The Rules of Matn Criticism: There are No Rules

In an effort to avoid the subjectivity of individual reason, Sunni Islam elaborated a method of ḥadīth criticism that subordinated evaluating the meaning of a report to an examination of its chain of transmission. With the fourth/tenth-century epistemological compromise of Ashʿarism, however, Sunni ḥadīth scholars adopted rationalist criteria of content criticism that included explicit rules…