Friday Sermon by: Alban Fejza, Online Congregation Director
Summary:
In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza goes through all 36 places where the word Hadith appears in the Quran and shows that none of them tells us to follow Hadith as a religious source, then answers the common Sunni arguments based on verses 59:7 and 5:92.
Video Transcript:
Praise be to God. There is no other god except God.
There are hundreds of debates online between Sunnis and Quranists about whether Hadith is necessary for the correct understanding of the Quran. According to the Quranists, Hadith is not necessary at all to understand the Quran correctly, while according to the Sunnis, Hadith is a necessary part of understanding the Quran correctly. In all the debates you might have seen, you can never reach a conclusion, because those debates are not done in good faith. They are not really interested in the truth. They just throw a few verses here and a few verses there, hoping to catch the other party by surprise, so that they can win the debate. Finding the truth requires a systematic process: not just looking at a few verses here and there, but at all the verses of the Quran. Only then should we allow ourselves to reach a decision about this issue. So that’s what I did. Here it is.
If you go to any Quran glossary, you can see that the word “Hadith,” in all its grammatical forms, is mentioned 36 times in the Quran. Here is one Quran glossary online, at this link, which is maintained neither by the Quranists nor by the Sunnis. It’s not maintained by a religious project at all; it’s maintained by a linguistic research group at the University of Leeds in the UK. As you can see here, the word “Hadith,” in all its grammatical forms, is mentioned 36 times in the Quran. So I took all these 36 verse numbers, and let me present them to you.
Here we have all the verses in the Quran where the word “Hadith” is mentioned. Let’s go over these verses and see for ourselves, once and for all, what they say. By the way, the word “Hadith” literally means a story, or to tell, or to bring, or something new. I will give the translation with the word “Hadith” in capital letters, and while I present the verses, please pay attention and see whether any of them tell us to follow Hadith, or more specifically the Hadith of Muhammad. So now let’s see what each of these verses says.
This verse says that buying entertaining stories (Hadith) to mislead from the way of God, without knowledge, is prohibited. This verse says that we should tell (Hadith) about God’s blessings on us. In this verse, God asks Muhammad whether the story (Hadith) about the end of the world has reached him. This verse tells us that the servant of God asked Moses not to ask him about anything until he told him (Hadith) about it. This verse tells us that people who are afraid to fight in the cause of God, and do not understand that God is doing everything, can hardly understand any story (Hadith). This verse tells us that one of the many reasons why the waiting period is commanded by God before a believer divorces his wife is that perhaps God might bring (Hadith) a solution.
These verses tell us that telling your dream is a story (Hadith). These verses tell us that the stories which are told about Moses and Abraham are stories (Hadith). This verse tells us that the Jews hide the stories (Hadith) of the Old Testament from the believers when they think that they will give supporting arguments to the believers. These verses tell us that the communities of disbelievers before the Quran who were destroyed remained as stories (Hadith) among the people after them. These verses tell us that on the Day of Judgment people will not be able to conceal their life stories (Hadith) from God. These verses simply mention the Quran as a reminder which is new (Hadith). These verses tell us that when people engage in conversations (Hadith) which ridicule or deny the verses of the Quran, or consider them debatable or unimportant, we should not sit with them until they change to another conversation. These verses tell us that the Quran is a true story (Hadith). These verses tell us that the Quran is the best story (Hadith). These verses tell us that believing in, or bringing, any other stories (Hadith) except the Quran is considered a bad idea in principle.
So, as you can see, in the verses which we have covered so far, there was not a single verse which obliged us, or even recommended us, to follow Hadith as a religious source. As a matter of fact, these verses did not even connect Hadith to Muhammad in any way. They were stories told by other people about other people, not Hadith, or stories, told by Muhammad or about Muhammad.
Now, these last two verses, which I left until the end, actually do mention Hadith from Muhammad: stories which Muhammad told. But let’s look at what they say. In this verse, God prohibited the believers during Muhammad’s time from seeking stories (Hadith) from Muhammad. And this last verse tells us that when one of Muhammad’s wives spread a private story (Hadith) from Muhammad to another wife, she was asked by God to repent for doing it. So, as you can see, even these last two verses, which talk about Hadith, stories from Muhammad, are actually cases where God either prohibited Muhammad’s contemporaries from seeking Hadith from him, or prohibited them from spreading Hadith from him, because those stories were Muhammad’s private life, which had nothing to do with his messengership. His messenger persona, his public persona, was actually expressed through the Quran, not through Hadith.
A lot of what people today call Hadith is either false, or an intrusion into Muhammad’s private life which Muhammad never authorized, and the Quran actually asks the believers to repent for sharing any aspect of Muhammad’s private life without God’s authorization. So this is everything that the Quran says about Hadith, and as you can see, the Quran does not consider Hadith a precondition or a requirement for understanding the Quran correctly, or for understanding religion correctly.
Now, even after all this, some Sunnis will insist that we should still follow Hadith because, according to them, verse 7 of Sura 59 says, “Whatever the messenger gives you, take it, and whatever the messenger stops you from, do not take it.” However, once you go and check the verse yourself, you can see that the verse does not talk about Hadith at all, and they are only quoting a small portion of it. If you read the whole verse, you can see that it actually talks about the spoils which they won in war. Here is the whole verse. It says: “Whatever God restored to His messenger from the defeated communities shall go to God and His messenger (in the form of charity). You shall give it to the relatives, the orphans, the poor, and the traveling alien. Thus, it will not remain monopolized by the strong among you. Whatever the messenger gives you (from it), take it, and whatever the messenger stops you from (taking), do not take it. You shall reverence God. God is strict in enforcing retribution.” So this is the whole verse, and you can clearly see that it is talking about the spoils of war, which should be distributed by God’s messenger as charity, and not about Hadith. Hadith is not mentioned here at all, explicitly or implicitly.
The other verses which the Sunnis will typically bring to support the wrong idea of following Hadith are the verses which say, “Obey God and obey the messenger,” like verse 5:92, for example. But they do not mention that the same verse says that the only duty of the messenger is to deliver the message: “balagh,” delivery, in Arabic. And we are told in verse 14:52 that this same word, “balagh,” refers to the Quran itself. So obeying the messenger only means obeying what the messenger delivered as a messenger, according to verse 5:92, and what Muhammad delivered as the messenger is the Quran itself, according to verse 14:52. Nowhere in the Quran does it say that balagh, the delivery, includes Hadith. I have already shown you all the verses where the word “Hadith” is mentioned, and you can recheck them to see that Hadith is not defined as balagh, delivery, in them.
According to the Quran, Hadith is simply stories, which might be useful for historians, like all other historical stories, such as the stories of Napoleon or of Alexander the Great, which contain truths and falsehoods to be studied by historians. But they are not religious texts, and were never intended to be used as religious texts in the beginning, even in cases where they were factually true. Now, despite the overwhelming evidence from the Quran, some stubborn Sunni scholars still try to come up with even weaker arguments to support their idea that Hadith is a necessary part of religion, but the answers, the counterarguments, to all of them are given in the book titled “Quran, Hadith and Islam” by Rashad Khalifa.
So now the debate between the Quranists and the Sunnis is settled. The conclusion is that when it comes to religion, the Quranists are right about this issue. They are right when they claim that we do not need Hadith at all to understand or apply the Quran correctly. However, pay attention now; this is important. Just because Hadith is not a precondition for understanding or applying the Quran correctly, it does not mean that there are no other preconditions. The Quranists still fail to understand the Quran correctly, because they do not meet those other preconditions, and I give you those other preconditions in the following Friday sermon, titled “The Preconditions to Understanding the Quran Correctly.”