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Chapter 4 of 511 min read
موقف القرآنيين: ردٌّ منطقي
Within the modern Muslim world itself, a movement has emerged that rejects the Sunnah as a binding source of Islamic guidance while accepting the Quran as the sole authoritative scripture. This movement — known by various names, including the Quraniyyun, Ahl al-Quran, or Quran-only advocates — presents itself as a return to the pure message of Islam, freed from later human accretions. Its proponents typically argue that the hadith literature is an unreliable human record, that the Quran is self-sufficient, and that following hadith has introduced distortions, superstitions, and unnecessary restrictions into Islamic practice.
The movement has a complex history and has attracted a range of intellectuals in different Muslim-majority countries. Understanding it requires both a fair presentation of its arguments and a systematic examination of whether those arguments withstand logical scrutiny. Ja'far Sheikh Idris's analysis demonstrates that the Quran-only position, whatever its rhetorical appeal, fails on the grounds it claims most confidently: reason and the Quran itself.
The Quraniyyun movement in its modern form traces to the Indian subcontinent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ghulam Ahmad Pervez (1903–1985), a Pakistani civil servant and intellectual, became its most systematic and prolific advocate in the Urdu-speaking world. In his journals and books, most notably Maqam-e-Hadith and Quran as the Sole Criterion, Pervez argued that the hadith literature was a later construction that corrupted the universal message of the Quran, which he reinterpreted in heavily modernist and rationalist terms.
In the Arab world, figures like Tawfiq Siddiq and Ahmad Subhi Mansur advanced similar arguments. The Egyptian-American biochemist Rashad Khalifa (1935–1990) brought the Quran-only position to Western Muslim communities, combining it with his controversial "Code 19" numerical claims about the Quran, which he used to argue that certain verses were later additions. Khalifa's position went beyond the rejection of hadith to the rejection of specific Quranic verses; he was eventually excommunicated by mainstream Muslim scholarly consensus and assassinated in 1990.
More recently, online communities and social media have given the Quran-only position new reach, particularly among younger Muslims in Western countries who encounter Islam in English and who may feel alienated by aspects of traditional Islamic practice. The movement's appeal lies partly in its intellectual accessibility — it strips away the complexity of Islamic scholarship — and partly in its resonance with modernist sensibilities that prioritize individual rational interpretation over scholarly authority.
The Quraniyyun present several interconnected arguments:
First, they argue that the hadith literature is inherently unreliable. The collections of Bukhari and Muslim were compiled over two centuries after the Prophet's death; in the intervening period, countless hadiths were fabricated or distorted; the science of hadith criticism, whatever its sophistication, cannot overcome the fundamental problem of such a long transmission gap. Therefore, hadith cannot serve as a reliable basis for Islamic law or practice.
Second, they argue that the Quran declares itself complete and sufficient. They cite Surah al-Ma'idah (5:3): "Today I have perfected for you your religion and completed My favour upon you and have approved for you Islam as religion." They cite Surah al-An'am (6:38): "We have not neglected in the Register a thing." They argue these verses establish the Quran as comprehensive in itself, leaving no room for a supplementary source.
Third, they argue that the command to "obey the Messenger" in the Quran refers to obeying the Quran itself — because the Messenger's primary mission was to deliver the Quran, and the Quran is what remains of the Messenger's guidance now that he is no longer alive.
Fourth, they argue that following hadith has introduced practices and beliefs into Islam that conflict with the Quran's spirit: excessive ritual, harsh punishments, restrictions on women, theological dogmas — all, they claim, traceable to hadith rather than Quran.
The most fundamental problem with the Quran-only position is that it is directly contradicted by the Quran's own text. As established in the preceding chapter, the Quran commands obedience to the Messenger (al-Rasul) as a distinct and separate obligation from obedience to Allah. The distinction is grammatically and substantively clear. If all the Quran meant by "obey the Messenger" was "obey the Quran," the instruction would be redundant — Allah could simply say "obey Allah" and the implication would cover everything the Messenger delivered.
The fact that the Quran repeatedly pairs "obey Allah" with "obey the Messenger" (as in 3:32, 4:59, 4:80, and many other verses) indicates that the Messenger's guidance constitutes a second, complementary source of authority alongside Allah's direct revelation. If the Messenger were merely a delivery vehicle for the Quran, this paired formulation would be meaningless. The logical structure of the command requires that the Messenger's own guidance — separate from the Quran itself — carries binding authority.
The Quraniyyun response is to say that "obey the Messenger" means "obey what the Messenger brought" and that what the Messenger brought is the Quran. But this interpretation requires reading "the Messenger" as a metonym for "the Quran," which is not how the Quran uses language elsewhere. Throughout the Quran, the Messenger is addressed as a person — his feelings are acknowledged, he is instructed to speak and act in specific ways, he is consoled when people reject him, he is directed to make particular judgments. The Messenger is consistently a person, not a text. Reading "obey the Messenger" as equivalent to "obey the Quran" is a motivated reinterpretation that the Arabic text does not support.
A second fatal problem for the Quran-only position is practical: the Quran's most central commands cannot be carried out without the Sunnah. The Quran commands salah — but does not specify how many times daily, what the times are, how many units each prayer has, what words to recite in each position, or what the positions are. The Quran commands zakah — but gives no rates, no minimum thresholds, no list of eligible categories of recipients. The Quran commands hajj — but does not describe the specific rites in any detail that would permit independent reconstruction. The Quran commands fasting in Ramadan — but does not specify the exact beginning and ending time each day, or the precise conditions under which exceptions apply.
The Quraniyyun, confronted with this problem, are forced into one of two positions, both of which are untenable. The first position is to invent their own methods for performing these acts, based on their own reading of Quranic hints and principles. This is exactly what they do — and the result is that different Quraniyyun communities practice prayer, fasting, and other obligations in radically different ways, with no principled basis for resolving their disagreements. If the Quran alone is the standard, there is no mechanism for establishing which of these competing methods is correct. The diversity of Quraniyyun practice demonstrates not the self-sufficiency of the Quran but its practical dependence on a supplementary source.
The second position — adopted less openly but effectively by many Quraniyyun in practice — is to silently use the traditional Sunnah-derived methods while formally rejecting the Sunnah. They pray five times a day, in the traditional way, at the traditional times, because there is no other practically accessible method. But this prayer practice is entirely derived from the Sunnah they claim to reject. This is not principled consistency; it is an unacknowledged dependence on the tradition they critique.
The Quraniyyun argument about hadith reliability contains a concealed and fatal epistemological inconsistency. They reject the hadith on the grounds that a two-century transmission gap makes it unreliable, that human memory and motivation cannot be trusted, and that the chain of transmission is insufficient to guarantee authenticity. But the Quran was transmitted to us by exactly the same human beings through exactly the same kinds of chains.
The Companions who memorized and wrote down the Quran are the same Companions who transmitted the Sunnah. The scholars of the first generation who preserved and compiled the Quranic text are the same scholars who preserved and transmitted prophetic hadiths. If human memory and motivation are untrustworthy to the degree that renders hadith unreliable, then the same grounds apply, mutatis mutandis, to the Quranic text itself. You cannot trust the human chain for the Quran while simultaneously distrusting an equally rigorous human chain for the Sunnah.
This is not an argument against the Quran's authenticity; it is an argument that demonstrates the inconsistency of the Quraniyyun's epistemological principles. If their scepticism about human transmission were consistently applied, it would be self-defeating. The only consistent position is either to trust the methodology that authenticated both the Quran and the Sunnah — which is the traditional Islamic position — or to reject the entire transmitted corpus, which would leave one with nothing to follow at all. The selective scepticism of the Quraniyyun is not a principled epistemological position; it is a position driven by the desired conclusion.
Several Quranic verses make explicit that the Prophet ﷺ has authority to legislate beyond what is explicitly stated in the Quranic text. Surah al-A'raf (7:157) describes the Prophet ﷺ as one who "commands them with al-ma'ruf and forbids them from al-munkar and makes lawful for them the good things and prohibits for them the evil things." This is a general legislative commission — not limited to what the Quran itself specifies.
Surah al-Nisa' (4:65): "But no, by your Lord, they will not believe until they make you judge concerning that over which they dispute among themselves and then find within themselves no discomfort from what you have ruled and submit in full submission." Here the Prophet ﷺ is designated as a judge — an arbiter of disputes — whose rulings must be accepted without internal resistance. The rulings of a judge are not simply recitations of existing text; they are determinations applied to specific cases. The Quraniyyun cannot accommodate this verse: it requires accepting prophetic rulings as binding, including rulings that go beyond what the Quran explicitly states.
Surah an-Nisa' (4:80): "Whoever obeys the Messenger has obeyed Allah." The identification of obeying the Messenger with obeying Allah is not a statement about the Quran; it is a statement about the Messenger's authority. If following the Messenger's rulings is equivalent to obeying Allah, then those rulings — whatever their content — carry divine authority. This verse is incompatible with any framework that reduces the Messenger's authority to delivery of the Quranic text.
There is a deeper problem that the Quraniyyun rarely address honestly: they cannot read the Quran in a vacuum. Reading the Quran requires a language — Arabic — whose vocabulary, grammar, and idiom must be learned from somewhere. It requires contextual knowledge about the occasions of revelation (asbab al-nuzul), without which many passages are incomprehensible. It requires familiarity with the intertextual references within the Quran to its own earlier passages and to the context in which the Prophet ﷺ and the early community lived.
All of this contextual and linguistic knowledge comes, ultimately, from the same tradition that transmitted the Sunnah. The same scholars who preserved and transmitted the hadiths also preserved the Arabic language, the lexicons, the grammatical sciences, the tafsir traditions, and the historical knowledge about the Prophet's life and community without which the Quran cannot be understood. The Quraniyyun who reject this tradition are actually operating entirely within it — they learned their Arabic from it, they learned the meanings of Quranic vocabulary from it, they use its exegetical tools while claiming to reject its hadith content.
This is the self-referential problem: the Quran-only position is logically self-defeating because even reading the Quran requires recourse to the broader tradition that includes the Sunnah. There is no pure Quranic reading that operates entirely independently of transmitted knowledge. The Quraniyyun's claim to derive their Islam from the Quran alone is an illusion — they are actually deriving it from a selective reading of a tradition they claim to reject.
One final argument deserves attention. The Quraniyyun's picture requires that the early Muslim community — the Companions and the immediate generations after them — dramatically misunderstood the Quran's own instructions about authority. According to the Quraniyyun, these people who lived with the Prophet ﷺ, heard the Quran in its original context, and participated in the establishment of the Islamic community, somehow failed to understand that the Quran alone was the standard. They preserved and transmitted the Sunnah on a massive scale precisely because they understood the Quran to require it.
This claim strains credulity. The Companions were native speakers of Quranic Arabic. They were present when the Quran was revealed. If the Quran itself meant to exclude the Sunnah, they were the most qualified people in history to recognize this — and they would have had every reason, as devoted believers, to follow the Quran's actual meaning. Instead, they universally preserved and acted upon the Sunnah. Their unanimous practice is not merely historical evidence; it is the most direct testimony available about what the Quran actually commands.
The Quraniyyun position requires not only rejecting the Sunnah but also rejecting the understanding of Islam held by everyone who knew the Quran in its original context. This is not a return to pure Islam; it is the substitution of modern rationalist preferences for the understanding of those who actually lived the Islam the Quran was addressed to. Ja'far Sheikh Idris's analysis makes clear that the Quran-only position is not a more faithful reading of the Quran — it is a less faithful one, sustained by rhetorical ingenuity rather than genuine hermeneutical rigor.