İbn Kesîr’in el-Bidâye ve’n-nihâye’sinin Siyer Kısmında Başvurduğu Muhteva Tenkidi Kıstasları ve Garâbet Tabirini Muhteva Tenkidi Bağlamında Kullanımı

The Sīra section of the work named al-Bidāya wa al-nihāya by Ibn Kathīr (d. 774/1373), who wrote many invaluable works in various branches of Islamic sciences, deals with the life, manners and miracles of the Prophet (pbuh) in a comprehensive manner. In this work, Ibn Kathīr criticized the hadith and sīra narrations very carefully and expressed the problems that attracted his attention regarding the content of these narrations. It is observed that he made recourse to a number of criteria such as conflict with the Qurʾān, authentic hadiths and sunna, reasoning and historical facts, idjmāʿ and basic teachings of the religion, dissimilarity to the words of prophethood/companions, narration of an event witnessed by a large group by only one person, narration of an event by only one person for which there are a number of reasons for it to be widely circulated, inconsistency within the text, simplicity of words, problems regarding the meaning, intuitive criticism and inclusion of isrāʾīliyyāt. In addition, it has been seen that Ibn Kathīr utilized expressions such as “gharīb” and “gharīb seriously”, from time to time in the context of criticizing the content explicitly rather than to point out the singularity of the hadith. Ibn Kathīr uses the expression “gharīb seriously” in cases where the content of the hadith poses a serious problem. When we look at the usages such as “seriously gharīb, even munkar or false” and "seriously munkar, even lie”, it is inferred that as the content problem in particular hadith increases, the expressions “munkar” and in more advanced cases “lie” is preferred instead of the term “gharīb”. In our study, although we cannot include all the examples that we identified in the main text, the fact that we have shared thirty-seven examples from those we selected may give an idea about the extent of Ibn Kathīr’s content criticism. Considering the importance of the subject of content criticism today and the discussions on this subject, we think that examining these criteria extensively and carefully and presenting convincing and sufficient evidence will make a significant contribution to clarifying these discussions. Ibn Kathīr also subjected nineteen Sahīhayn hadiths to content criticism, revealed the incorrectness of some of the information in several examples and tried to explain the problematic points of others. There are some claims that the hadith scholars have not sufficiently used reasoning in hadith criticism. In contrast to these cl