Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: what do you think about this one — June 5, 2024 | Ali Shukri Amin

Western secular academia has certain philosophical presuppositions that are absolutely necessary to function otherwise no further research is possible. The same is true of Islamic traditionalism.

Before you can really do sophisticated meaningful research into any science you have to first deal with fundamental questions of metaphysics and epistemology (what is truth? How can we know it? Does objective truth exist? What are the standards of truth?)

After the epistemological work of Hegel, continental philosophy was able to soundly base its method on physical reality, ignoring the neumenon and focusing on the phenomenal sciences. Hegel allowed them to put the supernatural, Christianity, epistemology, and metaphysics to bed.

It's no surprise that after his groundbreaking work, secularism rises as the dominant ideology, giving birth to Capitalism, Democracy, and Communism. The "natural philosophies" go from being a sub-branch of philosophy to all of knowledge itself "physical sciences then, just, science."

This is discussed in the academic study of religion. A secular "scientific" approach based on anthropology and empiricism has as many presuppositions as a religious institution. Indeed, Talal Asad deconstructed the entire idea of the secular-religious dichotomy in "Formations of the Secular," demonstrating that secularism is as much a "religion" with "unprovable" assumptions about the supernatural as any other.

The reality is that the secular academy and the Muslim traditional institution seek to do two very different things with two very different methodologies. I personally find some of the conclusions of both useful and interesting. But anyone that thinks that secular universities are "objective" because they use "science" doesn't know philosophy, intellectual history, or the first thing about skepticism.

To this day there has never been a rigorous skeptical evaluation of the tools of the Western academy in humanities following the monopoly of continental & analytic philosophy. The closest is Nassim Taleb, a Lebanese Christian, in his Incerto series - which deals with philosophical skepticism and rational empiricism but primarily from the perspective of financial modelling risk (although he does deconstruct most history, historiography, anthropology, and related fields that academic Islamic studies are based on).

This is an era I would like to write something academic in in the future.