History, Diversity and Reach

Impulses to privilege the Quran over hadith appear at various points in Islamic history, but Quranism as an articulated movement is largely a modern phenomenon, taking shape from the nineteenth century, especially in South Asia and Egypt, amid debates over reform, colonial modernity and the reliability of the traditional sciences.

Notable figures include the South Asian thinkers associated with the Ahl al-Quran and, in the twentieth century, Ghulam Ahmed Parwez; a separate and more controversial strand grew around Rashad Khalifa and the "Submitters" movement in the United States. Quranists do not form a single organised community but a diffuse tendency spanning very different theologies, and they remain a small minority within the wider Muslim world, often regarded with suspicion or rejected outright by mainstream Sunni and Shia authorities, for whom the Sunna is indispensable. The movement has drawn fresh attention in the internet age, which has given isolated Quran-centred thinkers and readers new means to connect. Scholars study it as part of the broader modern debate within Islam over the sources of authority and the authenticity of the hadith corpus, rather than as a denomination in the institutional sense.