READER RESPONSE: Anti-Hadis

Azly out to bamboozle
Mr Subang
Apr 21, 06 4:05pm


Azly Rahman has recently written an article denouncing Muslims whom he describes as anti- Hadis.

He quotes two extended passages purportedly from one such anti-Hadis cult-member and goes on to say that these arguments in support of anti-Hadis groups merely reflect the weakness of the mind of those who refuse to read more than just the Quran. From what Azly provides, there is no evidence to suggest that the passages were written by an anti-Hadis Muslim. In fact, they seem anti anti-Hadis. Neither do the passages, for that matter, contain arguments as such. They merely describe the behaviour of anti-Hadis Muslims in Internet forums, albeit in a rather battlefield idiom.

Azly goes on to deride Quranist Muslims - as they might be more respectfully referred to - by asking, ‘If reading the Quran itself is too burdensome and too mentally-taxing for the docile mind, how might one expect these lazy thinkers to read the Hadis?’

Azly presumes that Quranist Muslims are anti-Hadis because they a) are lazy and b) have not read Hadis. I think that the lazy person here is Azly because it is apparent to me that it is he who is wantonly denouncing something about which he has not bothered to investigate. Quranists, in my experience, actually have a very good acquaintance with the Hadis and have, as a result of their sincere conviction, surmised that their faith shall be guided wholly by the holy Quran (just as one might have a very good acquaintance with creation science and remain a fervent evolutionist, for example).

Azly suggests that the anti-Hadis cult results from several deficits in understanding. These include of the ‘philosophy of history, of dialectical materialism, of Marxist theory of knowledge, of eschatological dimension of historical progress, ecclesiastical dimension of the life of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and a range of other bases of knowledge in Islam, pragmatism, and continental philosophy’.

I cannot help but feel that Azly demands a lot from his majority of Muslims. I am surprised to find that they can find the time to acquaint themselves with so many fields of knowledge amidst their rigorous study of the Quran and Hadis as well as have full working and family lives.

I also feel that the plethora of multiple-syllabic words that Azly deploys in his article is an attempt to bamboozle his readers into misapprehending the quality of his erudition. But, of course, it may well be that he has such a thoroughgoing knowledge of the various fields he demands of others, a knowledge that I would have thought would take at least four PhDs to acquire.

If so, he must be a scholar of frightening intellect.

It is then a great pity that it should be wasted in firstly, casting epithets like pseudo-intellectual, lazy, wayward, extremely radical, docile at those whose views he does not share and secondly, in drawing illogical conclusions such as that Quranist Muslims might one day target the Quran for de-legitimisation.

As an author who derides laziness, pseudo-intellectualism and scholarly in-erudition, I find Azly Rahman quite the hypocrite.


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