- What is Quranism?
- Many rulings come from hadiths. How can you practice Islam without them?
- If you reject hadiths, how can you know how to pray?
- The Quran says obey God and the Messenger. Why do you reject the Messenger’s hadiths then?
- What about verses like al-baqarat, 2/129 which say the Messenger will teach them the book and the wisdom? Surely this wisdom was something separate to the Quran which we need?
- Orientalist scholars claim there were mass fabrications of hadiths. Why do you adopt Orientalist attitudes to hadiths instead of what Muslim scholars have said?
- But the hadiths have been authenticated by hadith sciences. Do you reject them because you think they are unreliable?
- How can you reject hadiths when they were compiled and preserved using the same methodologies which preserved the Quran?
- Isn’t this movement just a product of modernity and Western liberalism?
1. What is Quranism?
Quranism is a school of thought within the wider Islamic tradition which takes the Quran as the only authoritative source for defining islam. In Quranism, other texts, such as hadiths and works of the scholars, may contain useful information but do not represent the Divine Voice.
2. Many rulings come from hadiths. How can you practice Islam without them?
Rulings which come from hadiths should be accepted or rejected on merit.
The Quran says in hūd, 11/1 that it is a book of “perfected signs, then detailed,” (see also fuṣṣilat, 41/3) and that its stories contain an “explanation of all things” (yūsuf, 12/111). Therefore – as far as the Quran is concerned – the āyāt (signs) of the Quran contain as much detail needed for the reader to be guided:
๏ And this is the straight path of your lord; We have detailed the āyāt for a people who remember. ๏ — al-anʿām, 6/126
What’s more, we see in al-jāthiyat, 45/6 that the Quran denounces those who believe in any “ḥadīth after God and His āyāt.” This is consistent with verses which say the Quran is fully detailed and elucidated; the reader is not expected to find divinely authorised details in another text. In other words, the Quran asserts complete authority over its ideology and never refers the reader to another book.
3. If you reject hadiths, how can you know how to pray?
In practice, Muslims don’t learn how to pray from reading hadiths, but by imitating their parents and following the community. This is an example of what Fazlur Rahman referred to as a “living Sunnah,” which has support in the Quran:
๏ …and collaborate with one another in righteousness and the protection, and do not assist one another in sin and transgression. And take guard of God; indeed, God is the might of consequence. ๏ — al-māidat, 5/2
To collaborate with one another, taʿāwanū, in positive things is how Islamic rituals not detailed in the Quran have survived for centuries. This principle encourages unity in other things as well besides prayer, like the pilgrimage and burial rites etc. These normative practices don’t need to be defined by a text. Quranists believe the Quran left the exact form of rituals for the Messenger and his community to decide on collectively:
๏ And those who respond to their lord and establish the ṣalat; their affairs are conducted by consultation among them. And they contribute from what we have provided. ๏ — al-shūrā, 42/38
Understood in this way, the sunnah of the Muslims is meant to be organic, to grow and change with the community, within the boundaries set by the Quran, rather than a set of obligations imposed by a secondary text.
4. The Quran says obey God and the Messenger. Why do you reject the Messenger’s hadiths then?
The assumption here is that “obey God” means to obey the Quran, and “obey the Messenger” means to obey hadiths attributed to the Messenger authenticated by scholars of the sect you belong to. Quranists do not believe this assumption is justified.
Those who obey the Messenger have obeyed God, as per al-nisāa, 4/80: “whoever obeys the Messenger then surely he obeyed God.” Therefore, obeying the Messenger is the means to obey God. And the Messenger was only instructing people from the Quran:
๏ And when Our āyāt are recited upon them as clear evidences, said those who do not hope for the meeting with Us: “Bring us a qur'ān other than this or change it!” Say: “It is not for me that I change it of my own leaning, I follow nothing except what is revealed to me. Indeed I fear, if I should disobey my lord, a punishment of a tremendous day.” ๏ — yūnus, 10/15
The Messenger declares here that he can neither change the āyāt he is reciting nor bring them anything different. He was not acting as a source of law different to the Quran he was receiving.
Consider this verse as well:
๏ O you who have believed! Obey God and His messenger and do not turn away from him while you hear. ๏ — al-anfāl, 8/20
It ends with, “and do not turn away from him while you hear”. It doesn't say, and do not turn away from them because the obedience is one and the same.
5. What about verses like al-baqarat, 2/129 which say the Messenger will teach them the book and the wisdom? Surely this wisdom was something separate to the Quran which we need?
al-baqarat, 2/129 does say the Messenger yuʿallimuhumu l-kitāba wal-ḥik’mat – will teach them the book and the wisdom. The common understanding is that the Quran is al-kitāb and the Prophetic Sunnah is al-ḥik’mat. However, there are other ways of interpreting this. One is that al-kitāb and al-ḥik’mat are not two separate sources of law, but descriptions of two different aspects of the revelation.
The word kitāb refers to a structured text, such as a book. In this sense, al-kitāb describes the structured elements of the revelation, such as laws and social constructs for people to follow, while al-ḥik’mat refers to the wisdom imparted by the revelation. The following verses help make this distinction clearer.
The Quran is said to explain “the book” in yūnus, 10/37:
๏ It is not that this, the qur’ān, could be produced by other than God; it is a confirmation of what was before it, and a detailed explanation of the book. There is no doubt in it, from the lord of the worlds. ๏
This suggests al-kitāb is not the Quran itself or just another name for the Quran, but something detailed within the Quran. Similarly, al-ḥik’mat is not a description of a secondary source but a characteristic of the revelation, as per yā sīn, 36/2:
๏ By the wise qur’ān. ๏
In support of this, we find a verse which shows the book and the wisdom are referred to as one thing:
๏ …He sent down upon you the book and the wisdom; He instructs you with it. And fear God and know that God is with everything, knowing. ๏ — al-baqarat, 2/231
The singular pronoun ‘it’ is used instead of ‘them.’ Understood this way, it can be seen that the messenger gave knowledge of ‘the book and the wisdom’ by reciting the Quran to the people, since it is the Quran which explains the book and it is the Quran which imparts wisdom.
6. Orientalist scholars claim there were mass fabrications of hadiths. Why do you adopt Orientalist attitudes to hadiths instead of what Muslim scholars have said?
Quranism does not rely on the findings of hadith scholarship, Orientalist or otherwise. Orientalist scholars approached hadiths from a Western tradition of textual criticism. This doesn't make their work better or more right than that of Muslim scholars, it just means their respective methods were at times different. However, some things are agreed upon by both Muslim and non-Muslim hadith scholars. It is widely acknowledged that there was a culture of fabrication happening during the formative period of Islam. As noted by Jonathan Brown:
“Hadith forgery emerged as a blatant problem when the generation of Muslims who had known the Prophet well died off. With the death of the last major Companion, Anas b. Mālik, in Basra in 93/711 (the last Companion to die was Abū al-Tufayl ʿĀmir b. Wāthila, who dies between 100/718 and 110/728) lies about the Prophet quickly multiplied. It is especially in the generation of the Successors that we begin seeing notebooks (sahīfas) of hadiths, many supposedly narrated from Anas b. Mālik, filled with forged hadiths of a highly partisan or controversial nature.
From that point onward the forgery of hadiths would be a consistent problem in Islamic civilization. The heyday of hadith forgery was the first four hundred years of Islamic history, when major hadith collections were still being compiled.”
While this culture of hadith fabrication can serve as a useful comparison to how the Quran was transmitted, Quranists (for the most part) are not concerned with how Muslims overcame the problem of spurious hadiths. There's no real incentive in adopting Orientalist attitudes, or choosing Western scholarship over Muslim scholarship, especially since both traditions are largely in agreement that mass fabrications of hadiths were definitely happening.
7. But the hadiths have been authenticated by hadith sciences. Do you reject them because you think they are unreliable?
No. The issue is not reliability, but authority. To quote Aisha Musa:
Among the questions the Qur’an poses in relation to hadith are:
- “In which hadith after this will they believe?” (al-A`araaf [7]:185).
- “These are God’s revelations we recite to you in truth. Then, in which hadith after God and His revelations will they believe?” (al-Jatheya [45]:6).
We understand the import of these questions from yet another question posed in the Qur’an:
- “Shall I seek other than God as a source of law and judgement when He is the One who has sent down the Book to you in detail?” (al-An`am [6]:114).
Also,
- “What is wrong with you? How do you judge? Do you have another book which you study?” (al-Qalam [68]:35-36).
These are the real questions that deserve to be the central focus in the discussions about hadith. If we answer these questions in the negative (i.e. “No, I shall not.” and “None.”), then we see that the question of authenticity does not merely become secondary – it becomes moot.
If we seek only God and His revelations as a source of law and guidance, and do not believe in any hadith other than God’s revelations, it makes no difference if a hadith is authentic, or not. The Qur’an does not ask if hadith is authentic. The Qur’an asks if it is “other than God and His revelations.”
8. How can you reject hadiths when they were compiled and preserved using the same methodologies which preserved the Quran?
The methodologies used for the Quran’s transmission and preservation was (and is) different to those of hadiths.
The Prophet institutionalised the recitation of the Quran. All classes of Muslims recited it as a religious and cultural practice, a culture which continues to this day. Reciting the Quran meant its transmission was verbatim, i.e. word for word, and it was also recited in a melodious way, making it easier and more enjoyable to transmit. The distinct features of a recited text is partly why classical doctrine classified the Quran as waḥy matlū, “recited revelation” and differentiated it from the Sunnah, which was lā matlū, “not recited.”
Not only were hadiths not recited, they were not transmitted by the masses. For the most part, their transmission was confined to scholars. And since they weren't recited like the Quran, accuracy was an issue, as pointed out by Daniel Brown in Rethinking tradition in modern Islamic thought: “due to the practice of transmitting reports according to their sense (bi'l-maʿnā) rather than verbatim (bi'l-lafẓ), the words of the traditions cannot be trusted to represent even the exact words of Muḥammad.” The weakness in the methodologies employed in preserving hadiths is precisely why fabrications became prevalent.
In short, mass memorisation, verbatim transmission, and institutionalised recitation sets the Quran’s preservation apart from all other Islamic texts.
9. Isn't this movement just a product of modernity and Western liberalism?
Contemporary Quranism may or may not be influenced by modernity – this is certainly something which can be discussed. However, keep in mind that Quran-only movements and hadith rejection are a recurring theme throughout Islamic history.
Aisha Musa’s Ḥadīth As Scripture, demonstrates that al-Shāfiʿī was involved in polemics with Quranists of his time, and that the debate was continued by scholars centuries after:
"al-Shāfiʿī clearly addresses his arguments against both those who rejected all Ḥadīth and those who only rejected particular Ḥadīth... In Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī’s Taqyīd al-ʿIlm, written nearly two centuries after Ibn Qutayba’s Ta’wīl Mukhtalif al-Ḥadīth, and more than two-and-a-half centuries after al-Shāfiʿī (sic) Kitāb Jimāʿal-ʿIlm, we once again see opposition to the Ḥadīth primarily as a source of authority parallel to or possibly in competition with the Qur’ān."
Obviously Western influences cannot account for the existence of Quranists of the time of al-Shāfiʿī. And since “modern advocates of taking the Qur’ān alone… bear a striking resemblance to the opponents whom al-Shāfiʿī debates in section one of Kitāb Jimāʿal-ʿIlm,” citing modernity as the cause of contemporary Quranism is dubious.
◆◆
tagged: #quranism #nbj_quranism
for me it's xmpp. now that monal on ios has almost reached feature parity with conversations on android, there's no reason xmpp shouldn't be the go-to alternative to whatsapp.
I don't think signal is the answer. a centralised service susceptible to all the things wrong with whatsapp. matrix is bloated. push notifications on simplex android is still sketchy.
and i dont buy the argument that onboarding is too complicated these days. most people can make an account for anything they feel is worth it.