if you obey the majority of people, they will take you away from the path of The God. That is because they follow CONJECTURE, and they fail to think.”  (Quran, Sura al-An’am 6:114-116)

Many young Muslim students learn from early on not to question the mainstream, for sincere questions about religious authority are met with threats and intimidation: ‘Are you better than the sahaba who fought with the Prophet?’, or ‘Do you hate the Prophet that you question his Sunnah?’ And when they are older, they simply repeat to the younger generation what was told to them about going to Hell and disrespecting the Prophet.  On the contrary, the Qur’an says that the majority go to hell because they don’t think critically but follow conjecture.  Every individual has an obligation before God to use his reason and intellect to the best of his abilities to understand what God’s Word is really saying, not blindly follow fallible clerics.

Why don’t you follow Ahadith?
The choice is whether to focus on the ahadith (unrevealed human traditions) or Scripture (God’s Word).  The hadith wasn’t collected until around 200 years after Muhammad’s death, first by Imam Bukhari (d. 256/870). In his introduction, Bukhari states that out of almost 600,000 hadith, he could only record about 1% as authentic.  It is universally acknowledged by Muslim scholars that thousands of false hadith were composed in the early period of Islam and this was considered permissible.  Muhammad (pbuh) himself said:

“Do not write anything from me except the Qur’an. Whoever wrote, must destroy it” (Muslim, Zuhd 42:7147; Hanbel 3/12,21,39)

Caliph Umar knew this well, and therefore:

“…he instructed the Muslims throughout the provinces: “Whoever has a document bearing a hadith, shall destroy it.” The Ahadith, therefore, continued to be transmitted orally and was not collected and written down until the period of al-Mamun. (Muhammad Husayn Haykal, The Life of Muhammad, Cairo, 1935)

Umar also ordered Abu Hurayra not to narrate any more Hadith.  Likewise Zaid Ibn Thabit (primary collector of the Qur’an) repeated 30 years after Muhammad’s death, “The messenger of God ordered us never to write anything of his Hadith.” (Reported by Ibn Hanbal)

Although God promised to preserve his Word, he gave no similar promises of preserving human traditions.  Even among the traditions of Bukhari there are contradictory traditions and impossibilities which cannot be accepted.  The Qur’an emphasized the validity of the previous Scriptures over and over, but it never mentioned following hadith.