23 November 2014
Simple Islam: Islam Without Hadith
As Quran predicts, the religion is divided into multiple branches [1] and each branch is under the impression that it is the true one. Each of you, the readers of this article, belongs to one of these different branches and probably very certain about the genuineness of the method practiced by your branch. Probably the Elders of your branch have taught you that only the followers of your branch--who essentially follow the Elders’ commands--will be awarded with redemption and the others will be barbecued in a dreadful fire. They will scare you about hell and tell you that worshipping the God is the way of salvation and that they are the only reference for how to worship--like God would have whispered into their ears all the details of worshipping. Probably the Elders of your branch have prepared a whole library of arguments that why you should refer only to them for every single detail of worshiping, and why the method of worshipping is so complicated, difficult, and beyond the comprehension of the general public, and only the people who have spent years in studying this complex approach and have become one of the Elders could tell how to be a servant of God.
The intention of this article is neither questioning the validity of your particular branch nor creating yet another one. The audience of this article is a muslim who loves his religion, is afraid of the fire, but is also fed up with blindly following the Elders of his branch. In this article, we explain a view of Islam which is simple enough to be understandable for all the muslims. Each muslim will be both the decider for his/her deeds and responsible for them. There is no need for Elders nor their complicated package of becoming one. It is eventually your call that whether the benefits of this Simple Islam outweigh its disadvantages or not.
In the rest, we first introduce Simple Islam, which is based on Quran and not the Hadith. We then present our arguments for adopting Simple Islam. We then explain the advantages and disadvantages of eliminating Hadith from the religious practice. The conclusion at the end is on the reader.
1. Simple Islam
Simple Islam is based on three principles: belief in God, the judgment day, and the holy Quran that is brought by Muhammad. Muslim is a person who believes in these three principles, study Quran, and use that to improve his/her understanding of an ideal human being. A muslim makes his/her life decisions in a way to get him closer to an ideal human.
2. Why Simple?
As much as Simple Islam emphasizes on Quran, it ignores Hadith. The primary reason is that Quran is the miracle of the God and its text is reliable. To believe that the book we are reading now is the same as Quran that descended on Muhammad, we do not need to trust our ancestors from whom we inherited the text: each muslim in any century can read the text and decide whether he/she finds it miraculous or not. Hadith, on the other hand, is just a collection of sentences attributed to the prophet and hence is essentially part of the history, and the reliability of the details of the history is always questionable. To trust Hadith, we have to trust the honesty of the people who carried them over the centuries and also to trust the skills of the Hadith historians, also known as religious Elders or scholars. A muslim in Simple Islam needs to read only a book (Quran) which requires a reasonable amount of time, affordable by every muslim. On the other hand, in the current branches learning Hadith and its dependent skills requires years of studying, which in practice leaves Islam in the hands of a small group called religious Elders, unreachable for the general public. The public thus has no choice but blindly following the Elders in the name of worshipping the God.
2. Advantages of Simple Islam
The main advantage of Simple Islam is its simplicity. A simple religion is less susceptible to deviation along the history, is reachable by the general public, is more difficult to be abused by the opportunist of the society to confuse the public and trick them into following their wishes in the name of worshipping the God.
Second, with ignoring Hadith, Islam gets separated from the history of Islam--or in better words the history of muslims. It then becomes possible to firmly defend Islam in the 21st century without needing to defend even a moment of history of muslims and what they did in the past: from neglecting women rights to attacking the other countries with the excuse of spreading Islam. Most of the criticisms of Islam are actually criticisms of the way of muslims in the past centuries and not of the principles of Islam.
Third, the muslims practicing Simple Islam get rid of unreasonable laws that originally come from Hadith and is later attributed to Islam using many tricks. For example, if not all, most of the Elders believe in Apostasy: killing the unfortunate person who converts from Islam. This rule has been leveraged by the Elders in the history to threaten or eliminate the free thinkers such as Avicenna. For any person of understanding, this rule sounds ridiculous since if other religions also apply the same rule then nobody could ever convert to Islam either. Nothing is more cheerful for a muslim practicing Simple Islam than the fact that this rule as well as rules similar to it are inconsistent with Quran and have roots in nothing but the unreliable, shaky sands of Hadith.
Forth, the Elders can no more abuse the fear of the fire to make the people follow their commands, which are sometimes hilarious. Currently there are muslims that being afraid of hell do not allow their pictures to be taken because an Elder has issued a fatwa that taking pictures is sinful. As another example, not long time ago some Elders issued a fatwa that said using Videocassette recorder device is sinful, which was later taken back quietly.
Fifth, by centering the religion upon Quran, muslims can realize the importance of rules and principles based on the emphasis on them in Quran: the fact that in Quran hundreds of verses are warning about polytheism and only one verse remotely refers to hijab, the fact that Quran many times warns about the rights of orphans and never talks about pilgrimage to tombs, and many other examples.
Sixth, currently ordinary muslims either do not regularly read Quran, or if they do they have been scared of interpreting it as the Elders consider interpreting Quran a very complicated science that only them, i.e., scholars, are authorized to do so and the rest of muslim must just take whatever interpretation that the scholars offer. Nevertheless, comprehending the words of God beside science requires a pure heart which is a rare quality in the way of Elders. By eliminating the Elders from the religious practice, each muslim can directly communicate with the God through Quran without passing the intermediary channel of the Elders.
3. Disadvantages of Simple Islam
The first criticism of Simple Islam is that it is overly simple. Simple Islam does not get into the complicated details of prayer and its attachments such as the rules about doubts in the number of performed movement during the prayer and the rules about approved body cleanness for praying. This is in sharp contrast to the current practiced Islam, where these details are the majority. In the current branches of Islam, an ideal human is described as a person who learns the details of the religious traditions as taught by the Elders and performs them exactly. However, it is not explained that how such level of details would help the person to reach redemption. In fact, this question is never raised in the first place because the Elders consider even the smallest detail of their prescribed tradition as the direct command from the God.
In Simple Islam, the only reference for the patterns of the ideal human is Quran. Quran's guidance is used to find what leads people towards the ideal human and thus redemption. The fact that Quran emphasizes for hundreds of times on establishing prayer and not on its details leads to understanding that the important thing in Quran's view is establishing prayer itself and its details are left to be implemented by the people of different eras and cultures. There is no doubt that consistency of the established prayer with the prayer of the accompanying muslims as well as its similarity to the prayer of the pioneers of perfection such as Muhammad is an adornment for the held prayer. However its details are not the key to redemption and is left to be implemented based on the requirements of the time and the place.
The approval of this method comes from Quran itself when it commands the muslims who are living at the time of Quran's descendent not to ask for the details that are not revealed because otherwise implementing such details in the same exact way becomes mandatory [2]. When people disobeyed this command and did ask for details [3,4,5,6], we witness the most boring details about inheritance, etc. The Simple Islam's understanding, which is consistent with Quran, is that the God has descended Quran for the general guidelines in the religion and the details are left to the people of each time and place to implement them based on their culture and their understanding of the world.
The other criticism to Simple Islam is that by leaving the details to individuals, there will be an opportunity for inciting self (i.e., the devil inside) to interfere. In this way, the inciting self leads the muslim to implementing details that are more convenient or are fulfilling the evil desires. In response, it is worth reminding that the inciting self has thousands of ways to get into the surface and for interference with a person's judgment it could make use of the tiniest peepholes. Opening or closing a gate does not affect the very existence of the inciting self. Even though, a muslim could express his/her understanding of a good implementation of details and share it with the peers, whose feedback can help revealing the level of interference of the inciting self.
Summary
In this article, we introduced Simple Islam which is based on Quran instead of Hadith. We showed that eliminating Hadith leads to eliminating the Elders from the religious practice and frees muslims from the serfdom of their local Elders. Many of the unreasonable rules that are hanging from the wounded body of Islam (such as Apostasy) will be automatically disappear since such irrational interpretations are stemmed either from Hadith or the not-so-much-defendable history of muslims.
Notes
Simple Islam: Islam Without Extremists
اسلام بدون روحانیت
Simple Islam: Belief vs. Trust
یمان یا اعتماد
Criticisms of Simple Islam
دلایل قرآنی منتقدین اسلام ساده
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