Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Qur’ān; Translated and Explained by Muhammad Asad (1980)
bids you to sacrifice a cow.”53
They said: “Dost thou mock at us?”
He answered: “I seek refuge with God against being so ignorant!”54
(68) Said they: “Pray on our behalf unto thy Sustainer that He make clear to us what she is to be like.” [Moses] replied: “Behold, He says it is to be a cow neither old nor immature, but of an age in-between.
Do, then, what you have been bidden!”
(69) Said they: “Pray on our behalf unto thy Sustainer that He make clear to us what her colour should be.”
[Moses] answered: “Behold, He says it is to be a yellow cow, bright of hue, pleasing to the beholder.”
(70) Said they: “Pray on our behalf unto thy Sustainer that He make clear to us what she is to be like, for to us all cows resemble one another; and then, if God so wills, we shall truly be guided aright!”
(71) [Moses] answered: “Behold, He says it is to be a cow not broken-in to plough the earth or to water the crops, free of fault, without markings of any other colour.”
Said they: “At last thou hast brought out the truth!” – and thereupon they sacrificed her, although they had almost left it undone.55
53 As is evident from verse 72, the story related in this and the subsequent passages almost certainly refers to the Mosaic law which ordains that in certain cases of unresolved murder a cow should be sacrificed, and the elders of the town or village nearest to the place of the murder should wash their hands over it and declare, “Our hands have not shed this blood, neither have our eyes seen it” – whereupon the community would be absolved of collective responsibility. For the details of this Old Testament ordinance, see Deuteronomy xxi, 1–9.
54 Lit., “lest I be one of the ignorant”. The imputation of mockery was obviously due to the fact that Moses promulgated the above ordinance in very general terms, without specifying any details.
55 I.e., their obstinate desire to obtain closer and closer definitions of the simple commandment revealed to them through Moses had made it almost impossible for them to fulfil it. In his commentary on this passage, Ṭabarī quotes the following remark of Ibn ʿAbbās: “If [in the first instance] they had sacrificed any cow chosen by themselves, they would have fulfilled their duty; but they made it complicated for themselves, and so God made it complicated for them.” A similar view has been expressed, in the same context, by Zamakhsharī. It would appear that the moral of this story points to an important problem of all (and, therefore, also of Islamic) religious jurisprudence: namely, the inadvisability of trying to elicit additional details in respect of any religious law that had originally been given in general terms – for, the more numerous and multiform such details become, the more complicated and rigid becomes the law. This point has been acutely grasped by Rashīd Riḍāʾ, who says in his commentary on the above Qur’anic passage (see Manār I, 345 f.): “Its lesson is that one should not pursue one’s [legal] inquiries in such a way as to make laws more complicated … This was how the early generations [of Muslims] visualized the problem. They did not make things complicated for themselves – and so, for them, the religious law (dīn) was natural, simple and liberal in its straightforwardness. But those who came later added to it [certain other] injunctions which they had deduced by means of their own reasoning (ijtihād); and they multiplied those [additional] injunctions to such an extent that the religious law became a heavy burden on the community.” For the sociological reason why the genuine ordinances of Islamic Law – that is, those which have been prima facie laid down as such in the Qurʾān and the teachings of the Prophet – are
