What Rejecting Consensus Costs the Quranist Legal Method

Removing scholarly consensus from the sources a Quranist jurist may draw on has a practical consequence beyond the doctrinal point itself, since classical Islamic law relied on ijma precisely to settle questions the Quranic text does not address in enough detail to answer on its own, matters of ritual procedure, inheritance calculation and countless points of daily practice that centuries of scholarly agreement had resolved well before the modern period. Quranist thinkers, having set aside both hadith and consensus as most classical scholars use them, are left to derive such rulings through their own independent reading of the Quranic text, a method mainstream Sunni and Shia scholars criticize as discarding fourteen centuries of accumulated legal reasoning in favor of individual interpretation with no established check against error, while Quranist writers respond that reliance on scholarly consensus has itself produced significant disagreement across schools and periods, undermining the claim that consensus offers the reliable stability its defenders attribute to it. The Study Quran, a major contemporary commentary produced by scholars working broadly within the classical tradition, documents the range of positions later scholarship reached even where consensus was claimed, material Quranist writers cite as evidence that the supposed agreement modern Muslims are told to defer to was frequently narrower or more contested than later tradition presented it as being.