وصف منهج ابن حزم في نقد النصوص المقدسة عند اليهود

Abstract EN

Ibn Hazem is considered to be one of the prominent scholars in Islamic civilization who pioneered the standardization of comparative religion and the foundation of its rules.

Many Western scholars acknowledge that they have benefitted greatly from the approach he adopted in his study.

Ibn Hazem is also considered to be among the first scholars to apply textual criticism to Jewish and Christian sacred texts by studying them thoroughly and authentically, and by comparing them to one another.

His purpose was, after comparing and contrasting the texts, to identify the contradictions and explicit distortions infiltrated in these texts, and to make them known to the public.

It should be noted that Ibn Hazem followed the same approach used by Muslim scholars in applying textual criticism to historical texts, particularly to religious ones.

He used internal criticism, addressing the text's content, and the extent to which it correlated with both accurate transmission and pure intellect.

He also showed how contradictory these texts are with logical reasoning.

This scholar used external textual criticism as well, following the chain of narrators and transmitters (...) and this is what Muslim scholars call Sanad (Arabic for chain of narrators) which is a unique feature of the religion of Islam, and an essential one in the transmission narratives.

What Ibn Hazem did is similar to the criticism applied to the narrated prophetic sayings and actions; a criticism based on a knowledge of the narrators' status, their uprightness, and their honesty in taking on reports from the prophet (PBUH) and transmitting them.

The verification of reports and their narrators has yielded what is now known as the study of Hadith Terminology and the Invalidation and Validation of Narrators.

This tradition eventually resulted in a classification of prophetic sayings into sound or authentic hadiths, good hadiths, weak hadiths, and fabricated hadiths which are rejected.

Muslims are in fact right to be proud of this efficient approach; it requires much precision and scrutiny in verifying, accepting, and transmitting reports, and has allowed us, Muslims, to preserve our Islamic heritage from loss, distortion, and infiltration.