Öz
In this article, it is aimed to determine the conditions put forward by al-Māturīdī (d. 333/944) in order to accept āhād news (khabar al-wāhid) and ta’wīl (interpretation of Qur’ān) applied to verses and to make a comparison between āhād news and ta’wīl in terms of accepting conditions and provisions in his system of thought. It is known that al-Māturīdī who is declared to have produced many works in the fields of kalām, fiqh, usūl, tafsīr and sects has reached up to today only with Kitāb al-tawhīd and Ta’wīlāt al-Qur’ān. In his aforementioned works, he did not systematically explain the conditions he put forward for the acceptance of the ta’wīl and the āhād news. However, some of his explanations and applications, especially in Ta’wīlāt, allow us to determine these conditions. In this study it is tried to identify al-Māturīdī’s views about the āhād news and ta’wīl in these works by using the document analysis method. According to this, in his system of thought, khabar al-wāhid and ta’wīl are evaluated at the same level both as acceptance conditions and as the provisions it brings. In his understanding, if they carry necessary conditions, both khabar al-wāhid and ta’wīl convey conjecture, not certainty. Although both cannot be evidence in the topics that require knowledge of testation, they may be in the topics regarding the judgment. Almost all of the acceptance criteria of al-Māturīdī’s āhād news are related to the text and content. His explanations about the sanads, which are extremely rare and never constituted the focal point of his approach, aim either to confirm the verdict reached by means of other evidence or to answer the interlocutor with his own argument. In addition, theoretically al-Māturīdī also considers it necessary to examine the state of the narrators in order to determine the validity of a news. On the other hand, in his view, there are great similarities between the mutawātir khabars in terms of the certainty of the relation of its source and the tafsīr in terms of the certainty of divine purpose. In addition, the descriptions that al-Māturīdī uses when rejecting the āhād news, which he thinks they are not valid, and the ta’wīl, which he does not consider true, consist of almost the same expression patterns. As in the terminology of the hadith scholars, these expressions are not related to the basis, but to the content. The reason for these similarities in the aforementioned points should be the reflection of al-Māturīdī’s theologian identity, which deals with the evidence through certainty and suspicion. The mentioned points also show that al-Māturīdī has evaluated hadiths differently from the method of hadith scholars. The present study is expected to reflect the content-centered approach method of a scholar who has come to the fore in the fields of kalām, methodology and tafsīr.