Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Qur’ān; Translated and Explained by Muhammad Asad (1980)
those who set their own views against the divine writ 142 are, verily, most deeply in the wrong.
(177) True piety does not consist in turning your faces towards the east or the west 143 – but truly pious is he who believes in God, and the Last Day, and the angels, and revelation,144 and the prophets; and spends his substance – however much he himself may cherish it – upon his near of kin, and the orphans, and the needy, and the wayfarer,145 and the beggars, and for the freeing of human beings from bondage;146 and is constant in prayer, and renders the purifying dues; and [truly pious are] they who keep their promises whenever they promise, and are patient in misfortune and hardship and in time of peril: it is they that have proved themselves true, and it is they, they who are conscious of God.
(178) O you who have attained to faith! Just retribution is ordained for you in cases of killing: the free for the free, and the slave for the slave, and the woman for the
142 Lit., “who hold discordant views about the divine writ” – i.e., either suppressing or rejecting parts of it, or denying its divine origin altogether (Rāzī).
143 Thus, the Qurʾān stresses the principle that mere compliance with outward forms does not fulfil the requirements of piety. The reference to the turning of one’s face in prayer in this or that direction flows from the passages which dealt, a short while ago, with the question of the qiblah.
144 In this context, the term “revelation” (al-kitāb) carries, according to most of the commentators, a generic significance: it refers to the fact of divine revelation as such. As regards belief in angels, it is postulated here because it is through these spiritual beings or forces (belonging to the realm of al-ghayb, i.e., the reality which is beyond the reach of human perception) that God reveals His will to the prophets and, thus, to mankind at large.
145 The expression ibn as-sabīl (lit., “son of the road”) denotes any person who is far from his home, and especially one who, because of this circumstance, does not have sufficient means of livelihood at his disposal (cf. Lane IV, 1302). In its wider sense it describes a person who, for any reason whatsoever, is unable to return home either temporarily or permanently: for instance, a political exile or refugee.
146 Ar-raqabah (of which ar-riqāb is the plural) denotes, literally, “the neck”, and signifies also the whole of a human person. Metonymically, the expression fi ’r-riqāb denotes “in the cause of freeing human beings from bondage”, and applies to both the ransoming of captives and the freeing of slaves. By including this kind of expenditure within the essential acts of piety, the Qurʾān implies that the freeing of people from bondage – and, thus, the abolition of slavery – is one of the social objectives of Islam. At the time of the revelation of the Qurʾān, slavery was an established institution throughout the world, and its sudden abolition would have been economically impossible. In order to obviate this difficulty, and at the same time to bring about an eventual abolition of all slavery, the Qurʾān ordains in 8:67 that henceforth only captives taken in a just war (jihād) may be kept as slaves. But even with regard to persons enslaved in this or – before the revelation of 8:67 – in any other way, the Qurʾān stresses the great merit inherent in the freeing of slaves, and stipulates it as a means of atonement for various transgressions (see, e.g., 4:92, 5:89, 58:3). In addition, the Prophet emphatically stated on many occasions that, in the sight of God, the unconditional freeing of a human being from bondage is among the most praiseworthy acts which a Muslim could perform. (For a critical discussion and analysis of all the authentic Traditions bearing on this problem, see Nayl al-Awṭār VI, 199 ff.)
