Is Islam Based On The Qur’an?

The Trilogy of Qur’an, Sirah and Hadith. Allah is found in the Qur’an and Mohammed is found in the Sirah (his biography) and the Hadith (his traditions of small stories and sayings). There is a special name for the sum of the Sirah and the Hadith, the Sunna.

The most commonly belief about Islam: it is based upon the Qur’an.

It is not.

Let’s do a statistical analysis:

How important is the Qur’an? It contains about 153,000 words. The Sirah (by Ibn Ishaq) contains about 292,000 words, and the Hadith has 646,000 words (using the Bukhari text). So Allah is about 14% of the total of the Trilogy and the Sunnah (Mohammed’s words and deeds) is 86% of the total. These are only a quantitative measure, but still, it points out how important Mohammed is compared to Allah, based upon the amount of text.

This is born out further by noticing that the Qur’an does not contain enough information to practice even one of the Five Pillars of Islam. Only the Sunnah (primarily the Hadith for religious practice) tells the Muslim how to worship.

The above statistical measure shows that Islam primarily is based on the saying and deeds of Mohammad, sws.

Once the Qur’an is rearranged in the right time order – from Mecca to Medina etc – categorized and Prophet’s life is woven back into it, another fact leaps from the page. Very little of the Qur’an is devoted to how to be a Muslim, the religion of Islam. Instead, the majority of the Qur’an is about kafirs, non-Muslims. Kafirs are the worst of the creation. Allah hates kafirs and plots against them. Kafirs can be tortured, murdered, robbed, and enslaved etc. The Qur’an is fixated on kafirs.

To measure the Qur’anic fixation on kafirs, let us measure the fixation by counting the amount of text devoted to them. In Mecca an astounding 67% of the text is devoted to the kafir. In Medina 51% was about kafirs. The amount of text in the entire Qur’an devoted to kafirs is 61%.

As an aside, Islam excludes kafirs in every way from its religious practice. Since the kafir is outside of Islam, the term political Islam is used to describe the doctrine of Islam as it is applied to the “others”, the kafirs. So 61% of the Qur’an is about political Islam, not religious Islam. The Sirah shows the importance of Islam’s political nature. The Prophet preached the religion of Islam for 13 years in Mecca and only gained 150 followers. He moved to Medina where he became a politician and warrior. After 10 years -an astoundingly short time – he became a virtual ruler of all Arabia without a single enemy left standing. He was involved in an armed struggle every 6 weeks for the last 9 years of his life.

The Hadith of Bukhari gives all of the tactical details of jihad. A simple counting method shows that 3% of the hadiths are about the inner struggle, whereas, 97% of the hadiths are about jihad as war. So is jihad the inner struggle? Yes, 3%. Is jihad the war against kafirs?

Any one with a basic understanding of research methodology and data analysis knows that we cannot use a quantitative measure based on number of words to conclude which written document has contributed more in a system of belief/ideology.

Here is an example:

1. The American constitution contains about 8114 words.

2. The collection of writings and sayings of Abraham Lincoln that is the content of the book The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln by David Widger contains 551276

So with the same logic that the writer of the article provides, we can conclude that Americans only claim that their country is ruled based on the American constitution, the fact is, it is ruled based on the Abraham Lincoln’s sayings and writings, simply because American Constitution is only 1.47% of the collection of sayings and writings of Abraham Lincoln!

Same argument can be made about any religion and any nation and any system of belief or science.

The fact of the matter is that we cannot judge about the extent of contribution of a text simply by counting the number of the words in that text. Some times a single page forms the basis of a belief and then thousands of pages are written only to explain that single page or to explain the circumstances surrounding that single page.

Further, there are a number of points that need to be emphasised:

A. It is only natural that when an ideology starts to develop (whether it is religious or not), beside its main and fundamental text, its followers later start to write as much as possible about that ideology and its promoters. In doing so, they usually write thousands of pages and volumes of books containing the history and what ever is reported from the promoters of that ideology. This does not mean that people have ignored that fundamental text, this is simply the flow of knowledge transfer that happens in every discipline and every system of belief.

B. The Qur’an was written down and put together at the time of the Prophet (sws). At his time the Prophet did not promote or encourage writing down anything other than the Qur’an. The books of Hadith and history only started to be written about a century after the death of the Prophet (sws).

C. Although parts of the books of Hadith are about the Prophet (sws), the majority of the contents of these books are sayings attributed to the Prophet (sws) in explaining the beliefs, rules, moral values and stories that the Qur’an has talked about. In other words, these books (no matter how authentic they are) are simply attempting to explain and further elaborate on what the Qur’an is saying.

Apart from the above, the author has made a few other arguments which are addressed as follows:

1. He writes: “Very little of the Qur’an is devoted to how to be a Muslim, the religion of Islam.”

It is important to note that Islam and Muslim are not new concepts in the history of Abrahamic religions. In fact, the religion that was promoted by the prophets of God is only one and that is to submit ourselves to God (which in Arabic literally means Islam) and all the prophets of God had submitted themselves to Him (so in Arabic they can refer to as Muslims). A Muslim needs to do nothing complicated, he is only expected to worship none but the one and only God, to be a good and modest person, to encourage good and stop bad and to put his effort in purifying his soul. None of these need a higher education degree! Appreciating the Almighty and distinguishing good from bad is part of the human instinct and this is why the Qur’an says that Islam is part of the nature of human being (Qur’an: 30:30).

Apart from the above mentioned clear concepts, where some specific guidelines were needed, the Qur’an has provided them and the Prophet (sws) has elaborated on them in his Sunnah.

2. He writes “the majority of the Qur’an is about kafirs, non-Muslims. … Since the kafir is outside of Islam, the term political Islam is used to describe the doctrine of Islam as it is applied to the “others”, the kafirs. So 61% of the Qur’an is about political Islam, not religious Islam.”

This is a major misunderstanding of the concept of Kufr and the purpose of addressing Kuffar in the Qur’an. Any one who is not Muslim, is non-Muslim, however not every non-Muslim is Kafir. In the terminology of the Qur’an, Kafir is a person who is convinced about the true message of Islam, yet due to his arrogance he rejects the message.

The theme of the Qu’an is the warning given by the Prophet (sws) to his addressees (Qur’an: 6:19). This warning is based on a divine rule. Based on this rule the messenger of God is capable of making his message so crystal clear to his ‘direct’ addressees that they will remain with no excuse. In other words based on this rule the direct addresses of a messenger of God will reach to the sage that they will either accept the message or they will deny it despite knowing its truth, which means they will become Kafir. The Qur’an is warning the addressees of the Prophet (sws) against becoming Kafir. This explains why there is an emphasis on the concept of Kufr in the Qur’an.

Looking at the issue from this angle, it becomes clear that the emphasis of the Qur’an on the concept of Kufr is in fact religious rather than political.

3. The author seems to be uncomfortable with the fact that the Prophet (sws) managed to conquer the whole Arabia in only 10 years, when before that he only had a small number of followers. For one who is familiar with the Qur’an or even with the Bible, there is no surprise here. The Qur’an says: “God has written down; ‘I and my messengers will most certainly prevail” (Qur’an 58:21). In other words even this victory is part of the same divine rule that I was explaining in the last paragraph. While such victory certainly needs political leadership, its motives and origins are nothing but religion.

Two minor points remain:

– The author is certainly correct that Jihad in Islamic terminology in principle means fighting rather than inner struggle.

– At the beginning of his writing the author says: “There is a special name for the sum of the
Sirahand the Hadith, the Sunna.”. This is not correct. Sira, Hadith and Sunnah are three different things although I do appreciate that some times some Muslims use them interchangeably.