Has the prohibition of fighting in the sacred months been abrogated?

Scholars differ on whether the prohibition of fighting in the sacred months was abrogated or still stands. Muhammad al-Amin al-Shinqiti held both views in his lifetime: he argued for abrogation for a time and then abandoned it. ¹ This entry sets out the two views as he gives them, without a verdict.

His biographer quotes what he said on the fifth verse of Surat Bara'a: that he had held the prohibition abrogated and for a long time argued for this view as the sounder one, and that it then became clear to him that the sounder and more correct of the two views is that the prohibition of the sacred months remains and was not abrogated; and on the thirty-fourth verse, that what he later verified and came to hold firmly is that they remain prohibited to this day. See al-Tawba 5. ¹ The biographer gives this as an example of the shaykh's returning to what he saw as right even after defending another view for years. ¹