This chapter will introduce the isnād-cum-matn method and explain why this method has been chosen in analysing the traditions regarding the early history of the Qur’an. In his ‘Dating Muslims Traditions: A Survey,’1 Harald Motzki takes on various approaches to the early Islamic sources. Like all the other historical disciplines, he avers, Islamic studies has been trying to establish the reliability of their sources and in this regard source criticism has played an important role as it was a significant methodological achievement of modern times. By making use of the method in various ways, scholars of Islam have been involved in the quest of dating the early Islamic sources. The Muslim ḥadīth corpus has been one of the earliest and most widely available Islamic sources; therefore, these methods have been mostly focused on the field of ḥadīth studies. Motzki classifies these methods into four groups and examines their reliability: ‘1) methods which use the matn [the text part of the traditions], 2) dating on the basis of the collections in which traditions appear, 3) dating on the basis of the isnād [chain of transmitters part of the traditions], and 4) methods using matn and isnād’.

Motzki then begins a detailed survey of various representations of each method and points out their respective flaws. His criticism of these methods targets mainly the reliance on unsubstantiated premises upon which the method is built, heavy reliance on argumentum e silentio and reliance on only form criticism. Most of the approaches that have been discussed by Motzki were treated in the first chapter of this work and re-examining all these methods would be redundant; instead perhaps it would suffice to mention an example from his study in order to understand the approach. According to Motzki, Goldziher was the most important representative of the first method. Building upon his well-known premise that most of the ḥadīth literature came into existence as a result of political developments that took place during the first two centuries of Islam, Goldziher concludes that these traditions by and large have no historical value. Upon analysing the method Motzki detects two flaws in Goldziher's method:

First, his main focus is not the traditions themselves as ‘his source material consists mostly of traditions about transmitters and ḥadīths’. When Goldziher discusses ḥadīth he mostly prefers traditions that are considered unreliable by Muslims. Second, Goldziher rarely questions the historical reliability of the traditions that he treats.