Adapted from a discussion on whether Muslims should simply identify as Muslims rather than follow a madhhab (school of law).

Let's ask a different question:

Would you go to a doctor who refused to tell anyone what university they studied medicine at?

You, as a person in need of a doctor, don't need to identify as a graduate of Harvard medical school or John Hopkins or any other medical school.

However, you surely want evidence that your doctor has studied medicine in a systematic fashion so you can trust his prescriptions.

Din is the same way. As a layman, you don't need to identify as following "Harvard's medical curriculum" or a particular madh'hab. But when you need a ruling, you want to make sure the person giving it is properly licensed to do so. In Islamic law, the institutions that properly license someone are the madhahib.

If you decide you want to actually study in a serious way, you don't go and take 101 level courses at 4 universities. Someone who is a freshman at 4 different schools doesn't get a degree. You pick one school and continue until you get a bachelor's, master's, or PhD.

Similarly, when you are ready to take fiqh more seriously, you pick a madh'hab and study it.

The madhahib are not personalities or sects or identifiers, and some extremists do take them as such. They are schools to systematically study law.

If you felt very ill, would you trust yourself to conduct independent online research to treat yourself? Or your parents? Or your children?

Or would you rather have a qualified doctor take a look?

That's the same thing with Islamic rulings and evidence. The layman can spend all day researching Quran & hadith online, just like you can look up pharmaceuticals & research papers. That will never replace 8 years of university plus residency to become an actual MD. Similarly, online research of Islamic sources will never replace an 8 year alim program plus independent scholarly study.

---

This began as a comment I wrote on Reddit. Read it in context here: https://www.reddit.com/r/islam/comments/1w9158g/why_cant_we_just_identify_as_muslims_instead_of/p87uam2/

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

1. Pre-Understanding in Hermeneutics

The HCM postulates that it suspends conclusions about the truth of a text until after analysis is conducted with respect to historicity. According to Nicolai Sinai, professor of Islamic Studies and academic scholar of Qur'anic studies,

"To interpret a literary document critically means to suspend inherited presuppositions about its origin, transmission, and meaning, and to assess their adequacy in the light of a close reading of that text itself as well as other relevant sources.

This assertion flies in the face of developments in textual analysis among Continental philosophers and social scientists. Researchers arrive at texts and conduct hermeneutics based on their cultural background and personal biases. This concept of baked-in preunderstanding is termed Vorverständnis in German. Vorverständnis is what allows researchers to be able to conduct research in the first place, but denying it opens up a proverbial Pandora’s box of hermeneutic issues.

Hermeneutics refers to the methodology of interpretation. The HCM contains, but is not limited, to hermeneutic tools. Vorverständnis describes the circumstances of individual researchers and of similarly situated researchers before and during their hermeneutics. It should be noted that Vorverständnis is not something imposed or something that can be eliminated, rather it is the mechanism by which hermeneutics is even possible.

Without vorverständnis, a scholar examining Hamurrabi’s Code would be unable to determine that it is a legal text. They would have eliminated their frame of reference from Western jurisprudence and would no longer maintain their legal reasoning or ethical framework. Hence, Vorverständnis guides researchers in determining what is familiar, what is different, and why that matters. Texts are not authored in a vacuum and they can never be read in a vacuum.

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger argues that all interpretation necessarily happens within “fore-structures of understanding,” which are pre-emptive frameworks allowing interpreters to grasp preliminary orientations before formal engagement can occur. All interpretation that intends to understand a text must have pre-understanding, or it will be indecipherable. Hence, Vorverständnis is a structural component of human interpretation and understanding.

Subsequently, Hans-George Gadamer (d. 2002) in Truth and Method redeployed Heidegger’s concept of fore-structures to describe Vorurteil or prejudicial prejudgment. Vorurteil allows texts to challenge our preconceived notions and puts us in a dialogue with texts that contradict our pre-understandings. Gadamer argued that our pre-structures are dictated by a larger context of historical inheritance. As a result, tradition was a legitimate source for interpretative understanding according to Gadamer; not merely an obstacle to be overcome. It is the basis by which any understanding may be done.

We are strained to find HCM scholars who admit the entire methodological and philosophical stack underpinning their analyses. However, to reject that there is such a series of arbitrary, historically defined, layers is to reject the very basis upon which the analysis stands. We then arrive at a startlingly realization; that HCM academics are engaging not only in a form Orientalism, but a form of Occidentalism. There is a sort of deeply naïve and mis-informed hyper-reduction of the Western tradition itself baked into the idea that it can all be cast aside for an “objective” or “unbiased” analysis of Islamic texts.

By admitting Vorverständnis, we can acknowledge Vorurteil, and then engage in a true dialogue with historical texts. This would allow for the possibility that our pre-judgement could actually be challenged by these texts, once we acknowledge the existence of such pre-judgements. Ultimately, a sort of dialectic between the researcher and his research could possibly occur. Gadamer terms this a “fusion of horizons” or Horizontverschmelzung.

Gaddamer primarily framed Vorurteil within the lens of history (Wirkungsgeschichte, or effective history). He tasked researchers with acknowledging this so that their horizons could expand through sincere encounters with the text, something impossible under a reductionist Occidentalist framework.

In the Islamic tradition, historical texts are not simply empirical documents. They are the product of a Divine historical process, meaning that God Himself may bar the interpreter from certain textual realities if they are lacking a particular ethical or spiritual station. It is not merely a matter of prior biases, but of current inability to see with spiritual insight.

2. Colonialism

In developing a robust understanding of HCM academics’ Vorverständnis, we must turn to history. The modern field of comparative religious studies began during European colonialism of Africa. Following the Enlightenment, European researchers were fascinated by the “absence” of religion in Africa and the New World. Of course, their frame of reference for what religion constituted was Christianity but more specifically Protestantism. These colonial researchers saw religion as a hallmark of civilization, and the lack of Protestant-style religion indicated how savage Africans and native Americans were.

Hence, the distinction between “true” and “false” religion under Protestantism may be traced to this period of post-Enlightenment colonialism. This kind of comparative religion or proto-anthropology was framed in scientific fetters. Philosophers such as David Hume argued that testimony is not trustworthy, only direct experience can produce knowledge. Jonathan Edwards argued that authentic Christianity produces claims that are always verifiable. So, authentic religion was conceived of as having few ritual practices and being in the mold of Protestantism.

In these early works, Protestantism becomes synonymous with the highest forms of civilization, whereas indigenous African and native American “religions” were seen as “superstition” or “fetishism.” Later thinkers, such as Karl Marx, argued that African indigenous religions were no more worshipful of fetish objects than Christians did the cross. Marx went so far as to argue that capitalist Christians assigned human attributes to commodities, such as rights, similar to African fetish-worshippers. Yet, even this betrays a racialized trope.

Ultimately, these tropes of superiority are refined and refigured under secularism. A fetish becomes a “a racially coded secular term for mystification, ignorance of cause and effect, and irrational attributions of subjectivity to inanimate things” (pg. 181). These early social “scientists” held that the civilized are in control of their bodies. Religion should contain no ecstatic experiences or performative rituals. That material objects or symbolic representations are heretical. Indeed, we continue to see these tropes in HCM methodology. For example, the presumption that all kinds of Muslim testimony are automatically suspect and hold nearly no evidentiary value.

3. Racialism

The colonial enterprise in Africa was undergirded by the concept of race. Therefore, key to understanding the HCM’s assumption stack is to understand the impact of race as a worldview (referred to as racialism). Racialism is a pseudo-scientific approach to categorizing humans according to a concept of race. It should be noted that merely having a concept of races or biological differences between people from different areas does not constitute racialism. Racialism is a sophisticated worldview with specific beliefs and a particular history. As Audrey and Brian Smedly describe,

The people most instrumental in the development of the idea of race as experienced in North America were the English colonists who began settlements in the seventeenth century. The book thus focuses on English beliefs, values, and social practices, brought with them to the colonies, that set the stage for a racial worldview in America. Under the influence of English customs and beliefs, Europeans in the United States developed and institutionalized the concept to a more extreme degree than any other society outside of twentieth-century South Africa. The book therefore concentrates on the American experience and some of many influences that led to the formulation of the racial worldview most familiar to Americans. (pg. 21)

Furthermore, Howard Zinn race explains how constructed as a solution to the needs of wealthy European landowners in the nascent United States,

We see now a complex web of historical threads to ensnare blacks for slavery in America: the desperation of starving settlers, the special helplessness of the displaced African, the powerful incentive of profit for slave trader and planter, the temptation of superior status for poor whites, the elaborate controls against escape and rebellion, the legal and social punishment of black and white collaboration.

The point is that the elements of this web are historical, not “natural.” This does not mean that they are easily disentangled, dismantled. It means only that there is a possibility for something else, under historical conditions not yet realized. And one of these conditions would be the elimination of that class exploitation which has made poor whites desperate for small gifts of status, and has prevented that unity of black and white necessary for joint rebellion and reconstruction. (A People’s History of the United States, pg. 43)

This concept of a pan-European “race” can be identified as early as the European wars against the Ottoman empire, wherein figures who had historically conceived of each European state as its own “race” began to identify with all other Europeans against the “Turks” and “Arabs.”

This concept of pan-European “whiteness” cum racialism was developed in the Americas and then exported back to Europe, where we see it in the analysis of proto-social scientists and in comparative religion during the period of European colonialism in Africa. Audrey and Brian Smedly,

What modern scientists are saying is that race as a biological concept cannot be supported by the facts that we have learned about human biophysical variations and their genetic basis. The frames of reference and database of science have changed dramatically. Most scientists work with definitions and conceptions of human variation specific to their disciplines—that are confined to physical, genetic, biochemical, and molecular factors. These fields have had the benefit of tremendous advances due to highly sophisticated instrumentation for observation, identification, measurement, and analysis. New methods and techniques have enabled scientists to identify variability in perhaps thousands of hereditary traits from analyses of DNA, the genetic materials that determine our biophysical characteristics. The discovery of the range and complexity of genetic variation has prompted scientists to rethink the ways by which we classify populations and to question the extent of real differences between so-called races. (Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview by Audrey & Brian Smedly, pg. 18)

Modern capitalist secularism is inseparable from race. While race does not exist as a biological reality, it exists as a socio-cultural-economic reality. It informs any analysis conducted under a secular paradigm, as racialism is a part of wider capitalist realism. This is a particular bias present in HCM that is not present in traditional Islamic methodology. The Smedley’s,

It is significant that many contemporary scholars have concluded that race is a relatively recent concept in human history. The cultural structuring of a racial worldview coincides with the colonial expansion of certain western European nations during the past five centuries, their encountering of populations very different from themselves, and the creation of a unique form of slavery. Expansion, conquest, exploitation, and enslavement have characterized much of human history over the past five thousand years or so, but before the modern era, none of these events resulted in the development of ideologies or social systems based on race. Dante Puzzo put it explicitly: “Racism . . .is a modern conception, for prior to the XVIth century there was virtually nothing in the life and thought of the West that can be described as racist” (1964, 579). Though referring only to the West, this view unambiguously challenges the claim that race classifications and ideologies were or are universal or have deep historical roots. (pg. 28)

By Ali Shukri Amin

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

Cognitive Biases & Historiography

The HCM presupposes an overly rationalist and linear model of historical development, failing to take into account behavioral economics and decision theory. Specifically, HCM scholars fail to consider cognitive biases, uncertainty, and the limits of human rationality (as explored by Nassim Taleb, Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and others). Assuming that religious beliefs and texts emerge primarily from deliberate socio-political construction or material conditions ignores the role of randomness, heuristics, and cognitive biases in shaping human perception and historical memory. Furthermore, HCM analyses of history are replete with mistakes owing due to cognitive biases and faulty heuristics.

Kahneman and Tversky’s foundational groundbreaking work on cognitive biases (such as the availability heuristic, hindsight bias, and substitution effects) suggests that human decision-making is often irrational, context-dependent, and shaped by intuitive leaps rather than purely logical reasoning. This drastically reshapes interpretations of history. The problem with heuristics and biases is further compounded when we consider that we must account for them at the documentation and interpretative layers as well. Therefore, cognitive biases and heuristics are present both in the original data (the historical actor), at the level of data compilation (the original documentation), and at the level of the interpreting researcher.

The problem is cubed, problematizing the kind of empirical naturalistic research that HCM scholars engage in. The HCM tends to view religious texts as rationally engineered products of their historical contexts. Such an assumption fails to consider the irrationality behind historical documents. Additionally, the oldest sources source materials available to us are often produced second-hand, meaning that the irrationality and cognitive biases of the documenter must also be accounted for if objectivity is desired. Additionally, HCM academics routinely fail to consider their own irrationality when engaging in “plausible” interpretations.

These fallacies are not conscious attempts on the part of scholars to distort history or facts. They are unconscious biases that occur the part of researchers whom almost always believe themselves to be as impartial and unbiased as possible. Their goodwill actually makes the distorted outcomes of their research more pernicious, as students and the public are convinced of their sincerity in the quest for objective facts. However their regular exhibition of these bias compromises a great deal of their work.

It should be noted that a faith-informed historiography, while still subject to some of these same criticisms, may point to the belief that God has guaranteed an accurate account of the specific historical events which occurred prior to more abundant historical documentation. Critically, the idea of Divine preservation guarantees that enough historical documentation is reliable and has been interpretated at a sufficiently reliable level till the present day. There is no such guarantee with empirical research, indicating that any meaningful analysis within a naturalist framework may be genuinely impossible.

By failing to engage with these cognitive limitations, HCM overestimates its ability to reconstruct historical realities and underestimates the role of uncertainty, randomness, and deeply ingrained mental heuristics in the transmission and interpretation of religious traditions.

The Availability Heuristic

The subsequent analysis of cognitive heuristics and biases in secular historiography will be far from exhaustive. This is an area that is poorly studied. However, we will highlight four of the most prescient and immediately “available” biases that readers can utilize in critically analyzing works by HCM scholars. The first of which is the availability heuristic. Mukharij, Aroop, and Zeckhauser write,

“The foundational work of behavioral psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman shows that individuals tend to give excess weight to the explanatory value of more easily imaginable or more easily recalled instances and experiences. For instance, if individuals have friends who have suffered some medical ailment, they might think their chances of suffering the same fate are far greater than proper Bayesian updating would imply. This is the availability heuristic: what more easily comes to mind overly inflates an individual’s calculations of likelihood.

“Explanation bias is in some ways the fruit of the availability heuristic. Specifically, the availability heuristic may help to explain why the explanation bias exists: the more easily a plausible explanation of an historical happening springs to a person’s mind, the greater the probability that individual will tend to believe that it actually caused the outcome. That may be particularly the case for the poorly informed, who are then less likely to consider competing explanations for historical events.”[[i]](#_edn1)

Hindsight Bias

The second bias to consider is the “Hindsight Bias.” The Hindsight Bias describes a tendency to interpret historical events according to subsequent, not preceding, events. Naturalistic historiographers may attribute intent or causality, prior effects, to historical events based on subsequent consequences – despite there being no justification for doing so. Historical conclusions about manuscripts, influences, effects, intents, must occur based on evidence prior to an event, not based on information that is only known in hindsight. Essentially, accurate historiography would consider only the past relative to the datum being analyzed, not all the history subsequently. Mukharij, Aroop, and Zeckhauser write,

“Hindsight bias refers to the tendency by individuals to exaggerate, in hindsight, what they could have predicted in foresight. In other words, after a past event, individuals tend to believe they were more certain about the outcome that happened than they actually were, a phenomenon that Baruch Fischhoff labelled “creeping determinism.” … That is because, in hindsight, people have a hard time recalling how much they did not know at the time (i.e. their past uncertainty), and their knowledge of the outcome influences their memories.

“While hindsight bias refers to an inflated confidence that one had foreseen a past outcome ex ante, explanation bias refers to an inflated confidence in a particular explanation for a past outcome ex post.” [[ii]](#_edn2)

An example of this is in intertextual parallel analysis. If an HCM scholar draws a parallel between a particular Qur’anic pericope and another older text, they are certainly unable to determine causality. However, it may seem “most plausible” in hindsight that the Qur’an was influenced by the other text. This is because, given the benefit of having the two texts and adherents of both faiths interact over centuries, the same kind of intellectual cross-fertilization seems likely. This does not account for convergent evolution of disparate texts, random similarities, or even similarities projected by the researcher onto the texts. In fact, since there is no way to objectively quantify such similarities, the entire analysis is based on plausibility and highly susceptible to the Hindsight bias effect.

Claims about manuscripts, sources, influence, audience, or authorial intention must be grounded in evidence available prior to or contemporaneous with the event being analyzed, not in patterns that become intelligible only after centuries of subsequent history. Mukharij, Aroop, and Zeckhauser write,

“Yet, once events have occurred, people armed with the knowledge of hindsight tend to exaggerate those events' predictability and inevitability. To be sure, with the passage of time, documents, research, and perhaps interviews with participants may enable a better understanding of past happenings. Nevertheless, it is inconsistent to view the future as being uncertain but the past as having been predictable.”[[iii]](#_edn3)

This problem is especially acute in analyses of intertextual parallels. When a historical-critical scholar observes a parallel between a Qurʾānic passage and an earlier or contemporaneous text, the existence and perceived similarities of the non-Qur’anic text alone does not establish dependence, borrowing, or causal influence. Yet from the vantage point of later history, where Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others interacted over centuries, it can appear “plausible” that the Qurʾān absorbed material from surrounding traditions. That plausibility, however, is often an artifact of hindsight. It assumes a later picture of textual interaction and projects it backward onto the Qurʾān’s original milieu without evidence.

The methodological problem is that HCM scholars may admit several competing explanations: direct influence, indirect transmission, shared oral traditions, common Near Eastern motifs, convergent formulation, coincidence, or even resemblance produced by the scholar’s interpretive framing. Unless the researcher can establish a historically credible transmission pathway, chronological proximity, linguistic mediation, and contextual reason for dependence; the claim of influence remains entirely speculative. Yet, HCM scholars do not represent their analyses as mere informed speculation without evidentiary basis.

The mere subjective resemblance that two texts may bear to one another does not determine the direction, mechanism, or reality of causation. The concept of ergodicity, that long sample paths end up resembling each other, average of many short samples tends to equal a long sample, further calls into question HCM analyses. Since we observe history from the vantage point of the future, and cannot isolate any particular historical developments, we may attribute causality between data sets that has no evidentiary basis – which may simply be a product of ergodicity or convergent evolution between similar religious thinkers. Quite simply: much of the analysis performed by HCM scholars is subject to Hindsight Bias and there is currently no way in the method to distinguish genuine conclusions from statistical noise in history.

The Narrative fallacy

The “Narrative Fallacy” or “Explanation Bias” warns against retroactively imposing overly coherent, deterministic explanations on complex historical phenomena; a flaw frequently seen in HCM analyses across original sources. This fallacy leads historiographers to imply greater certainty to causal explanations of past events than is present in the evidence. In doing so, they conflate plausibility with probability. Mukharij, Aroop, and Zeckhauser write,

“Rather, we are observing that uncertainty and ignorance almost always receive too little attention when history is told (by anyone), leading to overconfidence in causal explanations of past events.”[[iv]](#_edn4)

“Partly in consequence, people often overvalue their preferred explanations regarding the past, that is, their causal claims for historical events.”[[v]](#_edn5)

“Had such events happened, history would have been written far differently, with a greater emphasis on other underlying forces that, perhaps counterintuitively, were also present in the reality of the past.

“Social and political movements also challenge confident causal claims. Their progress is highly uncertain. Consider the past decade's unexpectedly rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage, the continued vehemence of the abortion debate, and the worldwide rise of populism. Parsimonious explanations for outcomes that were once highly uncertain should be greeted with skepticism.”[[vi]](#_edn6)

“When an explanation is offered for an outcome, the significant uncertainties that prevailed are often ignored or forgotten. To some extent, this is reasonable. Through an outcome, one can know the actual circumstances–what “won out”; furthermore, information comes out after an event that was not known previously.”[[vii]](#_edn7)

The narrative fallacy is demonstrated when historiographers attempt to determine clear causality based on documented events, while contemporaneous future forecasting of those same events would have been riddled with uncertainty. This can lead to inflating the importance of historical events, ignoring the actual causes of events, asserting knowledge where there is none, distorting the nature of historical events under scrutiny, and distorting the nature of history itself.

Uniformitarianism & the Principle of Analogy

Following from the hard and social sciences, HCM academics rely on the principle of uniformitarianism with respect to the behavior and development of historical individuals and movements. According to Dr. Bruce L. Gordon,

"The uniformitarian principle assumes that the behavior of nature is regular and indicative of an objective causal structure in which presently operative causes may be projected into the past to explain the historical development of the physical world and projected into the future for the purposes of prediction and control. In short, it involves the process of inferring past causes from presently observable effects under the assumption that the fundamental causal regularities of the world have not changed over time."

In Defense of Uniformitarianism, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, pg. 82 https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2013/PSCF6-13Gordon.pdf

While uniformitarianism may seem like a reasonable assumption as pertains to physics or geology, uniformitarianism in the realm of social sciences or psychology is far more problematic. Assuming that people in the past behaved or had the same capabilities as people today, without direct evidence to indicate so, is problematic. The problem of uniformitarianism in psychology, sociology, or the other social sciences underpinning historical analysis is compounded as our understanding of human behavior is far from exact. Many essential scientific studies have endemic reproducibility issues and social sciences are some of the worst in that regard. Therefore, we have little meaningful empirical baseline by which we can extrapolate human behavior to assert some kind of uniformitarian analogy.

[[i]](#_ednref1) Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser. "Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis." Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, Oct. 2019, updated Nov. 2019, RWP19-032. Working paper

[[ii]](#_ednref2) Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser. "Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis." Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, Oct. 2019, updated Nov. 2019, RWP19-032. Working paper

[[iii]](#_ednref3) Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser. "Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis." Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, Oct. 2019, updated Nov. 2019, RWP19-032. Working paper

[[iv]](#_ednref4) Ibid

[[v]](#_ednref5) Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser. "Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis." Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, Oct. 2019, updated Nov. 2019, RWP19-032. Working paper

[[vi]](#_ednref6) Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser. "Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis." Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, Oct. 2019, updated Nov. 2019, RWP19-032. Working paper

[[vii]](#_ednref7) Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser. "Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis." Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, Oct. 2019, updated Nov. 2019, RWP19-032. Working paper

By Ali Shukri Amin

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

Before dealing with the philosophical conundrums that the HCM exposes its adherents to, we should deal with the oft-invoked refrain of “common sense probability and plausibility.”

As discussed in the previous post, hard sciences and social sciences validate theses based on experiments or, when experimentation is not possible, statistical analysis of historical data. HCM proponents often argue that their inferences about history are based on probability.

Quasi-Probabilistic Approach

When an HCM researcher looks at available evidence, they then attempt to draw a conclusion as to the most probable and plausible explanation – without relying on unjustified external explanations from religion or tradition. Probabilities are invoked as common-sense, it is simply intuitive to utilize naturalistic explanations based on available data and lead to the most “plausible” inference. These inferences are asserted to best explain the data, being closest to the truth. According to Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser,

“Not all historical events are difficult to explain, of course. Physical events, say a fire, can be diagnosed after the fact. Their source, say a faulty electrical wire or a dropped cigarette, can often be found. Events that occur multiple times are easier to assess. Often, indeed, analysts do employ probabilities to describe such happenings.”[i] ["Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis." Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, Oct. 2019, updated Nov. 2019, RWP19-032. Working paper]

Certainly, these kinds of small inferences are necessary. However, do they translate to the scale and scope that HCM researchers engage? HCM researchers invoke probability in such a way as to vastly oversimplify the complexities of history.

It should be noted that there is a categorical demarcation in method here between faith-based history and naturalistic history. Followers of Abrahamic faiths believe that observed history was guided by God intentionally. The Qur'an often encourages believers to reflect on the meaning of past events. However, from a naturalistic paradigm, we must assume that all historical events have no inherent meaning imbibed from on high and that they are the product of random forces. Therefore, the following critique only applies to historiographies that assume history has no guiding force and is a product of random natural forces.

The forward procession of events into the future is not linear. There are potentially infinite possibilities at any time, with a similar degree of possible outcomes. Quantifying every possible future scenario is analytically impossible. Yet, when observing the past, only one historical outcome is observed in reality. The exact reason for this outcome can never be known, yet HCM scholars will attribute inferences and probabilities to these outcomes.

Plausible Interpretations

Plausibility, probability, and science are highly severely conflated in discourses around the HCM. I have demonstrated in the previous part that the HCM is neither a hard science nor a social science, but most akin to an interpretative science.

A common misconception is that plausibility and truth are correlated or even causal. However, plausibility has nothing to do with actual truth, it simply describes whether something subjectively seems reasonable. The plausibility fallacy, as articulated by Dr. Mitchell Handelsman and Nassim Taleb, is a logical error of assuming that the more plausible an explanation is, the more likely it is to be true. Oftentimes, the most implausible explanations are true.

Additionally, crafting plausible theories does not beget knowledge. To many people historically, the most plausible explanation as to the shape of the earth was their experience of it; that it was flat. The more implausible explanation, that the Earth is round, was determined initially by trigonometry. Scientists such as al-Biruni performed calculations, looking at the angle of the horizon from atop a mountain. These are a reproducible methods with clearly defined parameters and variables. HCM scholars claim that the more plausible an explanation, the more likely it is to be true. However, plausibility is a measure of perceived coherence and intelligibility, not truth. Merriam-Webster,

superficially fair, reasonable, or valuable but often deceptively so

My issue is that even the provisional conclusions, especially the ones around which there is more confidence in the field, are unreliable. The problem with plausibility is not that plausibility is evaluated. As you said, it's somewhat inevitable. The problem is that plausibility is one of the main, if not the main, measure of evaluation. It is wholly unreliable for that. Any field that uses plausibility to evaluate hypothesis or theories will be fundamentally detached from reality. This is what traditional Chinese medicine or Marxist theory or literary analysis does.

Is there value in TCM? Of course. Does Marxist theory lead to fascinating insights? Yes. Is literary analysis important? Definitely. Do any of them independently lead to reliable conclusions that approach objectivity? Absolutely not.

If plausibility is the mechanism by which we evaluate theories then we will necessarily undervalue less-plausible theories (which may be objectively true) until new evidence makes them more plausible. This may never occur, especially dealing with settled history. Meaning we can develop a historiography with "scientific" fetters that claims any thesis can be challenged with evidence – while actually creating interpretative dogma that is not aligned with reality. Therefore, enterprises that are based on creating plausible theories must have other mechanisms to arrive at truth. Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser,

“First, many historians write works that are permeated with deeply-held theoretical assumptions about how the world works. A person who believes that market capitalism is a primary determinant of human behavior, will probably be more likely to think market capitalism was a primary determinant of any particular historical event. The same might go for rational actor theory, racial theories, gender theories, or any number of other theories of behavior that appeal to particular historians. But it is implausible that a single theory of human interaction could explain the multiple events that a single historian might address in a career. Some events should be explained by some reasons in a hierarchy of causation, and others by a different set in a different hierarchy. We would thus expect explanation bias to more acutely afflict more ideologically driven individuals.”

As will be demonstrated in later posts, the HCM is latent with the assumptions of modern secularism. These assumptions color all interpretations. Therefore, some objective mechanism must be required so as to parse "plausibility" from actuality. When advocates of the HCM claim it is “probabilistic", they do not describe how they have set down the parameters & variables to achieve reproducibility. This leaves them highly subject to imposing their deeply held views about the world, informed by a secular framework; then calling it objectivity.

It may seem intuitive to cross compare evidence, investigate plausibility, and arrive at the best "common sense" solutions. However, this is itself a "plausible" method and is not rigorous.

It should be noted that this is a problem of historiography and not of history. And it is a problem of secular empirical historiography, not religious historiography that believes history is not random. Documentation of history as simply collecting & retelling of facts is not the same as historiography.

Least Deserving Outcomes

As we observe modern historical events proceeding in real time, oftentimes outcomes deemed the least probable or implausible occur. This is despite the consensus of experts and vehement certitude of scholars. History regularly surprises us going into the future, yet we assume the generator of historical events in the past is linear enough to dissect. Very few pundits or analysts have any kind of remarkable track record with predicting the future, and the few that do fall within the statistical variance of the survivorship bias. Simply put, there is no Nostradamus.

From an empirical perspective, historical events are the product of random sequences of events without a deterministic mechanism that we know of. This does not mean that human actors do not have intentions or goals, or that there are no discernible behaviors. It simply means that there are no decipherable consistent historiographical laws, unlike physics.

Yet, the HCM method purports to be able to look at these events and “infer” the most probable conclusions as to why events occurred or how religious texts were produced. The method of attributing meaning to these data points by inference and rough "probability" occurs without creating sample paths for invisible unrealized histories.

This is a fatal flaw. Since pure randomness and coincidence are not accounted for by calculating other possible permutations, it is never clear whether the inferred explanations are simply a byproduct of historical noise or indicate something substantial. HCM academics do not investigate sequences of unrealized scenarios over time, meaning that HCM historiographers are only ever dealing with a control group. This fails to account for the fact that the most correct explanation for observed data or for history may be the most opaque and least intelligible. Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser,

“A third source of explanation bias could relate to discomfort from the cognitive dissonance encountered when giving fair hearing to competing theories. Humans generally have a hard time juggling competing hypotheses. A single explanation, especially one explained narratively, can be preferable precisely because individuals have an easier time understanding and being persuaded by it. While this could help account for explanation bias among producers of history (of any kind), it may better explain the strength of explanation bias's adoption among its consumers. Consumers of history who have less knowledge than its purveyors may also be less aware of competing theories and, therefore, even more susceptible to explanation bias.”

Back-Testing

HCM scholars frame the method as probabilistically back testing historical data, unfettered by religion or tradition. This is intended to be a claim of objectivity and accuracy. Back-testing itself is not a foolproof method. While it may provide valuable information in some fields, like cosmology, we also see the abject failure of back-testing in other disciplines. Applications of back-testing on certain historical medicine trials demonstrate that some trials succeed simply due to randomness. There are documented cases of miraculous recoveries from cancer which can be arbitrarily pieced together to form a nonexistent pattern by back testing. Back-testing regularly produces stock market trading algorithms that can be projected to produce tens of millions of dollars, only to go negative within hours of trading in real world scenarios.

The English mathematician Karl Pearson discusses the reference case problem, that true randomness is unattainable because we experience only one sample history. Therefore, we are unable to create proper control and variable groups on past back-testing. This calls into question methods of empirical research into history.

To reiterate, this is a non-issue for those who believe God designs our single observed history with intention and calls upon us to draw lessons from the past. Muslims do not believe history is the outcome of random naturalistic forces, but rather a selected chosen outcome of God that He intends for us to draw inferences from. However, it is a huge issue when the assumption is that history is naturalistic, random, with no guiding force. Life is nonlinear. This is observed in all domains of empirical inquiry. If we take a sandcastle and continue adding a single grain of sand in a linear fashion until it collapses, the collapse will be non-linear. In fact, it is practically impossible to predict where any particular grain of sand will end. Oftentimes the final outcomes of historical sequences or events, or the explanations between events, are the ones that are least path-dependent. They are the “least deserving” from a human perspective, occurring due to extraneous network externalities (see the Matthew Effect or the Gambler’s Fallacy). The results of future random processes are often unaffected by past results. This calls into question any empirical attempt to derive historical rules.

Additionally, the current success of empirical sciences also does not independently indicate truth. The famous Charles Dawkins fallacy, "It's true because it works" fails to take into account the problem of induction (which will be discussed later). Stock traders often have a successful market strategy for many years that produces billions of dollars and is therefore "true" due it's perceived efficacy until their fund explodes overnight. This problem is severely compounded when no statistical analysis or experimentation can be done. Then we cannot even know if a theory is true within a short time window, and nothing is falsifiable.

Complexity in History

The three-body problem and wider complexity theory illustrate this kind of quantitative nonlinearity. If we have two balls in a pool table, we can model their exact trajectories with astonishing accuracy if they are hit at any particular angle by a billiard cue. However, the moment a third ball is added, the complexity of potential outcomes becomes incalculable. Why a particular ball will end up where is so statistically difficult to compute that it is beyond the computation power humans currently possess. Yet, when looking at past data from an empirical lens, Historical-Critical scholars attempt to justify and explain why or how certain events are correlated.

A fascinating example of this is Qur’anic parallels with Judeo-Christian traditions at the time of Muhammad’s mission. Despite a dearth of direct causal evidence, the standard position of the HCM field is that the Qur’an is a byproduct of the intellectual, cultural, and religious milieu of seventh century Arabia. This conclusion is informed by parallels in mythology, Targums, Homilies, romances, poetry, the Torah, the Talmud, Christian writings, and other sources. Yet the logical leap between apparent correlation, which is unquantifiable empirically, to causality is totally unexplainable given the extant evidence. These kinds of conclusions would require computational capabilities trillions of times more powerful than computing the location of a third billiard ball upon being hit by a cue; something currently impossible.

Normal Distributions

These quasi-probabilistic claims of HCM scholars fail to account for typical statistical measures like significance, the normal range of fluctuation in a range, and data distributions. If a range of data has normal range of fluctuation, anything within that range is insignificant. In fact, it would be difficult for an HCM scholar to prove that much of the field cannot distinguish itself from statistical noise. HCM’s conclusions often rely on distributions with well-defined moments (e.g. finite mean, finite variance). However, reality rarely models according to a normal distribution. Randomness is often based on power-law or fat tail distributions. Especially in the realms of social science.

The assumption that something would be extremely abnormal or even impossible today in terms of people is less reliable in history than when it comes to physics because human social dynamics are more exposed to fat-tail distributions. This is further compounded when we are more critical about the science we are putting out about human behavior. The problem stems from reliance on models that assume stability in systems that are too complex to be accounted for in such a fashion. HCM starts by assuming that empirical reality contains a typical or an average that we can then analogize from, and draw explanations according to that baseline “reality”. This is assuming that these matters are distributed with "well-defined moments (e.g. finite mean, finite variance) which is misleading and inaccurate.

Social sciences and even history deal with non-ergodic systems. They don't convene to predictable averages overtime in any demonstrable fashion. They are described more accurately by models that consider wild swings or extreme singular events, which makes uniformitarianism problematic. It isn't just that studies have a problem of reproducibility, these methods are too fragile to draw inferences from.

Power-Law Randomness

The problem with well-defined movement distributions (e.g. Gaussian or bell curve) is that you can't model some kind of randomness with it. The problem is that real world phenomenon – especially pertaining to historical events – actually follow power-law distributions where there are extreme exceptions that are sparsely distributed. These are called “fat-tails” and these fat-tails dominate the course of history. Extreme rare events have an outsize impact and a normal Gaussian distribution would fail to account for that even though they are the story. The kind of assumption of normality you're suggesting here is problematic because it underestimates extreme deviations.

The problem is that HCM researchers assume a type of Gaussian randomness when history is defined moreso by power-law randomness. In non-linear, complex systems (such as markets, economies, societies, human history as a whole), local observations and empirical consistency do not necessarily generalize on a grand scale or project backwards. That's why in science theories are tested – and even that leads us to efficacy not truth. We can't run backwards experiments on history so our conclusions are much more fraught. An empirical approach to history should indicate that things for which there are no evidence should not be considered. However, things that have never happened before (for which there is no prior evidence) occur routinely in history. As will be discussed later when critiquing naturalism, outliers are important because of the problem of induction. Since there is no repeatability in a closed environment for history, secular empirical methods of explaining history cannot result in expertise.

[i] Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser. "Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis." Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, Oct. 2019, updated Nov. 2019, RWP19-032. Working paper

Are HCM Inferences Bayesian?

Admitting for a degree of uncertainty doesn't make the reasoning Bayesian. According to Daniel Kahneman Bayesian reasoning has two pillars,

"Anchor your judgment of the probability of an outcome on a plausible base rate. Question the diagnosticity of your evidence."

Where do you find either in any HCM work?

Faith based historiography typically assumes that the single observed history was intentionally chosen or guided by an All-Knowing All-Powerful God. Therefore, the procession of historical events is both causal and deterministic.

Naturalistic historiography typically assumes that the single observed history occurred due to a confluence of random factors and is unintentional. Therefore, the procession of historical events is neither causal nor deterministic.

The key difference here between faith based historiography & naturalist historiography is the introduction of randomness. Naturalists have to account for randomness in a way faith based historiography does not. While believers may need to and certainly should account for randomness and uncertainty into the future, the concept of Qadr means observed history has a meaning. This does not exist in a naturalistic framework.

In hard & social sciences, randomness, noise, and statistical distributions are accounted for when analyzing data. If the HCM is more than an interpretative science (Freudian/Jungian psychoanalysis, Marxist/Austrian economics, etc.) as HCM academics claim, then it should account for the same kind of naturalistic randomness.

IF history is a product of naturalistic forces THEN naturalistic forces are subject to randomness, statistical distributions, & noise THEREFORE explanations of history must account for that OR the explanations are merely interpretative and not actually explanatory.

By Ali Shukri Amin

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

Two Muslim academics recently published an article entitled, The Historical-Critical Method and Why Muslims Should Use It: Response to R.A Jabal in which they advocate for Muslims to apply the Historical Critical Method (hereafter referred to as the HCM) in Islamic studies. Their article was itself a response to another article by Rafay Jabal entitled, What is the Historical-Critical Method and Why Muslims Should Care. In Ahmad & Rasheed’s article, they argue that Jabal has not proposed a solution to his critique of the HCM,

Ultimately, while Rafay proposes that what he is doing is pointing out the biases and limitations of the method, he falls into a trap that many critics of the method fall into. He does not actually provide a firm solution to the problem.

Rafay’s critique was heavily focused on the epistemological commitments the HCM has and how this, in his view, biases the method to the point of unreliability. Ahmad & Rasheed argue that the HCM is valuable as it has produced historical knowledge “from pre-historic times to societies of modern history” and, therefore, Jabal’s deconstructive arguments and prescription to shed the HCM are unwarranted. Ahmad & Rasheed conclude that Muslims should utilize the HCM.

I will dissect their arguments in several parts, dealing in turn with the entire assumption stack of the HCM.

Pseudo-Scientific Approach to History

Ahmad & Rasheed, like other HCM scholars, often find the metaphysical and epistemological critiques leveled at the HCM to be baroque. This betrays a lack of appreciation as to the depth and importance of these arguments. However, I have chosen to begin with a critique which was wholly undiscussed by Rafay, Ahmad, or Rasheed. This critique operates within the accepted parameters and assumption stack of the HCM. I begin with a critique that is compatible with presupposing the entire secular modernist assumption stack for the purpose of demonstrating evident flaws in the HCM as a method which are unaddressed, before expanding outwards to increasingly higher levels of inquiry.

The HCM is advertised as a secular, evidence-based, unbiased method for approaching history. Indeed, it is even advertised as scientific. Dr. Joshua Little, eminent Historical Critical scholar and Research Fellow of Islamic Origins at National Chengchi University, says about the HCM,

“There’s a systematic use of science and established background knowledge. When we’re evaluating a report, a historical report, we evaluate it in light of modern science.” [The Origins of Hadith: Traditional and Modern Perspectives! | Dr. Joshua Little, 1:40:56 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZGw3wiPs1Q ]

Yet, by definition, if you cannot test a hypothesis and run controlled experiments or statistical analysis – a method is not scientific. Does that preclude the HCM from being a science?

Modern academia respects a few fields of research as being reliable for producing truth. These consist of the natural sciences, engineering and technology, medical and health sciences, agricultural sciences, and social sciences. Humanities/arts are not considered to be self-reliant methods of accomplishing truth, but seen as valuable for human expression and administration.

So, within the secular method, not everything must be a hard science to produce objective truth. However, if the HCM is not a natural science or social science, then it becomes pseudoscientific when proponents claim it can produce that truth. HCM proponents do claim that it is the best method for arriving at objective historical truth, although they may temper that claim with the fact that all historical truth is “probabilistic.” Yet, that caveat does not deal with a major problem with the Historical-Critical Method has. The HCM cannot validate or justify its own existence. Upon what basis does a proponent of the method justify that the HCM is superior to the historiographical method of ibn Khaldun? What is the methodological evidence that one approach & its conclusions are superior to another?

In hard sciences, such as evolutionary biology, there are evidence-based methods by which scientists may determine that other methods of scientific inquiry lead to erroneous conclusions in the past and due to these facts this other method is better. If this is the case then the HCM is not a scientific method. With a scientific method, we would be able to isolate the exact variables and have reproducibility of results.

In fact, proponents of HCM offer no way to measure historiographical frameworks for their value in explanatory function – since history is an environment where experiments are impossible and therefore there is no reproducibility & scientific conclusions cannot be achieved. However, the concept of nonexperimental sciences is oxymoronic. If neither experiments nor statistical analysis can be done, it's not a hard science. An example is Freudian psychotherapy. To some psychologists, psychotherapy is a very useful method. However, it cannot be validated experimentally though it may produce invaluable insights. The value of such insights is totally subjective.

This is contrasted with some of the hard sciences that are almost entirely based in past data. An example may be cosmology, which is based on observation & statistical analysis of datasets. There can be no controlled experiments but there are theoretical experiments that can be validated or disproven. Furthermore, cosmology and other similar sciences, such as geology, are heavily based on statistical analysis; not on the subjective opinions of researchers on increasingly far-fetched “parallels” (which betray the causality-correlation fallacy). Historiography is categorically different than cosmology. This renders the entire field more like psychotherapy. A researcher cannot come up with a formula to validate a thesis in historiography that can be back projected on historical data. That is not scientific.

If the HCM is not claimed to be a hard science, can it be claimed to be a social science? Proponents of the HCM may claim that HCM is a probabilistic social science. However, they offer no mechanism by which probabilities are being calculated. There are no variables being assigned or underlying rules. Instead, we find narratives based on assumptions that researchers arbitrarily deem most “probable” that are then projected onto the data. Until some statistical framework is proposed and actually utilized, the idea that the HCM is “probabilistic” is not a serious claim.

The HCM is best understood as an “interpretative science” along the lines of Freudian psychotherapy or Marxist economic theory. This renders all of historiography including the HCM, from a secular framework, as a pseudoscience. Since the "engine of historical events" that contains any potential laws of history is invisible to us, if such an engine exists and if such laws exist, we cannot study it in an empirical naturalistic fashion. From a secular perspective, that renders all of historiography no better than subjective interpretation.

Since HCM is not a hard science, it has no basis upon which to validate competing methods or conclusions for objectivity. Experiments and statistical analysis do not apply. How the HCM ensures that it is, itself, a legitimate method, and that it is superior to other methods, and that it can be used to reliably arrive at truth? Why do scholars of the HCM trust the HCM if not for experiments, statistics, and the other accepted tools of modern academia?

The only recourse to determining this would be to raise to the “higher sciences” which were handwaved by Ahmad & Rasheed in their article. Indeed, this is where we find our answer.

The Reproducibility Problem in Science

Science itself is not an infallible method of arriving at truth methodologically. In fact, modern science is replete with methodological challenges. Since the mid-20th century, prescient scientists have come to acknowledge that, despite the best efforts towards scientific rigor, many published research findings are either irreproducible or outright false. Stanley Schoar published a groundbreaking paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1966 in which he concluded that nearly 73% of conclusions in published scientific papers had unjustifiable conclusions. Schoar had identified the “replication crisis”, a now widely recognized problem especially in psychology and medicine. As a result, over the last nearly 60 years, a new field of “metascience” has emerged to conduct meta-analyses of papers within specific disciplines to evaluate validity over time.

In 2005, Dr. John Ioannidis published a profound essay entitled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. In it, he implicated a large number – if not the majority – of peer-reviewed medical research papers as being irreproducible. Using statistical significance to screen papers, he build a statistical model that indicated most of the conclusions were drawn from what could be considered statistical noise or false positives.

The findings of meta-researchers such as Schoar and Ioannidis go beyond quaint intrigue. Metascience has been used to upend widespread convention about medicine that has affected millions of people. As an example, since 1986, tens of millions of people have taken some form of fluxotine (generic Prozac). Prozac is a chemical treatment for depression in pill form that works by inhibiting serotonin receptors in the brain. is so prevalent that it has been observed in American public water supplies and affects wildlife (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5677497/). Yet, despite the academic consensus that depression may be medically described as reduced levels of serotonin in the brain, in 2022 several researchers challenged this conclusion. They published an article in esteemed scientific research journal Nature under molecular psychiatry. A widespread systematic review entitled The Serotonin Theory of Depression: a Systematic Umbrella Review of the Evidence. Utilizing a meta-analysis of published peer-reviewed studies, they concluded that there was no basis to assert that depression may be defined as insufficient serotonin as treatment utilizing serotonin inhibitors (SSRI’s) demonstrated no statistical significance.

Modern scientific conclusions, while often insightful and incredibly beneficial, are also fraught and often unreliable. This is withstanding the strict methodological guardrails that exist for scientific research. No such guardrails exist within interpretative methods like the Historical Critical Method, further throwing into doubt any conclusions HCM researchers may arrive at.

By Ali Shukri Amin

📍Here’s the uncomfortable truth: You don’t follow your Ê¿aqÄ«dah because it’s true— you follow it because you’re wired that way. A core thesis I present is that: most people inherit their theological orientation based on their cognitive style, not revelation. Literalists cling to clarity. Mystics seek meaning. But neither side holds the full picture. From Ibn Ḥazm to Ibn Ê¿ArabÄ«, this chart maps centuries of scholars across the Analytic–Syncretic spectrum—a lens to understand not just what we believe, but why we believe it. The Hadith of Banu Qurayẓah proves it: even the á¹¢aḥābah disagreed on interpretation—and the Prophet ï·º affirmed both. Swipe. Reflect. Get uncomfortable. أين ٠وقعك في طيف عل٠الكلا٠؟ 📍الحقيقة ال٠ُحرجة: أنت لا تتبع عقيدتك لأنها حق، بل لأنك ٠ُبر٠ج عليها. ٠عظ٠الناس يرثون تصوّره٠العقدي ٠ن ن٠طه٠ال٠عرفي، لا ٠ن الوحي. الحرفيّون يبحثون عن اليقين، وال٠تصوّفة عن ال٠عنى. ولا أحد ي٠لك الصورة الكا٠لة. ٠ن ابن حز٠إلى ابن عربي، هذا الطيف يوضّح خارطة فكرية لقرون ٠ن العل٠اء — ليس فقط ٠ا نعتقد، بل ل٠اذا نعتقده. وحديث بني قريظة يثبت ذلك: حتى الصحابة اختلفوا في الفه٠، والنبي ï·º أقرّ كليه٠ا. تأ٠ّل… وواجه نفسك. Islam #Theology #Salafi #Sufi #Shia #Kalam #Aqidah #Sunni #Ashari #Maturidi #Athari #MuÊ¿tazila #IbnTaymiyya #IbnArabi #IbnHazm #IbnSina #IslamicPhilosophy #AnalyticVsSyncretic #عل٠_الكلا٠#العقيدة_الإسلا٠ية #التحليليون #التوفيقيون #ابن_تي٠ية #ابن_عربي #ابن_سينا #الفكر_الإسلا٠ي #حديث_بني_قريظة #الطيف_العقدي This piece was originally written and shared by Ali Shukri Amin on Reddit. Read or discuss the original thread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/aliamin/comments/1kzlsup/analyticsyncretic_spectrum_of_islamic_theology/ Categories Islamic Scholarship A Rough Intro to Occidentalism | Is the HCM A Robust Methodology? Post author By Ali Shukri Amin Post date March 19, 2025 Like all fields of knowledge, history and historiography require a set of assumptions built upon each other over time. When you investigate the source of a particular field of inquiry, you dive deeper into this stack of assumptions into a more fundamental field. The 'assumption stack' of any field are the direct tools you use to operate in a particular science or area of research so they affect everything that's done in the field. Modern Western academic approaches to history and historiography, particularly the Historical Critical Method, assert themselves as the most advanced and unbiased approaches to the field. Modern science has an assumption stack. So does medicine. So do various approaches to history. So does the HCM. One of the major issues scholars in any field have is that they assume the internal coherence of that field produces truth that is applicable outside of that field. In reality, without proving every step of the assumption stack, those findings are only useful within that particular approach. Furthermore, most scholars of a field know nothing about their own assumption stack or don't even know it exists. Very few scientists know much about the philosophy of science or whether science produces actual truth because "it works." However, the HCM, especially as applied to the critical study of Islamic sources, ignores important sources of knowledge and unfairly privileges others. Far from being an unbiased or objective approach to these texts, the Historical Critical Method has as many baked-in assumptions as indigenous Islamic methods. Moreover, the assumptions of the Historical Critical Method are much more difficult to justify and rest on much shakier grounds. Understanding what assumptions underpin the HCM requires an exploration of its intellectual history. Many of these same assumptions underpin the current edifice of Western thinking. Exploring them requires significantly more effort than exploring the philosophical basis of worldviews which we are initially unfamiliar with – whose idiosyncrasies and contradictions seem more readily apparent to us. HCM has an assumption stack. It goes down to metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology at its core. The general assumption stack is the same as Western academia writ large but there are also specific assumptions and even outright incorrect biases at the final level. There is no such thing called being unbiased. Everyone has their biases and assumptions. Some biases and assumptions are thoroughly reasoned and robust. Others are demonstrably false. A Muslim academic would have a thoroughly reasoned Islamic epistemology, not an "unbiased neutral" one which is just a myth secularists unknowingly push (and which subsumes all other epistemologies under secularism under those false pretenses). Epistemology is a framework and a system. There is no such thing as a neutral or unbiased system. Seeking a neutral epistemology is like asking for a building that reaches as high as possible with no levels to it. You don't want the visitor to have to climb any levels to get to the top. It doesn't make sense. By definition, buildings are levels atop one another. By definition, a methodology or epistemology are layers of assumptions on top of each other. Some assumptions you can prove, others you can't. The important thing is to be epistemologically robust and be willing to question, critique, analyze, debate your assumptions – not to have no assumptions. Every claim of neutrality is a lie. It is not enough just to prove what the unacknowledged assumption stack of HCM is and then critique each layer. It would also have to be demonstrated across many texts that this stack really is operant with specific examples and leading to unjustifiable conclusions. That part takes even longer. First HCM has to be defined, then you have to assert what you think is the assumption stack, then you have to prove that it exists and is in use, then you have to criticise it on theoretical grounds, then you have to demonstrate an applied criticism where the assumption stack – in the wild – leads to unjustified conclusions or analysis. What ends up happening is that we use the HCM to criticize assumptions others made without proving that HCM can lead to any truth. That implies a large degree of cultural/civilizational chauvinism to critically deconstruct someone else's tools without applying that same critical lens to your own tools first recursively. It could initially come from a place of genuine inquiry and unawareness, but once demonstrated clearly: 'this is what you took for granted, these are the flaws, this is how your own toolset leads you to erroneous conclusion' if something like that is ignored then that has some kind of baked in chauvinism. I don't think the field is currently intentionally like that. I think the researchers have good intentions and are trying to discover truth to the best of their ability. However, as you & I have discussed before, I think this is the core issue that no one is addressing. Just like I don't think something like HCM could natively come out of Islamicate civilization, I don't think a critique like this could natively come out of the academy. It's extremely hard to notice your own assumption stack and deconstructing it is a multi-disciplinary feat. You tend to need to have another assumption stack to rely on otherwise you'll just end up stuck at radical skepticism or nihilism and never get to an applied analysis. Western secular academic history to humanities in general, Islamic studies in specific, has as many baked-in assumptions as the Madrassah. The assumptions upon which modern scientific knowledge is based are more extensive and less justifiable than the assumptions undertaken by Islamic thinkers in the pre-modern era. Modern science prioritizes empiricism over the other important sources of knowledge, namely: metaphysics, natural instincts, formal logic, skepticism, and Revelation. Islamic philosophy took empirical knowledge into consideration, but tempered it with philosophy, natural inclinations, formal logic, skepticism, and Revelation. The Historical Critical Method is science in the mold of evidence-based empiricism. It makes assumptions about modernism, naturalism, Hegelianism, and a wide host of other philosophical, epistemological, and historiographical ideas. Upon testing the Historical Critical Method according to other branches of knowledge, especially sub-branches of philosophy and skepticism, we can begin to more accurately and objectively determine what is not true than what is. The Islamic method of critiquing historical documents was developed in light of a more primitive form of empiricism, but much more sophisticated forms of instinct/intuition, logic, and skepticism over the course of 1,500 years. It was a multi-disciplinary approach, bringing the full force of the humanities to research. The primary critique of the epistemology underpinning the HCM is that academics operating with that methodology have blind faith for a myriad of core beliefs that are totally unjustifiable. They are unjustifiable in terms of being unproven or outright falsifiable as premises. However, most academics don't even realize all of these assumptions they are making, so they operate from a first-person perspective of objectivity within their paradigm. We know the assumptions of the Muslim historians. God exists, He speaks to humans, He sends Prophets, Muhammad was a Prophet, God preserved Muhammad's message, etc. Muslim theologians, philosophers, and historians constructed complex justifications for all of these assumptions and attempted to make them as robust as possible to justify further inquiry. HCM and source criticism looks at the texts that these scholars just assumed were valid or at least had an origin of validity and attempts to deconstruct them. What is not happening is a critique in the opposite direction within Western academia towards its own assumptions. Both sides are operating out of faith. My contention is that the Western academy does not acknowledge that it is doing so although any rigorous analysis can demonstrate that blind faith assumptions about things like metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology are the hallmarks of "religion." The purpose of this work is to, for the first time, comprehensively confront Occidentalism. The primary criticisms levied against the HCM are: The great number of unjustifiable epistemological assumptions required to accept the HCM Unjustified assumptions regarding historical theories and modernism The HCM’s failure to account for statistics and probability both in data collection and in analysis The dependency of the HCM on induction while failing to answer the problem of induction The Under-Determination of Scientific Theory The use of flawed heuristics and biases in the HCM The dependency on the illusion of causality (epiphenomenon) Dependency on flawed assumptions of Hegel’s model of epistemological truth Dependency on orientalist tropes This piece was originally written and shared by Ali Shukri Amin on Reddit. Read or discuss the original thread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MuslimAcademics/comments/1jfa95l/a_rough_intro_to_occidentalism_is_the_hcm_a/ Categories Islamic Scholarship Cantillation Before Islam: How Did Arabian Jews Read the Torah? Post author By Ali Shukri Amin Post date February 22, 2025 An open historical question I have been trying to get a clearer answer to, offered here as an exploration rather than a conclusion. The Hebrew Bible as it is chanted today carries a system of cantillation marks — the teÊ¿amim — that govern how the text is sung in liturgy. Those marks, in the form we know them, are a product of the Tiberian Masoretes and were fixed in writing only around the seventh to tenth centuries CE. That dating raises a question that sits right on the seam between Jewish and early Islamic history. The question Did the Jews of Arabia, before Islam or during the lifetime of the Prophet ï·º, already have a standardized melodic style for reading the Torah in ritual or liturgical settings? And how much can we actually claim to know about it? What we can and cannot say A few things seem reasonably clear, and a great deal does not: The written marks came later. The Tiberian pointing and accents postdate the early seventh century, so whatever Arabian Jews were doing, they were not reading from a notated system like the one preserved in later Masoretic manuscripts. Oral cantillation is older than its notation. The absence of written marks does not mean the absence of chanted reading. Structured oral traditions of liturgical recitation plainly predate the Masoretic project; the marks arguably codified an existing practice rather than inventing one. Arabian specifics are thin. The hard part is evidence for Arabian Jewry in particular. The communities of the Ḥijāz and Yemen are historically real and were liturgically active, but direct testimony to a standardized melodic mode among them in this period is sparse, and much of what gets said rests on back-projection from later, better-documented traditions. Why it matters The question is not idle. The early Islamic milieu was one in which scripture was heard as much as read, and comparative questions about how neighboring scriptural communities performed their texts — melodically, mnemonically, liturgically — bear on how we understand the wider oral-scriptural culture of late antique Arabia. If anyone can point me to solid scholarship on pre-Islamic or early-seventh-century Arabian Jewish liturgical reading, I would be grateful; this is a genuine gap in what I have been able to find. This exploration began as a question I posed on Reddit. Read or join the original discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicQuran/comments/1ivl1hb/what_do_we_know_about_tammim_and_oral_reading_of/ Categories Islamic Scholarship Ibn Hazm on Hadith Criticism: Do Divergent Chains Signal Fabrication? Post author By Ali Shukri Amin Post date January 13, 2025 This is an open exploration rather than a finished argument — a question I have been turning over and would welcome pushback on. Ibn Ḥazm al-AndalusÄ« (d. 456/1064), the great ẒāhirÄ« jurist and polymath, held unusually demanding views on the transmission of hadith. Against many of his contemporaries, he argued that a sound solitary report (khabar al-wāḥid) — one carried by an unbroken chain of upright, precise narrators — yields not merely probable opinion but binding knowledge. That position makes the integrity of the isnād carry enormous weight: if a single chain can obligate belief and action, then the criteria for accepting a chain must be correspondingly strict. The question Here is what I keep circling back to. Does the existence of multiple chains carrying the same report but with materially differing wordings raise the probability that fabrication has entered somewhere along the line? The intuition cuts against the usual reflex. We normally treat multiplicity of chains as strengthening a report — the logic of tawātur, where independent lines converging on one content make collusion implausible. But convergence on content is not the same as divergence in wording. If the same event is narrated through several chains and the actual text drifts from version to version, that drift has to originate somewhere: in paraphrase, in faulty memory, or in invention. The more the wordings diverge while claiming the same origin, the more transmission noise — and the more room for a fabricated or “improved” wording to be laundered through an otherwise respectable chain. Why it fits a ẒāhirÄ« sensibility A methodology that leans on the literal wording of texts has a particular stake in this problem. If meaning is to be read off the words themselves rather than reconstructed from the jurist’s sense of intent, then variation in the words is not a harmless matter of style; it is potential corruption of the very object of analysis. So a reader in Ibn Ḥazm’s tradition might reasonably be more suspicious of wording-level divergence than a jurist who is comfortable narrating hadith by sense (riwāya bi-l-maÊ¿nā). Where I am uncertain I am not asserting this as a documented ruling of Ibn Ḥazm’s; I am asking whether his premises push in this direction, and whether the classical muḥaddithÅ«n already had a vocabulary for it — iḍṭirāb (irreconcilable variance in a report) is the obvious candidate, and it is precisely a defect that weakens a hadith. The open question is whether divergent wording across multiple chains should be read as ordinary transmission-by-sense or as a genuine signal of fabrication risk, and how a strict literalist ought to weigh the two. I would be glad to hear from anyone who has worked through Ibn Ḥazm’s al-Iḥkām on this point. This exploration began as a question I posed on Reddit. Read or join the original discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicQuran/comments/1i00yo9/ibn_hazms_approach_to_hadith_analysis/ Categories Islamic Scholarship Due Process in Islamic Law Post author By Ali Shukri Amin Post date November 5, 2024 يا أَيُّهَا الَّذينَ آ٠َنوا إِن جاءَكُ٠فاسِقٌ بِنَبَإٍ فَتَبَيَّنوا أَن تُصيبوا قَو٠ًا بِجَهالَةٍ فَتُصبِحوا عَلىٰ ٠ا فَعَلتُ٠نادِ٠ينَ O you who have faith! If a profligate [person] should bring you some news, verify it, lest you should visit [harm] on some people out of ignorance, and then become regretful for what you have done. [Surah al-Hujurat] Mu'adh bin Jabal (RAA) narrated that the Messenger of Allah (ï·º) said:“If anyone disgraces his brother for a sin, he will not die before committing it himself.” Related At-Tirmidhi who graded it to be Hasan.وَعَنْ ٠ُعَاذِ بْنِ جَبَلٍ ‏- رضى الله عنه ‏- قَالَ: قَالَ رَسُولُ اَللَّهِ ‏- صلى الله عليه وسل٠‏-{ ٠َنْ عَيَّرَ أَخَاهُ بِذَنْبٍ, لَ٠ْ يَ٠ُتْ حَتَّى يَعْ٠َلَهُ } أَخْرَجَهُ اَلتِّرْ٠ِذِيُّ وَحَسَّنَهُ, وَسَنَدُهُ ٠ُنْقَطِعٌ.‏ 1‏ .‏ Narrated AbuBarzah al-Aslami: حَدَّثَنَا عُثْ٠َانُ بْنُ أَبِي شَيْبَةَ، حَدَّثَنَا الأَسْوَدُ بْنُ عَا٠ِرٍ، حَدَّثَنَا أَبُو بَكْرِ بْنُ عَيَّاشٍ، عَنِ الأَعْ٠َشِ، عَنْ سَعِيدِ بْنِ عَبْدِ اللَّهِ بْنِ جُرَيْجٍ، عَنْ أَبِي بَرْزَةَ الأَسْلَ٠ِيِّ، قَالَ قَالَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسل٠‏ "‏ يَا ٠َعْشَرَ ٠َنْ آ٠َنَ بِلِسَانِهِ وَلَ٠ْ يَدْخُلِ الإِي٠َانُ قَلْبَهُ لاَ تَغْتَابُوا الْ٠ُسْلِ٠ِينَ وَلاَ تَتَّبِعُوا عَوْرَاتِهِ٠ْ فَإِنَّهُ ٠َنِ اتَّبَعَ عَوْرَاتِهِ٠ْ يَتَّبِعِ اللَّهُ عَوْرَتَهُ وَ٠َنْ يَتَّبِعِ اللَّهُ عَوْرَتَهُ يَفْضَحْهُ فِي بَيْتِهِ ‏"‏ ‏.‏ The Prophet (ï·º) said: O community of people, who believed by their tongue, and belief did not enter their hearts, do not back-bite Muslims, and do not search for their faults, for if anyone searches for their faults, Allah will search for his fault, and if Allah searches for the fault of anyone, He disgraces him in his house. Hasan Sahih (Al-Albani) حسن صحيح (الألباني) حك٠: Sunan Abi Dawud 4880 "The first Li'an in Islam was when Hilal bin Umayyah accused Sharik bin As-Sahma' (of committing adultery) with his wife. He came to the Prophet and told him about that. The Prophet said: '(Bring) four witnesses, otherwise (you will feel) the Hadd punishment on your back.' And he repeated that several times. Hilal said to him: 'By Allah, O Messenger of Allah! Allah, the Mighty and Sublime, knows that I am telling the truth, and Allah, the Mighty and Sublime, will certainly reveal to you that which will spare my back from the whip.' While they were like that, the Verse of Li'an was revealed to him: 'As to those who accuse their wives.' He called Hilal and he bore witness four times by Allah that he was telling the truth, and the fifth time he invoked the curse of Allah upon him if he were lying. Then he called the woman and she bore witness four times by Allah that he was lying. When it came to the fourth or fifth time, the Messenger of Allah said: 'Stop her, for it will inevitably bring the punishment of Allah upon the liar.' She hesitated until we thought that she was going to confess, then she said: 'I will not dishonor my people today.' Then she went ahead with the oath. The Messenger of Allah said: 'Wait and see. If she produces a child who is white, with straight hair and Qadiy'a eyes, then he belongs to Hilal bin Umayyah, but if she produces a child who is dark with curly hair, of average size and with narrow calves, then he belongs to Sharik bin As-Sahma'.' She produced a child who was dark with curly hair, of average size and with narrow calves. The Messenger of Allah said: 'Had not the matter been settled by the Book of Allah, I would have punished her severely.'" أَخْبَرَنَا عِ٠ْرَانُ بْنُ يَزِيدَ، قَالَ حَدَّثَنَا ٠َخْلَدُ بْنُ حُسَيْنٍ الأَزْدِيُّ، قَالَ حَدَّثَنَا هِشَا٠ُ بْنُ حَسَّانَ، عَنْ ٠ُحَ٠َّدِ بْنِ سِيرِينَ، عَنْ أَنَسِ بْنِ ٠َالِكٍ، قَالَ إِنَّ أَوَّلَ لِعَانٍ كَانَ فِي الإِسْلاَ٠ِ أَنَّ هِلاَلَ بْنَ أُ٠َيَّةَ قَذَفَ شَرِيكَ ابْنَ السَّحْ٠َاءِ بِا٠ْرَأَتِهِ فَأَتَى النَّبِيَّ صلى الله عليه وسل٠فَأَخْبَرَهُ بِذَلِكَ فَقَالَ لَهُ النَّبِيُّ صلى الله عليه وسل٠‏"‏ أَرْبَعَةَ شُهَدَاءَ وَإِلاَّ فَحَدٌّ فِي ظَهْرِكَ ‏"‏ ‏.‏ يُرَدِّدُ ذَلِكَ عَلَيْهِ ٠ِرَارًا فَقَالَ لَهُ هِلاَلٌ وَاللَّهِ يَا رَسُولَ اللَّهِ إِنَّ اللَّهَ عَزَّ وَجَلَّ لَيَعْلَ٠ُ أَنِّي صَادِقٌ وَلَيُنْزِلَنَّ اللَّهُ عَزَّ وَجَلَّ عَلَيْكَ ٠َا يُبَرِّئُ ظَهْرِي ٠ِنَ الْجَلْدِ ‏.‏ فَبَيْنَ٠َا هُ٠ْ كَذَلِكَ إِذْ نَزَلَتْ عَلَيْهِ آيَةُ اللِّعَانِ ‏{‏ وَالَّذِينَ يَرْ٠ُونَ أَزْوَاجَهُ٠ْ ‏}‏ إِلَى آخِرِ الآيَةِ فَدَعَا هِلاَلاً فَشَهِدَ أَرْبَعَ شَهَادَاتٍ بِاللَّهِ إِنَّهُ لَ٠ِنَ الصَّادِقِينَ وَالْخَا٠ِسَةُ أَنَّ لَعْنَةَ اللَّهِ عَلَيْهِ إِنْ كَانَ ٠ِنَ الْكَاذِبِينَ ثُ٠َّ دُعِيَتِ الْ٠َرْأَةُ فَشَهِدَتْ أَرْبَعَ شَهَادَاتٍ بِاللَّهِ إِنَّهُ لَ٠ِنَ الْكَاذِبِينَ فَلَ٠َّا أَنْ كَانَ فِي الرَّابِعَةِ أَوِ الْخَا٠ِسَةِ قَالَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسل٠‏"‏ وَقِّفُوهَا فَإِنَّهَا ٠ُوجِبَةٌ ‏"‏ ‏.‏ فَتَلَكَّأَتْ حَتَّى ٠َا شَكَكْنَا أَنَّهَا سَتَعْتَرِفُ ثُ٠َّ قَالَتْ لاَ أَفْضَحُ قَوْ٠ِي سَائِرَ الْيَوْ٠ِ ‏.‏ فَ٠َضَتْ عَلَى الْيَ٠ِينِ فَقَالَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسل٠‏"‏ انْظُرُوهَا فَإِنْ جَاءَتْ بِهِ أَبْيَضَ سَبِطًا قَضِيءَ الْعَيْنَيْنِ فَهُوَ لِهِلاَلِ بْنِ أُ٠َيَّةَ وَإِنْ جَاءَتْ بِهِ آدَ٠َ جَعْدًا رَبْعًا حَ٠ْشَ السَّاقَيْنِ فَهُوَ لِشَرِيكِ ابْنِ السَّحْ٠َاءِ ‏"‏ ‏.‏ فَجَاءَتْ بِهِ آدَ٠َ جَعْدًا رَبْعًا حَ٠ْشَ السَّاقَيْنِ فَقَالَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسل٠‏"‏ لَوْلاَ ٠َا سَبَقَ فِيهَا ٠ِنْ كِتَابِ اللَّهِ لَكَانَ لِي وَلَهَا شَأْنٌ ‏"‏ ‏.‏ قَالَ الشَّيْخُ وَالْقَضِيءُ طَوِيلُ شَعْرِ الْعَيْنَيْنِ لَيْسَ بِ٠َفْتُوحِ الْعَيْنِ وَلاَ جَاحِظِهِ٠َا وَاللَّهُ سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَى أَعْلَ٠ُ ‏.‏ Sahih (Darussalam) Sunan an-Nasa'i 3469 Imran b. Husain reported that a woman from Juhaina came to Allah's Apostle (ï·º) and she had become pregnant because of adultery. She said: Allah's Apostle, I have done something for which (prescribed punishment) must be imposed upon me, so impose that. Allah's Apostle (ï·º) called her master and said: Treat her well, and when she delivers bring her to me. He did accordingly. Then Allah's Apostle (ï·º) pronounced judgment about her and her clothes were tied around her and then he commanded and she was stoned to death. He then prayed over her (dead body). Thereupon Umar said to him: Allah's Apostle, you offer prayer for her, whereas she had committed adultery! Thereupon he said: She has made such a repentance that if it were to be divided among seventy men of Medina, it would be enough. Have you found any repentance better than this that she sacr ficed her life for Allah, the Majestic? حَدَّثَنِي أَبُو غَسَّانَ، ٠َالِكُ بْنُ عَبْدِ الْوَاحِدِ الْ٠ِسْ٠َعِيُّ حَدَّثَنَا ٠ُعَاذٌ، – يَعْنِي ابْنَ هِشَا٠ٍ – حَدَّثَنِي أَبِي، عَنْ يَحْيَى بْنِ أَبِي كَثِيرٍ، حَدَّثَنِي أَبُو قِلاَبَةَ، أَنَّ أَبَا الْ٠ُهَلَّبِ، حَدَّثَهُ عَنْ عِ٠ْرَانَ، بْنِ حُصَيْنٍ أَنَّ ا٠ْرَأَةً، ٠ِنْ جُهَيْنَةَ أَتَتْ نَبِيَّ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسل٠وَهِيَ حُبْلَى ٠ِنَ الزِّنَى فَقَالَتْ يَا نَبِيَّ اللَّهِ أَصَبْتُ حَدًّا فَأَقِ٠ْهُ عَلَىَّ فَدَعَا نَبِيُّ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسل٠وَلِيَّهَا فَقَالَ ‏"‏ أَحْسِنْ إِلَيْهَا فَإِذَا وَضَعَتْ فَائْتِنِي بِهَا ‏"‏ ‏.‏ فَفَعَلَ فَأَ٠َرَ بِهَا نَبِيُّ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسل٠فَشُكَّتْ عَلَيْهَا ثِيَابُهَا ثُ٠َّ أَ٠َرَ بِهَا فَرُجِ٠َتْ ثُ٠َّ صَلَّى عَلَيْهَا فَقَالَ لَهُ عُ٠َرُ تُصَلِّي عَلَيْهَا يَا نَبِيَّ اللَّهِ وَقَدْ زَنَتْ فَقَالَ ‏"‏ لَقَدْ تَابَتْ تَوْبَةً لَوْ قُسِ٠َتْ بَيْنَ سَبْعِينَ ٠ِنْ أَهْلِ الْ٠َدِينَةِ لَوَسِعَتْهُ٠ْ وَهَلْ وَجَدْتَ تَوْبَةً أَفْضَلَ ٠ِنْ أَنْ جَادَتْ بِنَفْسِهَا لِلَّهِ تَعَالَى ‏"‏ ‏.‏ Sahih Muslim 1696a This piece was originally written and shared by Ali Shukri Amin on Reddit. Read or discuss the original thread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MuslimCorner/comments/1gk82dd/due_process_in_islamic_law/