The Discourse of Rationalism and Textualism in the 4th Century and its Role in the Variety of Understanding Hadith with a Focus on Shia Religious Narratives

Understanding Hadith’ enjoys a high ranking position among Shia scholars; however, Shia hadith thinkers’ understanding of the hadiths including religious hadiths is different. Some of the differences in understanding stems from hadith interpreters due to their diversity in their level of understanding people, their tendencies, the principles, and attitudes. What seems to bear significance is the difference in principles and foundations and the encounter of Shia scholars with narrative texts, which plays a significant role in the diversity of understanding the hadith. Among all these approaches, the discourse of textualism and rationalism of the 4th century scholars such as Sheikh Sadouq and Sheikh Mofid in the face of theological traditions are much discussed. It is obvious that the views of the holders of these two attitudes will lead to different understanding of the theological hadiths since the result of the textualism would be to stop understanding the text of some theological hadiths, and the result of of rationalism in the hadith will be the expansion of theological knowledge and evaluating it by means of reason. Having conceptualized understanding, rationalism, and textualism, the present study has used the historical and analytical sequence to examine  the distinctions of textualists and rationalists in some indexes including their conceptions and view on the acceptance of hadiths, as well as evasion from rationality through Ijtihad in theological hadiths, which causes different understandings in hadiths with regard to issues such as possibility of error on the part of the prophet, the deeds of servants, and the creation of souls before bodies.