Investigating and Criticizing the Israiliyyat of Stories of the Prophets in the Manhaj Al-Sadeghin

In many of the commentaries of Quran, in particular the narrative ones, there are a plenty of quotations about early prophet's biography, convictions and religion, originating from superstition and fictitious stories of people from other religions. These stories are called narrations of Israiliyyat. Without any criticism of these narrations, many commentators have quoted them. In the last century, there has been adopted a critical approach to these narrations by commentators and investigators. One of the Shiite commentaries which narrations of Israeli are contained in is the » Manhaj al-ṣādeqīn fī ilzām al-mukhālifīn« by Molla Fathallah Kashani. The commentator, sometimes, has mentioned the narrations for critical purpose. In other cases, however, the narrations of Israeli have mentioned without any criticism, in particular in stories of prophets such as Mohammad, Ayoub, Idris, and Jesus. In addition to problems in their documents, in their content also these narrations are vitiated and are inconsistent with Quran, hadiths of Imams, reason and knowledge. In this paper, which the data was analyzed by descriptive method and library studies, first the verses commented on the basis of these fictitious stories as well as Israeli narrations are explained and after classifying the narrations, we deal with the texts and documents critically.