Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: why do so many analysts find the quran — January 26, 2025 · m9ak9v3 | Ali Shukri Amin

A decent amount of corporal or capital punishments are described in the Quran. So are the fundamental rules of Qisas and Diya.

The Quran describes the fundamentals of Islamic contract law, the prohibition on usury, and is the primary evidence used on zakah.

It's the primary evidence for witness testimony in courts.

It's the primary evidence for dietary laws.

Additionally, all of the schools of jurisprudence were required to justify their interpretative methodologies across Quran and hadith using the Quran. To be considered legitimate, they had to derive maxims of law from the Quran that were then consistently applied elsewhere. So outside of the specific legal regulations for which the Quran is the primary reference, the jurists had to justify a lot of their hadith interpretations with the Quran.

In fact the Hanafis would not allow a hadith to modify Quranic statements and would reject any hadith that seemed to facially contradict the Quran.

\>I have no doubt that there have been attempts to do legal exegesis out of the Qur'an, but the fact is that the Qur'an itself does not say that much about law. Any attempt to derive, say, a whole modern implemented legal system from the Qur'an will be >>>99% exegesis and not what the Qur'an itself says.

Yes but that does not mean from the perspective of an anthropological sense the Quran isn't holding some kind of preeminance in the mind of these exegetes and jurists. If we look at American congressional bills the US constitution is basically irrelevant to them unless they are litigated in court. But congresspeople who are sincere patriots are always trying to legislate according to their interpretation of that text.

\>I read the Qur'an a lot. In fact, throughout this conversation, I've really been the only one citing the Qur'an's legal content, like the scope of that content, its comments on interest, dietary regulations, etc.

I think you'd benefit from a 3 month program overseas somewhere if solely from an academic perspective to get a lived experience for how people deal with this text. It's great to understand it in a theoretical sense but there's also a lived component to the Quran and it kind of removes a lot of the impact when we're only interacting with it from one lense.