The Doctrine That the Quran Alone Can Bind

Quranist movements hold that the Quran is, in its own description, complete and clearly explained, and that nothing external to it is required to establish what God has obligated believers to do. On this reasoning the hadith corpus, the body of reports about the Prophet's sayings and actions first compiled in written collections roughly two centuries after his death, cannot carry binding legal authority alongside the Quran, however useful it may be as historical record, because a report transmitted across generations of oral chains cannot claim the same certainty as a text Muslims hold to have been preserved intact from revelation. Aisha Musa's study of the hadith rejectionist argument traces this position through Muslim writers who raised it well before the modern era, though it remained a minority reading contested by every established legal school, which built their entire methodology on hadith as the primary source for interpreting Quranic command. The established schools' standard reply, itself long predating the modern Quranist movement, is that the Quran commands prayer and fasting without specifying how many prayer cycles a day requires or how a fast is properly observed, so a text held to need no supplement in fact leaves its central obligations unstated without hadith to fill them in, a gap Quranist writers have answered in various and not always consistent ways.