IBRAHIM MAQARE, YOU ARE COMPLETELY WRONG Muḥṣanāt Does NOT Only Mean “Married Women,” and Your Translation of the Zina Verse Collapses Under Basic Quranic Arabic! Maqare, you are a professor of language, not an Islamic scholar or specialist in tafsir and fiqh. In your submission you treated the word al-muḥṣanāt as if it exclusively means “married women” and used that reading to argue that the stoning punishment for married adulterers has no basis in Islam. That reading is simply incorrect. Look at the very verse you highlighted, Quran 4:25: فَإِذَا أُحْصِنَّ فَإِنْ أَتَيْنَ بِفَاحِشَةٍ فَعَلَيْهِنَّ نِصْفُ مَا عَلَى الْمُحْصَنَاتِ مِنَ الْعَذَابِ
 “But once they are sheltered in marriage, if they should commit adultery, then for them is half the punishment for the free [women].” In this verse al-muḥṣanāt is set in clear contrast with the slave girls. It means free women. The married slave girl who commits zina receives half the punishment that applies to free women half of the 100 lashes for free unmarried fornicators (50 lashes). Muḥṣanāt/muḥsināt (root ḥ-ṣ-n, “to fortify/protect”) is not limited to married women in the Quran. Context decides the meaning: • Quran 4:25 (same verse): the slave girls should be taken “chaste (muḥṣanātin), not those who commit unlawful intercourse openly nor those who take secret lovers.” • Quran 5:5: lawful in marriage are “chaste women (al-muḥṣanāt) from among the believers and chaste women from among those who were given the Scripture before you…” e.t.c Your claim that muḥṣanāt “only” means married women is therefore linguistically and contextually false. The Actual Islamic Ruling on Stoning the Married Adulterer. The majority position of Ahl al-Sunnah (the four schools of fiqh Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi‘i and Hanbali) is that rajm (stoning to death) is the prescribed hadd punishment for a muhsan (a free, adult, sane Muslim who has previously consummated a valid marriage) who commits zina, when the strict evidentiary conditions are met (four eyewitnesses to the act of penetration itself, or a clear, voluntary four-fold confession). This ruling rests on: •Mutawatir and well-authenticated hadiths in which the Prophet (SAW) both stated the rule and applied it. •The practice of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. •The consensus of the Companions, Successors and the scholars of the four schools. Only groups such as the Khawarij and some later modernist or Quranist trends rejected it. Documented cases in which the Prophet (SAW) ordered stoning include: •Ma‘iz ibn Malik al-Aslami a Muslim man who repeatedly confessed that he had committed zina while married; after the Prophet confirmed he was sane and married, he was stoned. •The Ghamidiyyah woman a Muslim woman who confessed to adultery and was stoned. •The married woman in the well-known case involving Unais (Bukhari & Muslim): the Prophet sent Unais to her; she confessed and was stoned. •Two Jewish adulterers were also stoned (the Prophet applied the Torah ruling to them). These were not cases of “Muslims being spared.” When a married Muslim met the conditions (usually by insistent confession), the Prophet applied the punishment. Here is my Direct Question Maqare If, as you claim, stoning for married adulterers is not part of Islam and was never applied to Muslims, can you name even one authentic case during the lifetime of the Prophet (SAW) in which a married Muslim adulterer (or adulteress) who met the evidentiary standard was deliberately not stoned simply because he or she was a Muslim? The historical record shows the opposite: the known cases of married persons who confessed were stoned including Muslims. A language professor should be careful with the range of meanings of a Quranic root and with the distinction between the Quranic text and the established Sunnah that the ummah has followed for fourteen centuries. On both the linguistic point and the ruling of rajm, the claim does not hold.