Abstract:

The present paper has the purpose to outline Fakhruddin al-Rāzī’s (d. 606/1210) understanding of ḥadīth. Al-Rāzī is best known for his thoughts in islamic theology, science of the principles of jurisprudence and Qurʾānic exegesis. He takes holistic criteria as a basis in his ideas and interprets the religious texts according to these criteria. He accepts only those traditions which conform to these criteria and rejects those which contradict these criteria, regardless of the sources wherein these traditions are recorded. In order to correctly analyse the minds of Razi who has not written any special work on hadith we have to look at his philosophical and theological theories. His philosophical ideas like protection of the prophets from mistakes, taking intelligence as a basis for evaluation of transmitted knowledge, classification of knowledge as definitive (qatʿī) and speculative (ẓannī) and cosmological idea of high being and low being are the criteria which play the constitutive role in his approach to the Prophetic traditions. His classification of mutawātir and āḥād also resulted from his theological thought. The ideas of Rāzī about transmission and interpretation of the hadiths according to these conceptions have the quality to bring new explorations particularly in current research field of hadith text (matn) criticism.

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