The Rules of Historical-Scriptural Criticism: There Are No Rules

In an effort to avoid the subjectivity of individual reason, Sunni Islam attempted to elaborate a method of ḥadīth criticism that subordinated evaluating the meaning of a report to examining its chain of transmission.  With the medieval epistemological compromise of Ashʿarism, however, Sunni scholars adopted rationalist criteria of content criticism that included explicit rules for rejecting ḥadīths due to their meaning.  This resulted in a strong internal tension within Sunni ḥadīth criticism from the fifth/eleventh century onward, with one and the same scholar upholding rigid rules of content criticism but not employing them or even rejecting them in application.  The inherent subjectivity of content criticism resulted in different Muslim scholars either rejecting or affirming the same ḥadīths.  Some scholars were much more inclined to reject ḥadīths due to meaning out of hand, while others were willing to extend them more interpretive charity.  The tension created by the subjectivity of content criticism emerged in unprecedented relief in the modern period, when ‘science’ and social norms presented an unmatched challenge to the interpretive awe in which pre-modern (and Traditionalist scholars today) held attributions to the Prophet.