Why Should the Muslims Not Reject the Ahadith?
Reply #39 - May 05, 2014, 03:02 PM
Happymurtad,
I really do understand what you're saying, but even today I'm not quite sure about the intellectual merit of orthodoxy. Although I knew it was not what the Muslim world was typically doing, we were of the position that people are often wrong, and that the interpretations and works of the in the early phases of the religion were not to be prized for their antiquity, especially not over the complete and perfect book. The heavy belief in the hadith seemed a product of its time, before the falsehoods in it were plainly obvious.
For most Quranists, this is the predicament you're placed in: like Dr_sloth was saying, it does say to follow the prophet and the sunnah, there are verses that talk about the importance of this, but it does not say that Muslim and Bukhari had their act together. Follow the prophet, sure, and by going along that logical thread you can make the case that, therefore, all people of all time should follow the prophet, and that's often the core of the Sunni argument.
However, you're a Muslim in the modern age, and you're looking at this package deal of rumors, and you know some of the hadith are demonstrably false. Some of them contradict each other and contradict the Quran. What Cornflower said about God preserving the religion so logically he'd preserve the hadith didn't fly for us, because, in order for that to be true, there couldn't be those one or two scientifically inaccurate hadith. So at this basic level, Quranists will be faced with this problem: either accept that the possibility, even if you consider it more remote or scripturally dishonest, that the verses about following the sunnah and the prophet were for the people of that time and not in reference to the hadith collection, or that the entire thing is a sham. The middle ground that is the Sunni position was simply impossible, not through the lens of classical Islamic education, but when placed against the indisputable truths, or even moral values, that came with recent times.
And if you know that this one about conception, poison, whatever, is wrong, that's fine, ignore it, but how are you going to logically support that this one, that prescribes the death penalty to someone, is definitely reliable? How are you going to be sure something so severe has its place in law, when it has no greater evidence of credibility than the false ones? This is where those verses come in that say that the book is complete, perfect, legislation is for God alone, are you going to seek any other resources other than this, so on and so forth, and this is where the logic comes from.
Now, if I had my way, the Quranist position wouldn't be that last stop, or the place to sit and feel better about yourself. I do think that, if you are going to try to be logical and honest, you should toss the entire thing, and I do consider my years as a Quranist as ones spent practicing intellectual dishonesty and cognitive dissonance. However, I feel the same way about my few years as a Sunni.
And at the end of the day, many Quranists, whether they'll admit it to you or not, are afraid of facing someone well-versed in the Quran. It is not a good friend to have, it is not a good foundation, we all know that there are some pretty awful things contained between those covers. We just don't get confronted about it as often as others do about the evils of the hadith.
Topic: Why Should the Muslims Not Reject the Ahadith?