Critique of the Qur’an-centered Approach in the Process of Jurisprudential Inference

Qur’an-centeredness is one of the long-standing trends in the field of religious education, including legislation. This trend has matured in the Sunnis with a clear historical background and through many ups and downs, and today it has followers among some Sunni scholars. But in the Shi’ite view it is new. In other words, if we consider the main characteristic of the Qur’an-centeredness as the exclusive authority of the Qur’an and the integrate negation of the Sunnah, these two qualities have not appeared in full in the Shi’ism. But at the same time, one cannot ignore the traces and layers of the presence of this trend in Shi’ite thought, such as a critical view of the hadith and the jurisprudential tradition of the past, the explanatory and emphatic dignity of the tradition, discrediting fame and consensus and abandoning the views of the past; signs that have led to the weak presence of tradition in the process of inference. The signs and symptoms of this presence is traceable both in the process of ijtihad and in its results and consequences; signs that are not digestible and justifiable in the Shi’ite jurisprudential tradition and show a kind of revisionism. This article, with the same view and citing the followers of this attitude, seeks to further explain and represent these signs and, of course, to critique and evaluate them.