The Rules of Matn Criticism: There are No Rules

Abstract

This research is a translation of Jonathan A.C. Brown's research, entitled "The Rules of Matn Criticism: There are No Rules." It is found that there are traditional rules established by the Sunnis to deal with hadith. These rules made the mind subject to the text and not the other way around. They rejected the criticism of the transmitted text. The research discusses a number of theoretical and practical opinions on this, the adoption of the rules of text criticism in Sunni Islam, the Sunni rejection of text criticism in theory and practice, the tension between subjective rationality and submission to the requirements of revelation in Hadith, the two opposites in text criticism, the subjective approach in approaching the texts of certain hadiths in pre-modern Islam, and the continuation and exacerbation of the crisis in the modern era. The research reached a number of conclusions. First, the leading scholar of hadith judges with a systematic sense based on awe of attribution to the revelation, and with its commitment to good faith in its interpretation. Secondly, a non-textual dominance of reason, science, and common intuition can overcome scholars' willingness to accept hadith as part of revelation. This tension between these two factors was a central pattern in Sunni scholarly dealings with sacred texts.