Scholar Timothy Furnish describes the textual basis for Islam:
For Muslims two authoritative poles of religious reference exist: the Qur'an, and the Sunnah plus the Hadith (Arabic plural Ahadith). The Sunnah is the customary practice of the Islamic community as derived from the actions and words of the prophet Muhammad.
For the practical purposes of Islam, i.e., sorting out the details of Sharia law, and especially the non-negotiable core of Sharia, which is called Hadd or Hudud, Muslim scholars must rely on the primary texts.
But not all primary texts are viewed with equal trust. It is the task, and the conflict, of Islamic scholars to rank these various texts in terms of their reliability.
Hadiths are narrative accounts of the these same actions and pronouncements, rather like “hearsay” records of what Muhammad did and said. Hadiths are not the word of God in the sense that the Qur'an is, but they are of only slightly lesser importance. They were almost certainly orally transmitted for some time before being redacted in the first few centuries of Islamic history. A specialized field of hadith criticism and analysis developed as a means of sorting the wheat of legitimate traditions - that is, ones that ostensibly truly went back to Muhammad - from the chaff of forgeries.
The opportunity both for ambiguity and for dispute is apparent. Because Islam in practice is more of a socio-political program than a personal meditative spirituality, points of textual interpretation are less about conceptual abstractions regarding the nature of the deity, and more about concrete details of communal living.
More than a millennium’s worth of armed conflict within and between Muslim communities fuels, and is fueled by, the prioritization of one text over another.
The complexities of Islamic politics cannot be explained by the Qur’an alone. Any student of Islam must survey a much broader variety of principle texts which form an underlying basis.
