Quran is understandable without Hadith
Quran according to itself is the miracle of the God; and a miracle by definition must be verifiable by people who witness it. Quran invites us to verify this claim by trying to bring a chapter like one of the Quran's.
And if you are in doubt concerning what We have sent down to Our servant, then bring a Surah like it, and invoke your helpers besides Allah, if you are truthful. (2:23)
The belief that Quran as the book that we are reading is the same as the divine message that was revealed long time ago, thus, does not require trusting the intermediary individuals along the history: each Muslim in any century can read the text and decide whether she finds it miraculous or not (Refer to Appendix I for further discussion).
Quran is revealed to be a reminder for all mankind:
You do not ask them any reward for it: it is just a reminder for all the nations. (12:104)
But how a message could be a reminder if it is not in an understandable form. And Quran is indeed simple and understandable by anyone:
Certainly We have made the Quran simple for the sake of admonishment. So is there anyone who will be admonished? (54:17)
Being comprehensible does not contradict with including unspecified names, quantities, etc. For example Quran mentioned the number of some particular keepers as 19 and explains that the story behind the number is intentionally left aside:
There are nineteen [keepers] over it. (74:30) We have assigned only angels as keepers of the Fire, and We have made their number merely a stumbling block for the faithless, and so that those who were given the Book may be reassured, and the faithful may increase in [their] faith, and so that those who were given the Book and the faithful may not be in doubt, and so that the faithless and those in whose hearts is a sickness may say, ‘What did Allah mean by this description?’ Thus does Allah lead astray whomever He wishes and guides whomever He wishes. No one knows the hosts of your Lord except Him, and it is just an admonition for all humans. (74:31)
Or as Quran explains it also includes some few ambiguous verses to test the ones who have sickness in their hearts:
It is He Who has revealed the Book to you. Some of its verses are absolutely clear and lucid, and these are the core of the Book. Others are ambiguous. Those in whose hearts there is perversity, always go about the part which is ambiguous, seeking mischief and seeking to arrive at its meaning arbitrarily, although none knows their true meaning except Allah. On the contrary, those firmly rooted in knowledge say: 'We believe in it; it is all from our Lord alone.' No one derives true admonition from anything except the men of understanding. (3:7)
Claim: Quran is not understandable without Hadith!
We explained above that Quran is a miraculous message that is independently verifiable (no need for Hadith to prove it) and independently understandable by the masses (no need for Hadith to explain it).
Hadith, on the other hand, is just a collection of sentences attributed to the prophet and is hence essentially part of the history; and the reliability of the details of the history is always questionable. To trust Hadith, one has to trust the honesty of the people who have carried them through the past centuries, and also to trust the skills of the Hadith historians, also known as religious Elders or scholars. Some Hadith-believers however not only use Hadith as a medium that explains the tradition, but also go way further and call Quran incomprehensible and introduce Hadith as the key to explain it in an understandable way. This has scared many Muslims from directly reading Quran without a Hadith-based interpretation offered by scholars.
This is an outrageous claim that disrespects Quran as the miracle of the God; this claim essentially implies that the God was unable to reveal an understandable book and we need to fix this flaw by attaching Hadith to it! Not only this outrageous claim is against common sense but as we show in the following it also contradicts with Quran as well as with Hadith. In this article we present this claim and show that it is in clear contradiction with Quran as well as with Hadith.
