Re: Quran and sunnah is enough for us to be successful
For those people who think that hadith or scholars are put before Qur’an when we look to hadith and scholars.
Firstly, one must understand the process of legacy. Legacy is something that we take from our teachers, who in turn have taken from their teachers, going all the way back to Muhammad (SAW) or his companions (RA).
It is hence legacy that we try to uphold when we are confronted with the verses of Qur’an.
Just like our teachers have taught us and their teachers have taught them … the Sahabah used to be listening to Muhammad (SAW) narrating verses of the Qur’an. They used to form understandings immediately like any human would, but look at the humility and desire they had to be ‘correct’. They used to submit those understandings as secondary to the understanding of Muhammad (SAW).
When RasoolAllah used to ask them “Do you know what this means?” they used to reply,
“Allah (SWT) and His Messenger (SAW) know best” … i.e. they wanted to hear what the real authority said about the topic rather than formulating their own understanding from it.
We can indeed do the same. Our teachers ask us what we understand, we ask to know the way it is supposed to be understood. Now we can read a verse from the Qur’an ourselves, but it is not putting hadith before Qur’an if we consult hadith for the meanings given to those verses by the pious predecessors, Sahabah and the prophet (SAW) himself.
Rather infact we are upholding a tradition his legacy by submitting our own understandings to see what understandings on those verses came before - even for the clear verses.
If we say that the priority is Qur’an and then hadith we should only say this when we are comparing two opposing rulings, knowing that either the Qur’an or Hadith will have a context in which they differ. However, to obtain a deeper meaning of a verse from the Qur’an we must go to the hadith.
We should forsake our common sense in favour of hadith, but where hadith is silent then we should use that common sense. The Qur’an is where we take the initial concept from.
When some people say we follow Qur’an and not hadith … really they are saying:
We follow Qur’an the way we understand it and not the way the prophet Muhammad (SAW) or his companions understood it. That is what they really are saying.