Since the late Nineteenth Century the idea that the Qurʾan should serve as the sole source of Islamic faith and practice has been articulated by a variety of Muslim thinkers in a variety of places. The idea itself is easily summarized: If the Qurʾan stands alone as the pure revelation of God, perfect and incomparable both in origins and transmission, then it must be the exclusive source of guidance for the faith and practice of Muslims. This apparently simple extrapolation from standard Muslim beliefs about the Qurʾan might be uninteresting except that most Muslims through most of Islamic history have thought differently. This project surveys the tropes and trajectories of modern Qur’anist movements from early 20th-Century Lahore and Amritsar to the Rashad Khalifa’s numerology and Edip Yüksel’s web-based polemics, highlighting the wider problems inherent to Islamic notions of revelation that Qur’anist ideas raise. Daniel W. Brown, “Qur’anists” in Herbert Berg, ed. Routledge Handbook on Early Islam (London and New York: Routledge, 2018).
Daniel Brown directs the Institute for the Study of Religion in the Middle East and is the author of Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought and A New Introduction to Islam.
