A Criticism of the Orientalists' Views on the Common Link Based on Shiite Hadiths

One of the topics of interest to the Orientalists in the field of history of hadith and jurisprudence is the common link theory which deals with serious and various problems in jurisprudential documents and narrations. Some of these problems are: the common link of narrators, family documents, involvement of too old narrators in documents, back-ward growth of documents and argument from silence. This theory eventually concludes that, due to the policy of prohibition of narrating and compiling hadiths, jurisprudential narrations may have arisen from the minds of jurists and their time of origination is at the most the second century AH. Hence, according to the common link theory, the documents of narrations suffer from singularity and are considered weak. However, this study aims to critique and examine the views of the Orientalists on the common link theory by relying on Ja’fari jurisprudence and using the historical analysis method and reject the claim of the Orientalists that jurisprudential hadiths suffer from singularity emphasizing issues such as the authority of Ja’fari jurisprudence among Sunnis, Imam Sadeq’s (a.s.) access to Imam Ali's (a.s) book as a written jurisprudential source from the first century and the fact that some of the narrators claimed by the Orientalists to be the common link of narration were Imam Sadeq’s (a.s.) students. As a result of this research, two common link diagrams are presented as examples based on the method of the two Orientalists, i.e. Schacht and Juynboll, that invalidate the idea of ​​ common link and a part of the common link theory.