Quranism's Rejection of Scholarly Consensus as a Source of Law

Classical Sunni legal theory recognizes four sources of law, the Quran, the hadith, scholarly consensus known as ijma, and analogical reasoning known as qiyas, and Quranist thought rejects the second, third and, in most of its variants, the fourth as well, holding the Quran alone to be binding on a believer and denying that the accumulated agreement of past scholars carries any authority an individual reader is obligated to follow. Aisha Musa's study of the debate over hadith authority in Islamic thought traces Quranist objections to ijma specifically to a concern that consensus, unlike the Quranic text itself, is neither directly revealed nor reliably verifiable, since claims that scholars across history agreed on a given point typically rest on later scholarly reporting about earlier scholarly opinion rather than on any fixed, checkable record comparable to the Quran's own preserved text. Quranist writers argue that treating scholarly consensus as binding effectively places human authority on a level with revelation, a move they read as inconsistent with the Quran's own repeated instruction that believers are answerable to the text and to God directly, a position that places Quranism in direct methodological conflict with every classical Sunni legal school, which each treat ijma, however differently defined, as a legitimate and necessary source for resolving questions the Quran and hadith leave open.