A Communication Analysis of the Interaction between theReligious Text and the Audience

Text- audience relation and the impact of the former on the latter, especially inthe context of religious texts, is a significant subject from communicationscience viewpoint. In the Islamic religious literature the religious propositionor "hadith", and with some degree of toleration a single-source narration(khabar-e vahid), have been recognized as a discourse unit. But what is theposition and function of a religious proposition in producing religiousknowledge? This function has probably been dominated by the jurisprudentialsystem and has been spoken about in terms of "authoritativeness". But thisfunction and position are to be analyzed in relation to the production ortransmission of knowledge. On the one hand, in proportion to the applicationof a religious proposition throughout history, the volume of knowledge basedthereon increases. On the other hand, it is not logical to establish a directrelationship between religious knowledge and a religious proposition.Basically, with emphasis on non-jurisprudential areas, none of the teachingsthat we consider to be in the form of single-source narration could be acceptedin a vacuum regardless of civilization-based knowledge. In the approach toanalyzing the Shi'a hadith heritage, it should also be said that a quantitativelook at the hadiths based on the direct relation between the religiouspropositions and knowledge is not an effective model in analyzing the sociopoliticalstatus of the Infallibles.