Dinbilimleri Akademik Araştırma Dergisi

Abstract

Determining the fictionality of a narration based on the literary style of a given text is one of the main topics of orientalist studies. The claim that ‘certain narrative techniques indicate factual invalidity of content’ goes back to 120 years earlier. Due to changes in Western literary theories, it appears in a different form concept in every period. At the beginning of the 20th century, Julius Wellhausen (d. 1918) and Carl Brockelmann (d. 1956) pointed out that early Muslim historiographers rewrote the narrations they inherited from their predecessors by their worldview and artistic skills. In the 60’s and 70’s, analysis of motifs and themes, around which stories were developed, came into prominence. For Eckard Stetter and Albrecht Noth (1999), certain characters, events, metaphors, similes etc. repeatedly appear in hadith or history narrations are anonymous motifs and themes. Therefore, their factual references are very uncertain. In the 90s, Stefan Leder and Daniel Beaumont claimed that narrative techniques such as well-planned plots, character-oriented event descriptions, moral evaluations and fantastic elements etc. are peculiar to literary fiction, so that such features make questionable factual validity of a historical narration. Another researcher Sebastian Günther widely discussed the concept of fictionality and approached the hadith narrations as a historical novel. He claimed specific narrative techniques fictionalize a given hadith narration and cut off its extratextual referentiality. For him, rearrangement, modification or diversification of a given hadith text through the transmission process indicates its fictionalization.
Formal evaluation of narrations is well-known and widely discussed by the terms taqṭīʿ, ikhtiṣār, talfīq etc., in classical hadith methodology. Unlike Muslim scholars, orientalists we have taken in this article discussed the issue within the context of the content's factual validity, not the text's reformation. All researchers above analysed the Islamic narrations, ḥadīth, sīrah and historiography, by ignoring the classical ḥadīth methodology and within the framework of the Western literary concepts that were valid in the period in which they lived. As is widely discussed in this article, the main problem for analysing Islamic narrations by the concept of fictionality is overlooking its historical, philosophical and cognitive background. Western literary theoreticians and history philosophers disagree about whether specific narrative techniques fictionalize factual texts such as history textbooks or biographies. Nevertheless, all these disagreements are ignored in the studies I have covered in this article, and a simplified analogy is preferred: ‘Every text having similar features to a literary work is fiction’. Therefore, depending on its textual features, claiming an Islamic narration's fictionality is theoretically a misconception. This intentional selection of the literary theory can be considered as the fictionalization of the fiction theory.
On the other hand, all Islamic narrations, whether hadīth, sīrah or historiography, claim to provide knowledge from past events. According to ʿilm al-balāgha, they are in the category of ikhbār, therefore, they are subject of true-false evaluation. However, a fictional discourse has no factual reference and is on the inshā type, therefore cannot be subject to the true-false assessment. Disregarding this categorical difference and dealing with Islamic narrations like novels makes all analyses problematic.
Despite all these problematic approaches, sample studies I have taken in this article point out a real problem: Due to misunderstanding or misreporting of the rāwi and/or the collector/author, there may be inconsistency between narration and historical facts. Textual features may give clues for such problems. However, this issue can be handled by comparing diverse narrations on the same issue, isnād-matn analysis and cross-checking the narratives to the extratextual data. Simplified parallelisms between the style and validity of the content cause much more complicated problems.