Rescuing the Quran from Hermeneutics: Reclaiming the Quran’s Message from the Shadows of Unnecessary Interpretations

By Naseer Ahmed, New Age Islam 25 June 2025 Introduction The Quran describes itself as “a clear Book” (kitābun mubīn)—a guidance whose verses are “fully explained in detail” (fuṣṣilat āyātuhu) and revealed in “clear Arabic language” (lisānin ʻarabiyyin mubīn). Yet, Muslims have inherited a religious culture that treats this divine clarity as insufficient. The Quran is often read as if it were incomplete, confusing, or ambiguous, dependent on the scaffolding of hadith literature and the interpretive tools of foreign intellectual traditions to make sense. This essay is a call to return. Not to classical commentaries and interpretations or modern hermeneutics, but to the Quran itself—on its own terms. We argue that the Quran needs no interpretive rescue. What it needs is a reader trained in consistency, logical inference, and contextual cross-referencing. It is not interpretation that unlocks the Quran, but disciplined attention. Part I: Hadith as a Source of Distortion No body of literature has done more to obscure the clarity of the Quran than the hadith corpus. Compiled long after the Prophet’s death, many of these reports present teachings and narratives that the Quran either contradicts or renders unnecessary. There is hardly a subject where this divergence does not arise—whether it is war, divorce, testimony, inheritance, or even the performance of Hajj. Ibn Kathir quotes one especially destructive hadith in his commentary on verses 2:191–193 and 8:36–38. It is collected in both Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, and claims the Prophet (pbuh) said: "I was commanded to fight against the people until they proclaim, 'There is no deity worthy of worship except Allah.' If and when they say it, they will preserve their blood and wealth from me, except for its right (Islamic penal code), and their reckoning is with Allah..." Based on this report, generations of Muslims have believed that the Prophet’s battles were fought to eliminate disbelief or to compel conversion—an idea that finds no support in the Quran. The Quran restricts armed struggle strictly to resisting oppression and aggression (2:190–193). It emphasizes that if the enemy inclines to peace, peace must be pursued (8:61). It forbids compulsion in religion (2:256). It commands that non-Muslims seeking asylum must be protected and given safe passage (9:6). None of this aligns with a mission to kill or convert. However, based on this hadith, several verses have been misinterpreted. Take 8:39 as an example. Fight until there is no more “fitna,” which is often misconstrued as meaning disbelief. In fact, “fitna” in this verse means religious persecution. The correct meaning is apparent from the justification for the command: to end persecution in all its forms, not disbelief. “Fight until the Deen of Allah prevails completely” becomes “fight until there is worship only for Allah,” which distorts the meaning. Deen of Allah means the law of Allah, which includes “no compulsion in religion.” Verse 9:29, which allows polytheists not subject to the punishment in 9:5 and the People of the Book to pay jiziya and live peacefully with complete freedom to follow their religion under the protection of the state, is interpreted to keep the polytheists out of its scope. They must either accept Islam or be killed—because of the hadith. To protect the status of the hadith, scholars have often reinterpreted the Quran to conform to it, reversing the divine order. The Quran, which should be the Furqan (criterion), is subordinated to texts it was meant to judge. Part II: The Trojan Horse of Hermeneutics While hadith distortion is familiar to many, a more subtle and insidious influence has crept in through Western academia: hermeneutics. Born in the Judeo-Christian tradition, hermeneutics became necessary to cope with morally, theologically, or scientifically problematic texts—such as divine commands to commit genocide (e.g., 1 Samuel 15:3), or depictions of God as regretful, forgetful, jealous, or physically limited, or the description of creation in which vegetation is created on the third day, but the sun is not created until the fourth. To preserve belief, theologians developed interpretive strategies that allegorise, historicize, or abstract away the literal meaning. But to apply these tools to the Quran—a text that proclaims itself morally coherent and linguistically precise—is not only unnecessary, it is an insult to the word of Allah. Using hermeneutics on the Quran assumes that its surface meaning is untrustworthy. It replaces the reader’s trust in divine speech with a reliance on academic gatekeepers. It veils what the Quran claims to unveil. An Example of the Abuses of Hermeneutics Does Hell contradict the Attribute of Mercy? Let us consider a response based on the Quran’s internal logic: If there were no Hell, would the world have been a better place? Allah is the epitome of morality—the One who maximises all that is truly good. Hell is not in opposition to mercy; it is a part of His mercy. Without it, oppression, injustice, and moral chaos would prevail. The Quran describes Hell as a continuous and purposeful torment: (4:56) Indeed, those who disbelieve in Our verses – We will drive them into a Fire. Every time their skins are roasted through, We will replace them with other skins so they may taste the punishment. Indeed, Allah is Exalted in Might and Wise. If the warning of Hell were not an act of mercy, Allah would not have repeated, amid its terrifying descriptions: (55:37–45) When the sky is rent asunder... Then which of the favours of your Lord will you deny?... This is the Hell which the sinners deny... Then which of the favours of your Lord will you deny? These refrains declare that even the warning and existence of Hell is among His favours, not despite its severity, but because of it. Our capacity for good and evil stems from the autonomy Allah has granted us. Without free will, we would be like animals, incapable of moral growth. Heaven and Hell are consequences of this autonomy. To suggest that Hell is too harsh is to suggest that Allah should not have created us with this capacity in the first place. Was Allah unjust in creating Adam and favouring his progeny over all creation? To weaken the punishment of Hell is to flatten the moral landscape. If Hell were less severe, Heaven would be less rewarding, and our autonomy curtailed accordingly. Allah, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, created the perfect balance: the capacity for true moral choice, and the consequences that give that choice meaning. Thus, the creation of Hell is not a contradiction of mercy—it is its manifestation. Without it, there would be no Heaven, and no moral autonomy either. There would have been no Cognitive Revolution, and we would have remained hominins like our evolutionary predecessors. Perhaps, in such a case, there would have been no reason for Allah to create the universe at all. (15:85) We created not the heavens, the earth, and all between them, but for just ends. Ponder over what those just ends are. Then which of the favours of your Lord will you deny? The beginning of wisdom, therefore, is not to resist, but submit—and then seek the best explanation. When the same question is responded to based on “hermeneutics”, it invokes overarching Quranic themes of divine mercy (Rahmah) and justice (ʿAdl), and the inherent purpose of divine punishment. Where is the need for this? The verses reflect all of those features of Rahmah, ʿAdl, and divine purpose and do not require these filters. Subjectively, one may interpret divine mercy in a way that allegorises the punishment and make it meaningless. Part III: Interpretation vs. Logical Inference Let us be precise: interpretation, as commonly understood, is the act of assigning meaning to that which is unclear or ambiguous. But the Quran repeatedly insists that it is not ambiguous. It is mubin (clear), bayyin (self-evident), tibyan li kulli shay’ (an explanation of everything). Therefore, what the Quran demands is not interpretation but logical inference, internal consistency, and methodical reading. Assembling all relevant verses on a subject and analysing their mutual coherence is not “hermeneutics” in the postmodern sense. It is no different from solving a logical puzzle. Tafsir bil-Qur'an (تفسير القرآن بالقرآن), or the interpretation of the Quran by the Quran itself, is the method the Quran asks us to follow, and this is the method employed in all my articles, such as: • From Adam to Everyone: The Eternal Path of Salvation for All, and • Surah Al-Bayyina and the ‘Worst of Creatures’: A Misreading That Spanned Centuries? These articles yield results that dismantle centuries of misreadings—without appealing to philosophical jargon or scholastic elitism. They operate strictly within the Quran’s framework. Is this not rigorous enough? Or is “rigor” only acknowledged when cloaked in terminology foreign to the Quran? Part IV: A Litmus Test — The Word “Kafir” The most widespread and damaging interpretive error in the history of Quranic exegesis is the conflation of Kafir with disbeliever. Has centuries of hermeneutics corrected this? No. But a single verse is enough to dismantle the error—if read with care. Surah Al-Baqarah (2:6): “As to the Kafaru, it is the same to them whether you warn them or do not warn them; they will not believe.” Does this mean all disbelievers are beyond warning? Clearly not. The Quran commands prophets to warn disbelievers, many of whom do believe eventually. Therefore, Kafaru here cannot mean “all disbelievers.” It refers to a specific class: those who are obstinate and sealed off from truth. From this, one must conclude: • Not all disbelievers are Kafirs • Therefore, “Kafir” ≠ “disbeliever” Further verses confirm this: • 3:90 and 4:137 speak of people who disbelieve and then believe again. • Kufr is also used for believers who deny bounties (16:112), reject moral commands (5:44), those who do not spend in charity or do so without good grace (2:254, 2:264, 4:37), or consume usury (3:130). • The Quran frames kufr as denial, defiance, ingratitude, rebellion and oppression, and not as a lack of belief. A disbeliever is not a kafir unless he also fights against belief. Thus, the Quran’s use of Kafir is: • Faith-neutral, and • Behavioural, not creedal. If the premises are the literal meaning of the verses, then logical inferences based on them are true by definition and do not require external validation. It is as if what is logically inferred is explicitly stated by the text. Although the Quran does not explicitly state that “Kafir” ≠ “disbeliever”, since this is a logical inference, it is as good as if the Quran had stated it explicitly. For confirmation, we may look for verses that contradict this inference. There are none. The method of logical inference is therefore sound. Let us now apply the rule “Kafir” ≠ “disbeliever” to the war verses in which kafaru is mistranslated as “disbeliever” by every translator. Then in these verses Kafaru becomes “oppressor,” rendering the message faith-neutral. The command to fight oppression becomes a command to fight every oppressor irrespective of their faith to protect the oppressed irrespective of their faith. It becomes a command to all just people, irrespective of their faith, to band together to fight against injustice and oppression. Quranic ethics is universalised simply by correcting a mistranslation using logical analysis and inference. Part IV: Distortions by Asbab al-Nuzul The Quran provides the context, where necessary, to understand the meaning and scope of its command. For example, the context for 9:5 and its limits are defined by the previous four verses and the one immediately following it. This makes 9:5 inapplicable in any situation, and serves only as a historical record of the judgment on the vanquished Meccan polytheists. However, 9:5 is misused, ignoring the context provided by the Quran, by people who invoke a context absent in the Quran. One striking example is the treatment of the verse: “Let there be no compulsion in religion” (2:256) A statement of profound moral and universal significance has been contextualised away by many classical commentators. Some claim it was abrogated, others restrict its application to specific historical communities. The result is that a foundational ethical principle is rendered null simply because it did not align with later political or legal needs. This is the danger of overreliance on inherited exegesis: it can domesticate the Quran’s radical moral voice, subordinating it to inherited structures of power or polemic. The Quran is not tribal scripture; it is universal guidance. Part V: The Limits of Classical Tafsir Approximately one-third of the verses in the Quran are Mutashabihat (allegorical), which were ambiguous to early scholars because the knowledge required to understand their meaning was unavailable until scientific discoveries in recent centuries. Even their tafsir on the Muhkamat (clear) verses are often based on unreliable hadith or asbab al-nuzul rather than logical inference. Part VI: Is Clarity Possible Without Interpretation or Hermeneutics? Scholars argue that “no reading is truly plain or neutral” because every reader brings a bias. That may be true in literature or politics, but not in disciplines governed by internal logic and definitional precision, such as mathematics. Why don’t mathematicians bring their biases into theorems? Because their discipline does not permit it. A faulty conclusion violates internal consistency and is therefore immediately rejected. The same standard applies to Quranic inquiry. If a method: • Respects internal coherence, • Grounds itself in Quranic definitions, • Tests conclusions against logical consistency, and • Verifies through comprehensive cross-referencing, …then bias is kept in check. Any flawed reading will expose itself by creating a contradiction, which the Quran (cf. 4:82) does not allow. Speculative or borrowed frameworks often complicate what is simple, and worse, can preserve distortion if it is clad in enough scholarly authority. Epilogue: Return to the Furqan The Quran is not a riddle. It is a criterion—Al-Furqan. It is not in need of rescue through hadith, or reinterpretation through hermeneutics. What it requires is careful reading, internal cross-referencing, and a commitment to never impose meanings upon it that it does not affirm for itself. True tafsir is not theological embroidery—it is listening with discipline. It is resisting the temptation to interpret when inference suffices. It is reading the Quran as it asked to be read. To reclaim the Quran is not to abandon scholarship, but to place it back in service of the text—not over it. When we do this, the Quran begins to speak again—not in the voice of its interpreters, but in its own. ….. A frequent contributor to NewAgeIslam.com, Naseer Ahmed is an independent researcher and Quran-centric thinker whose work bridges faith, reason, and contemporary knowledge systems. Through a method rooted in intra-Quranic analysis and scientific coherence, the author has offered ground-breaking interpretations that challenge traditional dogma while staying firmly within the Quran’s framework. His work represents a bold, reasoned, and deeply reverent attempt to revive the Quran’s message in a language the modern world can test and trust. URL: https://www.newageislam.com/debating-islam/rescuing-quran-hermeneutics-message-interpretations/d/135981 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism