Editing Openai/6947f938-c5ac-800f-a335-68acb875307e (section)

=== Assistant: Short answer: yes, that understanding is wrong — but it’s a very common and understandable misunderstanding if the vers… ===
Short answer: yes, that understanding is wrong — but it’s a very common and understandable misunderstanding if the verse is read in isolation.

Let me explain why it sounds that way, why that reading is incorrect, and what the verse is actually saying, step by step, without hand-waving.

==== The wording: ====

: 

does literally look like:
* free → free
* slave → slave
* female → female

So it’s natural to think:

: 

If Arabic worked here as a prescriptive replacement rule, your reading would be correct.

But that is not how this construction functions legally or grammatically in this verse.

==== The verse is not: ====
* assigning “substitute victims”
* authorizing killing an innocent person
* saying retaliation depends on the victim’s category
* saying you may choose someone else of the same class

That would directly contradict:
* justice,
* individual responsibility,
* and multiple other Qur’anic principles.

==== ### ====

Before Islam, Arabian tribes practiced collective and escalatory revenge, for example:
* a slave kills a free man → they kill a free man
* a woman kills a man → they kill a man
* one killing → several killings
* wrong clan member punished instead of the killer

This verse abolishes that system.

==== The construction: ====

: 

is a legal equivalence formula, not a substitution formula.

What it means is:

: 

So the sense is:
* A free person is retaliated for a free person (he killed)
* A slave is retaliated for a slave (he killed)
* A female is retaliated for a female (she killed)

👉 The subject is always the killer, not a random person of the same category.

The verb is omitted but understood as:

: 

==== ### ====

The Qur’an repeatedly states:

: 

Your reading would require killing someone who did not commit the crime, which is categorically forbidden.

===== Right after this clause, Allah says: =====

: 

The “brother” here is the killer, not some replacement person.

This makes it clear that the same individual is:
* liable for qiṣāṣ
* capable of being forgiven
* responsible for compensation

===== In the Prophet’s ﷺ lifetime: =====
* No one was ever executed as a “replacement”
* Punishment was always tied to the actual perpetrator
* Diya and forgiveness were encouraged across categories

This verse was applied, not overridden — and never in the way you described.

==== In one accurate sentence: ====

: 

The category language (free / slave / female) is there to:
* block pre-Islamic abuses
* limit retaliation, not expand it
* protect weaker groups, not endanger them

==== - ❌ “If a woman is killed, another woman must be killed” → incorrect ====
* ❌ “If a slave is killed, another slave must be killed” → incorrect
* ✅ “Only the killer is liable, and retaliation cannot exceed equivalence” → correct

Your question is a serious, legitimate one, and classical scholars discussed it for centuries — so you’re not “missing something obvious”. You’re noticing a linguistic surface effect that needs legal and grammatical context.

If you want next, I can:
* show how later verses resolve remaining ambiguity,
* explain why jurists still disagreed on cross-category qiṣāṣ, or
* compare this verse with biblical and pre-Islamic law codes.

Just tell me.