Abu Bakr’s Stance on Hadith and the Problem with Anti-Quran-Alone Hadith Narration

A common maxim about the Hadith corpus is: for every Hadith, there is an equal and opposite Hadith. This reflects the reality that many individuals fabricated Hadith to support conflicting political or theological positions. The result is a vast, often contradictory body of literature—pro-Aisha Hadith, anti-Aisha Hadith; pro-Umayyad, anti-Umayyad; pro-Ali, anti-Ali—and this extends to core doctrinal debates as well.

One particularly fascinating subset is what may be called anti-Hadith Hadith—reports that, if taken as authentic, undermine the legitimacy of the Hadith corpus itself. Even more curious is the existence of anti-Quran-alone Hadith—a smaller collection of reports aimed at preemptively condemning those who would later argue for following the Quran as the sole source of Islamic law.

One of the most cited examples of this genre appears in both Sunan Ibn Majah and Sunan Abi Dawud. In these narrations, the Prophet is depicted warning against individuals who say the Quran alone is sufficient:

Miqdam bin Ma’dikarib Al-Kindi narrated that: The Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said: “Soon there will come a time that a man will be reclining on his pillow, and when one of my Ahadith is narrated he will say: ‘The Book of Allah is (sufficient) between us and you. Whatever it states is permissible, we will take as permissible, and whatever it states is forbidden, we will take as forbidden.’ Verily, whatever the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) has forbidden is like that which Allah has forbidden.”