Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: what do you think about this one — June 6, 2024 · l7ewda9 | Ali Shukri Amin

What there was was: Protestant Christianity that saw outward and physical manifestations of worship as being backwards or resembling paganism. Some iconoclastic sects of Protestantism took this to the extreme, making Christianity something which occurs almost entirely in the heart and mind, along with the text. By removing all forms of outward practice, this lays the stage for "religion" to exist in the "private sphere."

When critical Biblical scholarship began to develop in the West after the Gutenberg press allowed many people direct access to the Bible and after the Enlightenment, it became clear to many intellectuals that Christianity was not true and the source texts were not at all historical. Since they assumed the superiority of Christianity and the nascent Europe (as contrasted with the encroaching Ottomans), if Christianity was false - then so was every other "religion" that made assertions about God, in a cascading effect.

Protestantism, with its aversion to rituals or public implementation, was thus primed to be relegated to the "private" sphere. Since all other "religions" were false, they have an equal truth-value to Protestantism, and since Christianity is superior, they should be similarly limited.

What is very interesting is the convergent evolution of secularism with Calvanism, the replacement of the Godhead with the production of wealth, and Jesus as the replaceable figure of other "religions." In this way, Protestant Christianity became the model for other religions to follow. So long as there was subservience to a state whose motive was the protection and enjoyment of capital, then Jesus could be replaced for Vishnu or Allah or any other God. They are equally false in the eyes of the secular, and so long as they are subservient to the secular umbrella, equally acceptable.

The idea of "religion" is a construct by the secular philosophy which allows it to consume and subsume all traditional ways of life, while rendering itself as the ultimate governing authority. Indeed, under secularism we have seen the destruction of nearly all traditional ways of life.

The evidence for these statements, further elaboration, clarification, can be found primarily in "Formations of the Secular" and "The Protestant Ethic of Capitalism." These are two absolutely essential texts for the modern academic study of religion, and in my opinion should be studied before Islam - or any other "religion" - is studied in any academic sense.

It is unsurprising to me that the academy leaves these texts out. Humanities as a whole are suffering under the weight of the STEM uber alles mentality, hence our public academics not even having the tools for proper didactic discourse with one another. The modern academy has taken metaphysics, epistemology, and formal logic so for granted with their assumption that Hegel has figured it all out, that they aren't even teaching the Hegelian approach to these issues. This leaves most graduates incredibly ill-equipped to answer basic questions.

Without formal training in philosophy and the academic study of religion, any conclusions arrived by Islamic studies academics is not critical at all, because the criticism is underpinned by a motherload of unprovable assumptions.

This becomes problematic when we encounter an actual skeptic who tests these assumptions. Most of the conclusions arrived at by historians and anthropologists in the academy would not stand up to the most basic questioning by an educated statistician, for example, who could point out multiple ways they are misinterpreting data due to heuristics, biases, and not taking into account the factor that randomness plays in the representation of the historical record or development of events