Chronicling the Hadith " Hold to My Tradition and the Tradition of the Righteous Caliphs" (The Method of Chronicling the Chain of Transmission - Text)

Chronicling a hadith means assigning its date, place, its originator and its historical development. Western scholars often pay attention to the historical aspect of a hadith and consider it as one of the elements of reconstructing the history of Islam: the history its events, jurisprudence, dogmas, religious institutions, the interpretation of the holy Quran, etc. The main objective of historical criticism is finding out the original meaning of a text. In their analysis of religious texts and locating their historical context, critics follow a historical approach, which is a branch of literary criticism, and they try to find out the world which is behind the text by looking into older texts. In the 1970s when the formal analytical approach to reading the scriptures was introduced it also found its way into Islamic studies. Albrecht Note and his students introduced a kind of formal analysis, which is considered to be one of the best methods in narrational analysis, on the basis of the changes of the text in their research. In this method, the changes in narrations and their development from the first narrator to the complier of the narrative are studied and on this basis the approximate date of the narrative is estimated. This kind of historical analysis of narrative has a long history also in the analysis of the Muslim critics, and the scholars of hadith since a long time has referred to such cases. Nevertheless, considering such issues has not been much effective in determining the time of hadith and has not turned into a systematic analytical method. The analysis of the document-text on the basis of Albrecht Note theory, which has been developed by some of his students such as Shonler and Motski offers a good method for analyzing historical texts and identifying their date of origin. Since the best method for evaluating a theory is testing it on the basis of independent and external samples, in this research the mentioned method is tested on one sample narrative. This sample is the tradition “Hold to my tradition and the tradition of the righteous Caliphs,” which is reported by Arbadh Ibn Sariyeh.