Ibn Bābawayh's Method in Criticizing Ḥadīth (Study of the Most Important Indexes of Shaykh Ṣadūq's Critical Approach to Ḥadīth)

The written works of Ibn Bābawayh (Shaykh Ṣadūq), head of the traditionists and the distinguished figure of Shī‘ī ḥadīth in fourth/tenth century, had amounted to 300 books and treatises. A proficient scholar, he has standards and criteria in the field of ḥadīth in general and in criticizing ḥadīth in particular that incorporate approaches and patterns as a guide map and a role model. In order to obtain a relatively more precise and complete image of the nature of the eminent scholarly personality of Ibn Bābawayh, the cognition of his patterns, standards, and methods in the realm of criticizing ḥadīth and its academic study is useful and of importance in the field of ḥadīth studies; because the above study and cognition can, among other things, contain useful lessons, applicable models, and excellent approaches for a better and more accurate understanding of ḥadīth. Ibn Bābawayh’s critical ideas concerning traditions and narrations can be uncovered throughout his works. In this article, Shaykh Ṣadūq’s ideas and critical method and approach in the expanse of “criticizing ḥadīth” are studied, examined, and evaluated in such instances as “dissimulative traditions”, “extras of traditions”, “distortions created in traditions”, “the mutifarrid traditions (narrated by only one narrator) and unrecorded traditions in the early shī‘a principles”, “sectarian tendencies and the narrators’ school of thought”, “some narrators’ mutifarridāt (traditions narrated by only one narrator)”, “the category of sanad of some famous traditions”, etc.