The position and Role of Theologian Beliefs in Hadith Criticism and its Pathology

Having believed that Hadith Study is suffering from such defects as forgery, distortion, alteration, and paraphrasing, the Hadith scholars have paid much attention to the evaluation of the Hadith's document and text. In this respect, the Hadith scholars have made much use of the study of the narrators in assessing the documents. However, they have taken advantage of such criteria for assessing the text of Hadith as non-opposition to the Quran, non-opposition to the definitive tradition, non-opposition to reason, and non-opposition to human knowledge such as jurisprudence, history, and experimental sciences. One of the most important criteria for evaluating Hadith text, which has a long history, is the theologian beliefs. The scholars of the past have so far evaluated and criticized the hadith texts based on the theologian beliefs; however, these theologian beliefs have not yet been conceptualized. Thus, the use of this criterion has always been a concern of chaos, disorder and inappropriateness. This is caused one to criticize Hadith according to their own beliefs and faith. Also, the pathological use of this criterion has not been taken into account so far. This essay first focuses on the conceptualization of the theologian beliefs and then, on the pathology of the use of theological beliefs that are the main purpose of this paper. By examining this, it became clear that every theological belief did not have the merits of the criterion and the measure of evaluation. This paper also identified six disadvantages in the use of theological beliefs in the critique of hadith.