Methods and Criteria of Compilation of Tradition Comprehension

Muhammad ibn Ya‘qūb al-Kulaynī, is the first of those scholars who devised the book of al-Kafi's with special attention to the science of dariyah al-hadith. Given the primacy of this science, al-Kulaynī, as the author of tradition comprehension (fiqh al-hadith) in the era of the formation of the collections of narrations, applied the unwritten principles of comprehension of hadith in al-Kafi. Kulaynī's fundamental principles include, the way of responding to a request for the formation of the collections of narrations, criteria for the recognition of the true and false tradition, categorizing, naming and type of traditions, the length of the compilation, explaining the chapters, compilation of al-Kafi based on the validity of each narrations, setting the narrations based on specific topics, analysis of some narrations, explaining the difficulties of some hadiths along with the elimination of possible contradictions and analyzing the chains of hadiths. These rules can be applied as the rules of tradition comprehension in the method and context.