Textual and Content Criticism of Narratives of Prohibition of Residence in the Villages

Keeping one's residence in small villages is severely censured in some of the hadiths of the Infallible (pbuh). These hadiths regard the residents of small villages ignorant and oblivious of Allah's precepts, bounds and laws, and forbids residence in small villages. Today, the above-mentioned characteristics have, to some extents, been removed from many rural areas due to the scientific and spiritual growth of the society. Besides, people are nowadays enjoined to migrate from urban to rural areas to preserve rural resources and to consolidate taking up residence in rural areas. These attitudes outwardly contradict the hadiths. Therefore, an analytical survey of the hadiths forbidding keeping residence in small villages and a clarification of their intended meaning required that the present research be done. The present essay collected a number of interrelated hadiths, traced their sources, and clarified their intended meaning through an analytical-descriptive approach. The research resulted in the fact that the hadiths against keeping one's residence in small villages do not censure or forbid residing in rural areas, rather, they introduce social criteria for one's living place. The censure rests on the characteristics dominant in small villages the time the hadiths were issued.