The following was asked on a discussion forum I follow. I need your help in answering it.

A few weeks ago, I joined a woman’s group and we post questions to get to know each other and answer questions, give advice, and so on. It was a mixed group with Muslims and non-Muslims with the majority being Muslim. Anyway, there were several debates in which some women would argue over why they reject hadith and only follow Quran. I’m wondering how can they be Muslim when they reject certain aspects of Islam?

Almighty Allah SWT says: “This day have I perfected your religion for you, completed My favour upon you, and have chosen for you Islam as your religion” (5:3)

Rejecting the Hadeeth altogether is irrational! Because it is the Hadeeth that tells us how many prayers we have to pray everyday, how to pray and what to say in a prayer, what proprotion of our money are we to take out for the Zakah (mandatory alms), among hundreds of other teachings without which the religion would not be complete.

More importantly, rejecting the Hadeeth is tantamount to disobeying God, who says, “Whoever obeys the Messenger has obeyed God” (4:80). How do we obey the Prophet (PBUH) if we don’t know what he said?!

Which brings me to the reason which is probably why these folks reject the Hadeeth. Namely, they do not trust that the prophet (PBUH) said what the Hadeeths say he said. I doubt that any Muslim would actually know that the Prophet ordered something and they consciously decide not to do it!

So, the issue actually is the authenticity of the Hadeeth. There is reason to be suspicious of the authenticity of the Hadeeth, but that’s no reason to reject it; it is reason to scrutinize it.

This is exactly why our righteous predecessors spent lifetimes collecting narrations, verifying the integrity and competence of each narrator and ensuring the continuity of the “chain of narrators”. May God have been pleased with their phenomenal efforts. They found out that 90% of all narrations going around were either weak or outright fabrications! They discovered that many narrators were not credible or were incompetent.

The good news is that they ended up with the creme of the crop: Men and women of impeccable reputation, remarkable memory, mastery of language, piety and knowledge. Those are the narrators of the Hadeeths rated authentic by the leading Hadeeth scholars, such as Al-Bukhaari and Muslim.

The disciplines of Hadeeth study are many and are sophisticated; you actually are taught them in specialized universities in the Muslim world! There is the Usool discipline (Foundations), the Takhreej discipline (scrutinization and rating of narrations), Ta’reekh discipline (biography of narrators), Al-Jarh wat-Ta`deel discipline (assessment of narrators), as well as the need to learn the vocabulary, customs, geography and society at the time of the Prophet (PBUH) until the Hadeeth books were authored three Centuries later.

What the Hadeeth scholars have done is a showcase of scientific discipline. Yet, they were human still and as human they could err despite their best efforts. Therefore, it is conceivable that a hadeeth could be rated authentic but has fundamental problems with it. This is a sensitive issue, because strict Muslims, such as the Salafis (blind followers of ancestors) reject the notion that the Salaf (ancestors) could have made mistakes. Other Muslims are puzzled by the apparent discrepancy, even contradiction, of what some hadeeths say and what the Quran says. Whenever such situation happens, Muslims typically have one of four reactions: (a) Pretend that there is no discrepancy, (b) Attempt to reconcile the two texts, (c) Favor the Quran over the Hadeeth, or, believe it or not, (d) Favor the Hadeeth over the Quran!

I humbly suggest that everybody should do (b)! And if they can’t, then at least (c). The other approaches to the problem are irrational, because a true hadeeth cannot possibly conflict with the Quran.

The women in your friend’s group have taken the cop-out position, which, IMHO, is just as bad as pretending there’s no problem.

Verse 5:3, which you cited, and the subsequent two verses were the last verses revealed of the Quran. The Prophet (PBUH) knew that his mission is complete and that perhaps his time was up. He said on his “farewell sermon” which immediately followed the revelation of 5:3-5, “Listen to me and understand what I’m saying, perhaps I will not see you again after this year of ours!” He died three months later. Thus, the “completion verse” meant that not only was the Quran complete, but the Hadeeth too. Their conveyor, peace be upon him, would shortly die.

So, to answer your main question: Those people don’t know how to handle hadeeths that seem to contradict the Quran, so they don’t bother with the Hadeeth at all. It’s a radical reaction, kind of like being diagnosed differently by different doctors then deciding that you won’t treat yourself at all! The right thing to do is to scrutinize the hadeeth. By doing so, and provided the hadeeth is authentic, one gains knowledge of what the hadeeth actually means and can see that no conflict exists between it and the Quran. That is a task that is understandably beyond the capacity of most Muslims. It is an obligation, IMHO, upon Muslim scholars to do this and ease people’s minds.