Why do Muslims

believer wrote: follow hadith when the Quran is supposed to be complete? Is it possible that Mohammad was not finnished when he died?

Quran is more than enough. we as human part of our job is to be reminder so the hadith has more detials about Mohamed PBUH, it tells you what and how he did things, so you remember and do the same

now the quran tells you to pray but you find how to pray in Quran because allah thought mohamed how.

simple answer for you is this

if you follow quran one of the things Quran ask you to do it to follow Mohamed and all Prophets , so hadith will be good for you to  Follow the Prophet



Edited by seif the truth

rami wrote: The Quran instructs us to do many things one major thing is to follow the advice of the prophet.

Is the prophet omniscient and infallible?  The advice that he gave to his followers in Arabia 1400 years ago may have been wise and good for that time and place, but the world has changed dramatically.  How could he have known what would be wise and good for a Muslim living today?

Surely only Allah is perfect, and only His advice (i.e., the Quran) is timeless.  It seems to me that by treating the words of the prophet as equal to those of Allah Himself you risk making the prophet into another god.

layalee wrote: What dramatic changes would you say has took place in the world that the messages that the Prophet Mohammed (p.b.u.h) provides may not be of suffient guidance for the 'ways' of today?

What a question!  What changes have there been in 1400 years?  Organ transplants, air travel, nuclear weapons, contraception, indoor plumbing, computers, global warming, the printing press, antibiotics, cloning, ... I could go on and on.  And that's just the technology.  There have been huge changes in society, in geography (a whole new continent!), world politics, economics, etc.  The problems we face today, and the solutions available, are nothing like the ones that Mohammed faced.

Just one example: I've been reading the discussion of "Beards" with great interest and amusement.  Such a lot of fuss over something so trivial!  Who could possibly believe that Allah would care one way or another whether a man has a beard or not?  And if He did care, why would he not have said so in the Quran, which is supposedly complete and perfect?

Certainly, Mohammed urged his followers to grow their beards.  Why?  Maybe he just liked beards, I don't know.  Or maybe, as I think I read somewhere, he may have done so to distinguish his followers from a rival religion where the men were clean-shaven, so it may have made sense at the time.  But I'm willing to bet that that rival religion, whatever it was, is now long-gone; and in any case, the other major group that I think of with long beards is Orthodox Judaism!  So does it still make sense?

rami wrote: Bi ismillahi rahmani raheem Is the prophet omniscient and infallible? No but Allah is and in his Omniscient and infallible ways said follow the advice of the prophet. He also said in his infallible and perfect Quran the prophet [sallah llahu alaihi wa sallam] does not speak from his own desire but only what he has been instructed to speak.

But surely this refers only to his recitation of the Quran!  The entire Sura (53) is about the divine revelation of the Quran, isn't it?

Is praying now different from how it was back then, is fasting, hajj, divorce, inheritance, theft, murder, human nature!

I would say yes, most of those things are indeed different.  The new things I listed are not just new in themselves - they also affect the older things that the Prophet spoke about.  I am not a Muslim and don't know in detail what the Prophet said, so it is difficult for me to give you a specific example, but I will try.

I believe (please correct me if I'm wrong) that the Prophet encouraged large families.  That may have made sense fourteen centuries ago because infant mortality was extremely high, the global population was small and resources were plentiful.  But now babies almost always live to adulthood, life expectancy has doubled or tripled, the planet has almost reached its capacity and resources are becoming scarce.  If the Prophet were alive today, do you think he would still be encouraging large families?  Why?