Koranists and Karaites: two forms of scripturalism facing the interpretive tradition

Introduction The history of religious traditions regularly shows the emergence of movements which challenge, to varying degrees, the authority of established interpretative traditions in favor of a direct return to the Scriptures. This phenomenon, which can be compared to scripturalism, does not, however, constitute a homogeneous phenomenon: it appears in very different historical, theological and social contexts. In medieval Judaism, Karaism was notably formed around a challenge to the normative authority of rabbinic tradition and the Talmud, by granting Scripture a central place in the development of religious norms.

In the contemporary Muslim world, different currents qualified as Koranists (Qurʾāniyyūn) question, sometimes with very diverse positions, the normative authority of hadiths and the Sunnah in the interpretation of the Quran and the determination of religious practices. It would be historically excessive to consider these two movements as identical. They belong to profoundly different periods, societies and intellectual configurations. A comparison nevertheless remains possible on a specific point: the questioning of an interpretative and legal tradition considered authoritative alongside the revealed text.

This comparison then allows us to ask a fundamental question: can we understand and put into practice a Scripture independently of the traditions of transmission, interpretation and exegesis which have been formed around it? I. The primacy of Scripture and the contestation of traditional authority Karaism appeared in the medieval Near East, particularly from the 8th-9th centuries, in a context of particularly important debates around religious authority. The Karaites grant the written Torah a fundamental normative authority and contest the obligatory authority attributed by rabbinic Judaism to the oral Torah, of which the Talmud constitutes one of the main expressions.

It should nevertheless be noted that Karaism is not devoid of intellectual tradition. Karaite commentators, jurists and grammarians have produced considerable literature over the centuries. The debate therefore does not simply concern the opposition between "text" and "absence of tradition", but more on the nature of religious authority and the legitimate conditions for the interpretation of the text. A comparable problem, although in a very different context, appears among contemporary Koranist trends.

These bring together very diverse thinkers and movements, but have in common that they consider the Quran as the sufficient normative religious source, or that they contest the independent normative authority traditionally attributed to the Sunnah and the hadiths. There is thus, in both cases, a desire to return to the revealed text as the primary foundation of faith and practice. However, this approach immediately raises a methodological difficulty: who interprets the text, using what methods and with what validation criteria?

II. The problem of interpretation without a common hermeneutical framework A Scripture never presents itself as a text isolated from its linguistic, historical and social environment. Its understanding presupposes mastery of the language, knowledge of the context of revelation or composition, analysis of the terms used, study of related passages as well as knowledge of the practices and interpretations transmitted. In the classical Islamic tradition, this necessity gave rise to a particularly developed set of disciplines: Quranic exegesis (tafsīr), sciences of hadith (ʿulūm al-ḥadīth), jurisprudence (fiqh), foundations of law (uṣūl al-fiqh), sciences of the Arabic language and other auxiliary disciplines.

The function of these sciences was not simply to multiply the intermediaries between the believer and the text. They also aimed to establish rules allowing a reasoned interpretation to be distinguished from a purely subjective reading. The problem posed by a strictly individualist approach to the text is therefore less the existence of a personal reading than the possible absence of criteria allowing this reading to be controlled. Two people with the same text can in fact reach different conclusions when they share neither hermeneutic method, nor corpus of authorities, nor common principles of interpretation.

III. The question of the Sunnah in Islam In classical Islamic thought, the relationship between the Quran and the Sunnah is not based on the idea that two independent sources have been placed arbitrarily on the same level. The Sunnah is traditionally considered as a source allowing us to understand, clarify and put into practice Quranic prescriptions. The Qur'an itself presents the Prophet Muḥammad as a figure responsible not only for transmitting revelation, but also for explaining and teaching it.

Allah says: وَأَنزَلْنَا إِلَيْكَ الذِّكْرَ لِتُبَيِّنَ لِلنَّاسِ مَا نُزِّلَ إِلَيْهِمْ “We have sent down to you the Reminder so that you may make clear to men what has been sent down for them. » Quran, 16:44 This prophetic function of clarification constitutes one of the major foundations on which jurists and traditionists have constructed the place of the Sunnah in the development of religious norms. Prayer is a particularly significant example. The Quran orders prayer on numerous occasions, but does not provide, in the form of a systematic manual, all of the practical modalities for its accomplishment: number of units of prayer, detailed succession of gestures, formulas pronounced, etc.

The prophetic tradition then plays an essential role in the transmission of the practice. The same reasoning can be applied to other areas of worship and religious law. IV. An important consequence: the plurality of interpretations One of the major issues in the debate therefore concerns the possibility of establishing a common religious norm when the authority of the interpretative tradition is greatly reduced. In the case of Karaite Judaism, history shows that the abandonment of rabbinic autho