Some classical scholars counted only a handful of abrogations. Others counted over 500. The medieval scholar Ibn al-Jawzi listed 247. Al-Suyuti, one of the most influential classical scholars, documented 21 clear abrogations but acknowledged many more disputed cases. Shah Waliullah of Delhi, writing in the 18th century, tried to reduce the number to just 5.

This enormous disagreement about how many verses of their own holy book have been cancelled is significant. It reveals that Ilm al-Naskh, the science of abrogation, is not an objective discipline producing consistent results. Like Ilm al-Hadith, it is a field where scholars reached contradictory conclusions using the same methodology, because the methodology was never truly objective. It was always shaped by what conclusion a particular scholar needed to reach.

The Standard Islamic Defence of Naskh and Why It Fails

Muslim scholars offer three main defences of abrogation.

The gradual revelation defence holds that Allah revealed rules in stages, suited to the developing maturity of the early Muslim community. Just as a doctor adjusts a patient's prescription as their condition changes, Allah adjusted his rulings as circumstances evolved.

The mercy defence holds that some abrogations replaced harsh rulings with more lenient ones, demonstrating divine compassion.

The wisdom defence holds that Allah in his infinite wisdom knew that certain rulings would only be appropriate for specific times and circumstances, and abrogating them was a pre-planned adjustment rather than a mistake.

These defences have been repeated for centuries and many Muslims find them satisfying. But they all share one critical weakness. They require us to accept that an omniscient God, who knows all things across all time, repeatedly issued rulings that needed to be corrected shortly afterward, and that each correction happened to align perfectly with the specific political, military, social, or personal problem Muhammad was facing at that exact moment.

More importantly, the gradual revelation defence only works as an explanation when the direction of change is consistent, moving steadily from easy to strict as the community matures, or from strict to lenient as a sign of mercy. But many abrogations documented in this article show neither pattern. They show a reactive pattern, i.e., a ruling is issued, people protest or rebel, and a new ruling immediately appears that gives them exactly what they demanded. That is not divine pedagogy. That is a human leader backing down under pressure.

The Three-Feature Pattern That Exposes the Truth

When the full record of Quranic abrogation is examined systematically, three consistent features emerge across every case.

First, the trigger is always a human problem. Every significant abrogation was preceded by a specific, identifiable crisis, i.e., a military defeat, a failed political alliance, a personal desire, a public embarrassment, or a threat to Muhammad's authority. The new verse always appeared after the crisis, never before it.

Second, the new verse always solves Muhammad's immediate problem. If abrogation was genuinely driven by timeless divine wisdom gradually unfolding, we would expect to find at least some cases where the new verse created a new difficulty for Muhammad, or failed to resolve the immediate crisis, or addressed a problem that had not yet arisen. We find no such cases.

Third, the timeline always matches. The new verse does not arrive years before the problem or years after. It arrives during the crisis or immediately after. An omniscient God who pre-plans everything has no reason to time revelations so precisely to match earthly events. A human author responding to real-time pressures has every reason to do so.

The case studies that follow demonstrate this pattern across four entirely different domains, i.e., military management, daily law, political strategy, and divine omniscience. No single case proves the argument on its own. The cumulative pattern across all four does.

Case Study 1: Allah Did Not Know His Own Soldiers' Capacity (Quran 8:65-66)

The Abrogation

Before the Battle of Badr, when it became clear that the Meccan army significantly outnumbered the Muslims, Muhammad issued the following Quranic verse to encourage his companions:

(Quran 8:65): O Prophet, exhort the believers to fight. If among you there are twenty patient ones, they will overcome two hundred. And if among you there are a hundred, they will overcome a thousand disbelievers, because they are a people who do not understand.

The ratio here is unambiguous, i.e., one Muslim is equivalent to ten disbelievers. This was presented as a divine command and a divine guarantee.

The companions were terrified. They were being told to face an army ten times their size, and they protested loudly. In response, Muhammad claimed the immediate abrogation of that verse and revealed a replacement:

(Quran 8:66): Now Allah has lightened the burden from you, and He has come to know that in you there is weakness. So if there are from you a hundred steadfast ones, they will overcome two hundred. And if there are from you a thousand, they will overcome two thousand, by the permission of Allah.

The ratio dropped from 1:10 to 1:2, reduced by eighty percent within the same sitting, in direct response to companion protest. The classical scholar Qurtubi records in his commentary on these two verses:

Abu Dawud narrated from Ibn Abbas, who said: This verse was revealed, and this command was difficult and burdensome for the Muslims. Then the command for alleviation was revealed.

This sequence already raises a serious question about divine omniscience. If Allah knew from eternity that the companions could not sustain a 1:10 ratio, why issue that command in the first place? Why put the companions through the fear and the protest before adjusting? The only coherent answer is that the original verse was issued by a human who misjudged his audience's reaction, then corrected himself under pressure.

The Linguistic Proof of Human Authorship

The problem in verse 8:66 goes deeper than the abrogation itself. The Arabic phrase at the heart of the verse is:

وَعَلِمَ أَنَّ فِيكُمْ ضَعْفًا

Translated literally, this means "and He has come to know that in you there is weakness."

The verb عَلِمَ (alima) in Arabic describes the acquisition of new knowledge, i.e., becoming aware of something previously unknown. Applied to Allah, it directly contradicts the Islamic doctrine that Allah is Al-Alim, the All-Knowing, who possesses complete and unchanging knowledge of all things from the beginning of creation.

Islamic theology holds explicitly that Allah's knowledge does not increase or develop over time, because He already knows everything. There is no moment at which He "comes to know" something He did not know before. Yet that is precisely what the Arabic of this verse says.

Modern Muslim translators have recognized this problem and attempted to solve it through mistranslation. Common distorted renderings include "He knew that in you there is weakness" and "He has known there is weakness in you." All of these change the tense and meaning of the Arabic verb to remove the implication of newly acquired knowledge. They are grammatically incorrect translations of the original Arabic.

If Allah truly knew from eternity that the companions were too weak to face a 1:10 ratio, He would never have issued that command in verse 8:65. The fact that verse 8:66 says He "came to know" of their weakness is a direct admission that He did not know it before. The most parsimonious explanation is that a human author wrote verse 8:65, misjudged the companions' reaction, and then wrote verse 8:66 to walk back the earlier demand, using the word alima to describe his own updated understanding of the situation.

Case Study 2: Allah Learns Through Trial and Error

The following case studies all share the same structure. A ruling is issued, it proves unworkable or provokes protest, and a new ruling immediately appears resolving the problem. Each case documents a different domain of Islamic law.

Zihar: Allah Endorses a Foolish Custom, Then Reverses Under Pressure

During the era of pre-Islamic Arab ignorance, there existed a custom called Zihar. If a man compared his wife to his mother's back, it was treated as an instant and permanent divorce. It was a foolish and cruel practice inherited from pagan Arabia.

When Islam emerged, Muhammad continued to endorse this custom rather than abolishing it from the start. The problem arose when a woman named Khuwaylah came to Muhammad, furious, because her husband had pronounced Zihar against her. She protested repeatedly. Muhammad initially dismissed her, telling her that her husband had made her unlawful to him and she should accept it.

Only when she refused to leave and continued pressing him did Muhammad claim a new revelation abrogating Zihar:

(Sunan Abu Dawud 2214): Narrated Khuwaylah, daughter of Malik ibn Tha'labah: My husband, Aws ibn as-Samit, pronounced the words "You are like my mother." So I came to the Apostle of Allah complaining to him about my husband. The Apostle disputed with me and said: "Remain dutiful to Allah; he is your cousin." I continued until the Quranic verse came down (Quran 58:1-4): "Allah has indeed heard the speech of the woman who is disputing with you concerning her husband."

The question this sequence raises is unanswerable within an omniscience framework. If Allah is truly perfect and all-knowing, why did He endorse Zihar in the first place? Why did He not prohibit this cruel and foolish practice from the very beginning of Islam, before Khuwaylah had to suffer under it and engage in a prolonged dispute to get it changed? The verse itself boasts that "Allah is All Hearing, All Seeing" while describing a situation in which Allah apparently needed to watch the entire drama of a woman's distress before acting. A sensible omniscient God would have prohibited Zihar before the first victim was created, not after watching one suffer.

Allah Did Not Know Muslims Could Not Control Themselves During Ramadan Nights

Initially, Muhammad prohibited sexual relations with wives during the nights of Ramadan entirely. This command proved impossible to enforce. Even prominent companions including Umar ibn al-Khattab secretly violated it. When the violations became too widespread to ignore, Muhammad claimed a new revelation permitting what he had previously forbidden:

(Quran 2:187): It is made lawful for you to have sexual relations with your wives on the night of fasting. Allah knows that you used to deceive yourselves, so He turned to you and forgave you. So now you are allowed to have sexual relations with them.

Ibn Kathir records under this verse:

During the month of Ramadan, after Muslims would pray Isha, they would not touch their women and food until the next night. Then some Muslims, including Umar bin al-Khattab, touched their wives and had some food during Ramadan after Isha. They complained to Allah's Messenger. Then Allah sent down this verse.

The verse itself contains a remarkable admission. Allah acknowledges that the original prohibition failed, that Muslims broke it secretly, and that the ruling is now being adjusted in response. If Allah had genuinely known from eternity that the prohibition would be universally violated, he would never have issued it in the first place. The sequence is only explicable if a human author issued an unrealistic rule, observed that it was being widely broken, and then revised it to reflect reality.

Liaan: Allah's Four-Witness Rule Collapses Under Male Companion Protest

Muhammad introduced the requirement that accusations of adultery require four male eyewitnesses who personally observed penetration. Failure to produce four witnesses would result in the accusers being lashed eighty times for false accusation, even if they were telling the truth. This ruling emerged in the context of the IFK incident, where Muhammad needed to protect his wife Aisha from accusations.

The problem arose when male companions discovered their own wives in compromising situations. They could not produce four witnesses and faced being lashed eighty times for telling the truth. A companion named Sa'd ibn Ubada came to Muhammad and said:

(Sahih Muslim 1498c): If I were to find with my wife a man, should I not touch him before bringing four witnesses? Allah's Messenger said: Yes. He said: By no means. By Him Who has sent you with the Truth, I would hasten with my sword to him before that.

The male companions were on the verge of rebellion. Muhammad could not afford to lose their loyalty. He then claimed a new revelation creating the exception of Li'an, which allowed a husband to accuse his wife of adultery simply by swearing four times in Allah's name, without any witnesses and without being lashed for the accusation. This right was not extended to wives.

The sequence is transparent. The four-witness rule was created to protect Muhammad's wife. It then created a practical crisis among male companions. A new ruling appeared that solved their specific problem while preserving the original disadvantage to women, who could not rebel against Muhammad and whose interests therefore did not need to be accommodated.

Allah Ordered the Killing of All Dogs, Then Reversed Four Times Under Protest

The command regarding dogs went through four distinct stages of revision, which is perhaps the clearest single demonstration in the entire Quran and Hadith literature of a legislator adjusting rules in response to popular pressure rather than issuing timeless divine wisdom.

Stage 1: Muhammad commanded the killing of all dogs without exception.

(Sahih Muslim 1572): Allah's Messenger ordered us to kill all dogs, and we carried out this order so much so that we also killed the dog coming with a woman from the desert.

Stage 2: After public outcry, the ruling was revised to permit keeping dogs for hunting and livestock protection while maintaining the directive to kill all other dogs.

Stage 3: After further protests, the directive was revised again to require killing only black dogs, which were declared to be devils.

(Sunan Abu Dawud 2845): The Prophet said: Were dogs not a species of creature I should command that they all be killed; but kill every pure black one.

Stage 4: After continuing opposition to killing black dogs, the ruling was revised once more to require killing only jet-black dogs with two spots on their eyes.

(Sahih Muslim 1572): Allah's Apostle forbade their killing. He said: It is your duty to kill the jet-black dog having two spots on the eyes, for it is a devil.

The Hadith itself records Muhammad's bewilderment at the ongoing protests:

(Sahih Muslim 1573a): Allah's Messenger said: What is the trouble with them? How are dogs a nuisance to them?

Four rounds of revision on a single ruling, each one prompted by protest and each one moving in the direction of leniency, is not the profile of divine wisdom. It is the profile of a human legislator repeatedly misjudging public tolerance and adjusting accordingly. An omniscient God issuing timeless divine law has no reason to go through four iterations of trial and error on the question of which dogs should be killed.

Charity Before Private Consultation: A Rule That Backfired Immediately

Muhammad became overwhelmed by the constant questioning from companions who wanted private consultations. To reduce the number of questions, he introduced a new Quranic requirement, i.e., before anyone could speak to Muhammad privately, they had to give charity first.

(Quran 58:12): O believers, when you wish to speak to the Messenger in private, give charity beforehand.

The result was immediate and the opposite of what Muhammad intended. The companions valued their money more than they wanted answers. They stopped consulting Muhammad entirely, and he began losing influence over them. He then claimed an abrogating verse within the same passage:

(Quran 58:13): Is it that you are afraid of spending sums in charity before your private consultation? If you do not do so, and Allah forgives you, then at least establish regular prayer, practice regular charity, and obey Allah and His Messenger.

Ibn Abbas records that many people refrained from asking questions after the charity verse was revealed, and that Allah then revealed the following verse lifting the restriction. If Allah had genuinely known in advance that the charity requirement would cause the companions to stop consulting Muhammad entirely, he would never have introduced it. The sequence only makes sense as a human author trying a policy, watching it fail immediately, and reversing it.

The Ten-to-Five Breastfeeding Revision

Muhammad created a practical problem by declaring that adopted sons become non-Mahram to their foster mothers upon reaching adulthood, forcing them out of the household. He also strictly forbade interaction between women and non-Mahram men in everyday life. This created enormous practical difficulties for families.

His solution was to rule that a woman could breastfeed an adult man to make him her Mahram, removing the restriction on interaction. The number of required breastfeedings was initially set at ten. This proved awkward and embarrassing in practice, and the number was later revised down to five.

The question the breastfeeding revision raises is identical to the question raised by every other case in this section, i.e., if Allah knew from eternity that ten breastfeedings was the wrong number, why reveal it in the first place? Why not reveal five from the beginning? The only coherent answer is that there was no divine author setting the number from eternity. There was a human author setting a number, observing the practical reaction, and adjusting it.

Case Study 3: Allah Broke His Own Covenant at the Battle of Hunayn

The Threat That Was Never Enforced

After the Battle of Uhud, in which the Sahabah abandoned their positions and fled, Allah issued a solemn warning in the Quran that any believer who turned his back on the battlefield would earn divine wrath and eternal hellfire:

(Quran 8:15-16): O believers, when you face the disbelievers in battle, do not turn your backs to them. And whoever does so on such an occasion, unless it is a strategic retreat or joining another fighting force, will certainly incur the wrath of Allah, and Hell will be their home. What an evil destination.

This was not a mild suggestion. It was an explicit divine covenant with a specific and severe consequence attached to it.

At the Battle of Hunayn (8 AH), the Sahabah broke this covenant. Despite Muhammad's calls to hold their ground, they fled the battlefield in panic. The Quran itself confirms this without ambiguity:

(Quran 9:25): Allah has already given you victory in many regions and on the day of Hunayn, when your great numbers pleased you, but they did not avail you at all, and the earth was confining for you with its vastness. Then you turned back, fleeing.

According to Allah's own covenant in 8:15-16, every companion who fled at Hunayn had now earned divine wrath and was destined for Hell. Yet instead of enforcing his promise, Allah issued a verse of forgiveness:

(Quran 9:27): Then Allah will accept repentance after that from whom He wills. And Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.

The Quran's own words stand in direct contradiction to each other. Allah promised wrath and Hell for those who fled. The Sahabah fled. Allah then forgave them. The same book that declares "you will never find any change in Allah's way (48:23)" and "who is more faithful to his covenant than Allah (9:111)" contains within its own pages a sequence in which Allah issues a covenant and then does not keep it.

The Repentance Defence and Why It Fails

The most common Muslim response to this argument is straightforward. Allah did not break his covenant. The Sahabah repented sincerely after Hunayn, and Allah's mercy always supersedes his warnings when a sinner genuinely repents. This is consistent throughout the Quran, which repeatedly emphasizes that Allah is Forgiving and Merciful. The forgiveness after Hunayn was therefore not a broken promise but a demonstration of divine mercy in response to genuine repentance.

This defence sounds reasonable at first. But it collapses the moment you apply it to the attribute of divine omniscience, which Islam itself insists upon. If Allah is truly All-Knowing, then before he issued the warning in verse 8:15-16, he already knew with absolute certainty three things simultaneously, i.e., that the Sahabah would flee at Hunayn, that they would then repent, and that he would therefore forgive them. He knew the entire sequence from eternity before a single word of the threat was revealed.

This creates a devastating logical problem. If Allah knew from eternity that the threat would never be enforced because repentance would follow, then why issue the threat at all? A threat that the one issuing it already knows will never be carried out is not a genuine threat. It is theater. It serves no meaningful purpose as a deterrent, because the deterrent was never going to work, and the one issuing it knew this before he issued it.

This problem does not exist if we understand the Quran as the work of a human author. Muhammad issued the threat in 8:15-16 because he genuinely needed his soldiers to hold their ground and he did not know what would happen at future battles. When the Sahabah fled at Hunayn and he could not afford to lose their loyalty by punishing a large and powerful group of companions, he issued the forgiveness verse because the political situation demanded it. A human leader responding to real events in real time would behave exactly this way. An omniscient God with no political pressures and complete foreknowledge of all future events would have no reason to.

Case Study 4: The Qibla Change Exposes Muhammad's Failed Jewish Strategy

The Background

Since Muhammad claimed that his new religion was a continuation of the faith of the Jews and Christians, he initially commanded his followers to pray facing Bayt al-Muqaddas in Jerusalem rather than the Kaaba in Mecca. Upon reaching Medina, Muhammad further adopted many Jewish laws and practices in a deliberate attempt to win the acceptance of the Jewish tribes there. These adoptions included dietary laws modeled on Kosher rules, the prohibition of usury, the eye-for-an-eye principle of legal punishment, ritual purification practices similar to the Jewish Mikvah, and the prohibition of images modeled on Exodus 20:4.

The strategy failed completely. The Jews of Medina examined Muhammad's claims against their own scriptures, found them wanting, and rejected him as a false prophet. The Hadith records Muhammad's frustration with devastating clarity:

(Sahih Bukhari 3941): The Prophet said, "Had only ten Jews believed me, all the Jews would definitely have believed me."

Not even ten Jews accepted him. Muhammad's attempt to position Islam as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy had been definitively rejected.

The Abrogation and Its Timing

At precisely the moment when the Jewish alliance strategy had collapsed beyond recovery, the Qibla changed from Jerusalem back to the Kaaba in Mecca. The timing is not subtle. It tracks Muhammad's political failure with the Jews, not any theological principle.

Muhammad was aware that people would notice the obvious connection between the Jewish rejection and the Qibla change, and would conclude that he had changed the Qibla out of personal anger rather than divine guidance. The Quran addresses these critics directly, and revealingly, calls them fools:

(Quran 2:143-146): The foolish among the people will say, "What has turned them away from their Qibla, which they used to face?" We only appointed the Qibla which you used to face to see who would follow the Messenger and who would turn back on his heels.

This Quranic response raises more problems than it solves. The excuse given is that Allah changed the Qibla twice in order to see who would turn back from Islam. But history does not record a single person who left Islam because of the Qibla change. If the purpose of this double change was to test who would apostatize, and nobody apostatized, then the test achieved nothing. An omniscient God who already knew nobody would leave Islam over the Qibla change would have no reason to perform a test whose outcome He already knew.

The Problem of the Kaaba's Idols

Even the first instance of making the Kaaba a Qibla raises a separate and serious question. At the time Muhammad first commanded prayer toward the Kaaba, the Kaaba contained 360 idols and images of pagan gods. Islamic law prohibits prayer in any space containing images of living creatures. How could Allah direct Muslims to pray toward a structure filled with exactly the kind of idols his own religion declared forbidden?

A genuinely omniscient God would have directed the Qibla toward the Kaaba only after it had been cleared of idols, which happened after the conquest of Mecca in 8 AH. Instead, Muslims were directed to pray toward an idol-filled pagan shrine for years before the conquest. The only coherent explanation is that the choice of Qibla was driven by human political and cultural considerations rather than divine planning. The Kaaba was chosen initially because of its cultural significance to Arab identity, then temporarily abandoned in favor of Jerusalem as part of the Jewish outreach strategy, then restored to the Kaaba once that strategy failed.

Muhammad's Response to the Jewish Rejection

After the Qibla change, Muhammad did not simply move on. He began openly threatening the Jews of Medina with expulsion and confiscation of their property if they refused to accept Islam:

(Sahih Bukhari 3167): The Prophet came out and said, "Let us go to the Jews." He said to them, "If you embrace Islam, you will be safe. You should know that the earth belongs to Allah and His Apostle, and I want to expel you from this land."

This sequence, i.e., adopt Jewish practices to win Jewish acceptance, fail to win Jewish acceptance, change the Qibla away from Jerusalem, and then threaten the Jews with expulsion, is the sequence of a human political leader managing the consequences of a failed diplomatic strategy. It is not the sequence of a prophet receiving timeless divine guidance that was always going to unfold exactly this way regardless of human events.

The Gradual Revelation Defence: A Final Assessment

Before the conclusion, it is worth addressing the gradual revelation defence one final time in light of all the case studies above.

The defence works reasonably well for a small number of abrogations where the direction of change is genuinely progressive, as in the case of the alcohol prohibition, which moved in stages from a partial restriction to a complete ban. That pattern is at least consistent with the idea of a community being prepared gradually for stricter standards.

But the gradual revelation defence fails completely for every case study documented in this article. Consider what the cases above actually show.

The 1:10 ratio was not gradually adjusted downward over years of careful development. It was abrogated within the same sitting in direct response to companion protest. The dog-killing ruling was not progressively refined over time. It went through four iterations of revision, each one prompted by protest and each one moving toward leniency, i.e., exactly the opposite direction the gradual revelation defence predicts. The Ramadan sex prohibition was not a carefully staged test of discipline. It was universally violated, including by prominent companions, and then quietly reversed. The charity-before-consultation rule backfired so immediately that it was reversed within the same Quranic passage. The Qibla changed not in response to any theological development in the community's understanding, but in precise correspondence with the failure of a specific political strategy.

None of these fit the profile of wise gradual revelation. All of them fit the profile of a human legislator issuing rules, observing the consequences, and adjusting when the consequences were undesirable. The gradual revelation defence is a framework that works only when applied selectively to the cases that support it. Applied honestly to the full record, it collapses.

Conclusion: What the Pattern Proves

The doctrine of Naskh was developed by Muslim scholars to explain an uncomfortable feature of their holy book, i.e., it contradicts itself. Their solution was to say that later verses cancel earlier ones, and that this was part of Allah's plan all along.

But this solution creates a larger problem than the one it solves. If Allah planned all along to cancel certain verses, then those cancelled verses were never meant to be permanent divine guidance. They were temporary placeholders, revealed not because they were true for all time but because they were useful for a particular moment. And in every case documented in this article, the moment they were useful for was a moment in Muhammad's personal and political life.

The pattern across all four case studies is identical. A ruling is issued. It creates a specific problem for Muhammad, whether a military crisis, a legal difficulty, a political failure, or a threat to his authority. A new ruling then appears that resolves that specific problem. The new ruling never creates new difficulties for Muhammad. It never fails to resolve the immediate crisis. It never arrives before the problem or after it has already been resolved by other means. It always arrives during the crisis and always solves it exactly.

This is not the profile of divine revelation. It is the profile of a very capable human leader writing his way through a series of crises, adjusting his text as circumstances demanded, and attributing each adjustment to God in order to maintain his authority over his followers.

The Quran's own words about abrogation confirm this reading. Verse 2:106 presents abrogation as Allah bringing forth something "better" to replace what was cancelled. But in case after case, what actually happened was not that a better ruling replaced a good one. What happened was that an unworkable ruling was replaced by a workable one, an unpopular ruling was replaced by a popular one, and a politically damaging ruling was replaced by a politically convenient one. That is not improvement in the divine sense. That is crisis management in the human sense.