At lunch I was doing my usual foraging of blogs looking for something interesting to read and ran across a pointer to this blog post at The Big Pharaoh. It was about a sub sect of Islam known as the Quraneyeens. Seems that 15 practitioners of this brand of Islam had been recently imprisoned in Egypt What? Muslims persecuting Muslims? You bet. Why? Because they’re Muslims who believe in the Quran, and only the Quran.
According to the blog post, there are two key religious texts that are the foundation of Islam, the Quran and the Hadith. As I understand it, (and correct me if I am wrong), the Quran was, according to tradition, written directly by The Prophet himself. Whereas the Hadith is a set of observations about his opinions and actions and lessons that were preserved orally for over 150 years before they were written down, raising issues about whether or not the preservers of the oral tradition either deliberately or unintentionally injected their own biases, opinions, and political agendas into the Hadith.
update: Commenter rayhaan tells me that “Hadeeths are sayings, actions and endorsements of the Prophet.” But agrees that they were preserved orally because very few could read or write at the time.
One can see analogous issues in other religions. According to a comment on the blog post, Judaism has the Karaites, who reject the Talmud and rely on the Torah. And in the United States, there is a Christian denomination known as the Church of Christ who believe in modeling their life only on the words and actions of Jesus. In the more extreme Church of Christ congregations, they do not even celebrate Christmas because Jesus didn’t celebrate Christmas. (well, maybe with ice cream and cake and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, but only when he was a kid, but I digress…)
The reason this has any relevance at all to anyone outside the religious scholarship community is that, again according to the blog post, many of the more odious aspects of Islam that we deplore, such as the status of women, and the justified killing of non-Muslims, originate from the Hadith, and not the Quran.
So by focusing on the Quran, the Quraneyeens have a path for continuing to be faithful Muslims while rejecting violence, the oppression of women, etc. In the United States, there is an organization called The Free Muslims Coalition which is led by some of the leaders of the Quraneyeens which has actively demonstrated against terrorism, anti-Semitism.
Very cool. I hope more and more people learn about these folks and I hope they are not persecuted into oblivion.
you said to correct you if you were wrong. And you were. the Qur’an is the word of God (Allah) which was conveyed to the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) by the Angel Jibreel or Gabriel in English. When he recieved the revelation (Wahy) he would tell it to others who would write it down on anything they could find. Very few could read and write. Hadeeths are sayings, actions and endorsements of the Prophet (pbuh)