Reddit comments from August 2024

What is the most comprehensive analysis and criticism of the 'ilm al-rijāl corpus from an HCM perspective? It seems to me that criticizing the historicity of the narrators in a sanad or at least the authenticity of their biographies is one of the stronger critiques of the traditional hadith corpus.

Although the jarh wa ta'dil corpus is not dependent entirely or solely interlinked with hadith/sanad/mutun, the failure to properly document these biographies with reference to additional evidence could be a huge oversight and IMO one of the stronger deconstructions of hadith from a historical perspective.

The bias or slant seems a lot less problematic to me than where did all of this biographical content come from and how do we know it is reliable?

The idea with hadith is that we can confirm/verify any particular hadith through sanad analysis. A sahih hadith should be musnad (connected chain) of thiqqah ruwat (reliable narrators), not containing 'ilal (subcantaneous defects) or being shādh (aberrant with respect to stronger narrations).

How do we verify the books of ilm al-rijal? They aren't narrated with sanad. They're just there as biographical dictionaries. What confirms that, a) all of those people existed and b) what was said about them is true?

This then becomes problematic for hadith from an HCM perspective because if the hadith corpus relies on sanad and sanad relies on jarh wa tadil, then we need to first validate jarh wa tadil books.

Maybe there's just something I don't understand about this. I'd like some input from someone who knows this a bit better than me.

It would be a pretty big oversight on the part of the muĥadithūn to go to such great lengths to engage in isnad criticism and then not question the rijāl literature, especially since isnad is totally reliant upon jarh wa ta'dil. It seems bizarre to me. I wonder if there is something I am missing. There should be some academic research on this as well that I am unaware of?

I think it's kind of dismissive of human knowledge and intellect broadly to assume that just because we are unfamiliar with possible arguments to a glaring issue that no one has thought about this before. Especially since both of us are unaware of either academic or traditional literature on this topic. This requires us to just assume a very large oversight without doing any research on it, especially since this is a very particular question (how did traditionalists justify the historicity of ilm al-rijal literature?)

It could certainly be an oversight but this is why I specifically asked if this was researched. Without research, making an assumption either way says more about our personal biases than anything else.

So because you've personally never heard the historical justification traditionalists may or may not have given as pertains to jarh wa tadil that means it doesn't exist at all without any kind of specialized study? So u/chonkshonk is now the arbiter of what does and does not exist in terms of previously unstudied areas of academic Islam?

My position was that I don't know what academics or traditionalists have to say about this. I don't mind admitting that I'm unfamiliar with something. I don't get the insistence that because you are also unfamiliar to come to a conclusion on it.

There could very well be research done on this especially in Arabic that I haven't come across.

Thanks for asking and hopefully we can get some mlre detailed insights into this

Are Muslims even real? 🤔

Should be pretty trivial to train a large language model on the methodology and apply it to ahadith one by one. I'm in machine learning professionally, just haven't had the time to sit down with Little's thesis.

What's your suggestion? Graph neural networks? You wouldn't get an analysis out of something like that, more like a probabalistic score based on many factors. It would be very hard to follow the logic.

1. Vectorized embeddings databases. Usually utilized in conjunction with LLM logic in a process called RAG (retrieval augmented generation).
2. Visualizations are probably going to be best represented by using a graph neural network and then putting the data output into something like R or Tablaeu. However, this would be a last step.
3. Analysis would likely have to come first. Human readable analysis and statistical analysis would be done seperately. Probably best to do statistical analysis and graphing first, then have a very sophisticated series of automated prompts along with decomposition metrics for graph to produce a report.
4. Not sure what you mean here
5. More clarity needed based on #4

Embeddings, RAG, LLM, graph NN, and some data visualization techniques seem to be sufficient here.

I think there's a subtle analogy between literacy and exactitude I take issue with here. I don't think the scale of exactitude is causally related with literacy. It seems to me that this is a more cultural phenomenon. Eastern philosophy, including much of Islamicate thinking, is more focused on broader concepts and abstractions as opposed to exactitudes. Although you see that movement in Islamic civilization (atomism, material sciences, hyper-legalism) it seems the early Muslims were more geared towards the Eastern intellectual paradigm.

I like Taha Jaber al-Alwani's fatwa on the Supreme Court frieze of Prophet Muhammad in this regard. He has an extensive discussion on the West as a culture of the "image" versus Islamic cultures of the "word."

I also think there's good reasons to believe some prophetic companions were more literalistic exact thinkers while others were not. I have my own views on how these two strains relate to neurology and personality but those are purely speculative ☺️

The oldest formal theological school was that of the Mu'tazliah. Ash'arism was initially founded by Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari as a response to Mu'tazilism, with Maturidism developing shortly thereafter in a kind of intellectual convergent evolution.

The "Athari" school was not initially a formal theological school but essentially represented Sunni hadith scholars who rejected formal theology altogether. Later on, their stances were justified in a theological way.

It depends how you define a theological school. In terms of a systematic curriculum with a body of knowledge and responses to various views, then Mutazilism then Asharism. If you define it as a belief system that is taught through texts even if it isn't as rigorously codified, then Atharism. Certainly, the ideas of Atharism are older than Mutazilism even.

You can check The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology for a good overview on this. The first part of Yasir Qadhi's PhD thesis is also instructure.

The movement in Islamic psychology is to describe these kinds of intrusive negative impulses that affect a patient's life as described as being "Shaytanic" in origin. That these thoughts and impulses originate from the demonic whispers of Shaytan, and that behaviors which precipitate are essentially affected by this Jinn. So the thoughts and impulses are seen as coming from a malicious entity which is not the patient. The patient can recognize it as such and begin to exert control over this jinn/demon.

I'm not sure what the history of mental health treatment is in classical Christianity. In the Islamic world, psychological treatment and jinn exorcism went hand in hand - with some conditions being considered one or the other or both. This goes back over 1000 years including to the first mental hospitals in the world. Abu Zayd al-Balkhi is credited with developing the first model of cognitive behaviorial therapy.

It seems that modern therapy and psychiatry is often devoid of the spiritual component which may be exactly what many patients need for progress.

Take it to a data recovery shop and they should be able to find it if it was successfully saved then accidentally deleted.

The entire corpus of Mumia Abu Jamal's political philosophy has been penned entirely from prison, mostly on death row.

You're not being dramatic. There's a kind of cultural chauvanism in the classics and philosophy departments in the Ivory tower that precipitates downwards. The reality is that other civilizations have traditions that are as rich as the West. It doesn't prepare your students or us as a society to be evolutionarily fit to survive to ignore that.

Read Walden and look at Thoreau's fascination with Hindusim and then wonder how he would have reacted to Sufism. He was incredibly enriched by his limited exposure to Indian literature and incredibly deprived by his lack of exposure to Islamicate literature.

Spain and Latin America have a tremendous amount of fantastic literature.

Black Americans have also produced quite a corpus of invaluable works. African literature should probably be divided into Muslim and non-Muslim Africa, because the literature, style, philosophy, and topics is totally different.

In terms of east Asian literature it's hard to go wrong with the Tao Te Ching. Central Asian: Rumi's Diwan or Concordance of the Birds by Farid al-Din al-Attar.

Very insightful comment. There are several distinct Islamicate intellectual traditions that survive today. West Africans certainly have an emphasis on memorization, law, and spirituality. North Africans (the Azharite tradition) were more aligned with the Eastern tradition of reading (reportedly up to 12 hours a day) and engaged much more with didactic theology/Prophetic narrations.

Although I don't think most Western students of the classics would be interested in the technical religious manuals of these scholars, they also produced many texts of great aesthetic value that aren't technical. Al-Ghazālī's Ihyā is probably one of the most valuable texts in all of human history, as is al-Qushayrī's Burda (to say nothing of the Qur'ān itself).

It's also worthwhile to look at the depth of thought in Islamic didactic theology and political/legal philosophy. I don't think anything similar exists in any other tradition.

I'd disagree that having a European classical cannon is a tool of white supremacy. Most of these classical works predate the creation of a trans-European "white" identity or the creation of the idea of "race", which uniquely developed in the United States. It's anachronistic to say that Plato or Boetheius, Greek or Roman, were "white". They were pagan Mediterraneans (although Boetheius was supposedly Catholic). They certainly didn't identify as a trans-European "white".

Shouldn't your problem be squarely with the people misappropriating the tradition as opposed to the tradition itself? I am not white, I am from north Africa. The intellectual heritage where I am from engaged with the Greco-Roman tradition for over 1000 years and skin color was never a factor. Black African Sudanese scholars studied and taught ibn Rushd's commentary on Plato's Republic without giving a thought to Plato, ibn Rushd, or their own skin color.

This is a uniquely modern problem that stems from an American conceptualization of "race" as a defining social construct. People coming from other traditions don't want this baggage. You guys need to sort that out.

It's unfortunate that you are arguing without knowing what I'm even referring to.

Many sociologists, anthropologists, and historicans argue that the modern conceptualization of race has no basis in biology and was not widespread historically. It is a unique product of a trans-national European identity due to the wars with the Ottomans and north African Muslim sultanates, but was not crystallized until a pan-European identity was required in the new world as contrasted with a pan-Native and pan-African identity.

https://thenewpress.com/books/fatal-invention

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/invention-of-race-in-the-european-middle-ages/878223724345B49D515AA39DF3A0B617

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/inventing-the-science-of-race/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Race%20werewolves%20marriage%20Purgatorio&utm_content=NYR%20Race%20werewolves%20marriage%20Purgatorio+CID_78068a72752bb95b0a1f213c9605a497&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Inventing%20the%20Science%20of%20Race

It is in fact a kind of cultural chauvanism to superimpose European and American ideas of "race" on other traditions that never had these ideas or these deep-seated issues. Other civilizations had cosmopolitan centers of learning and culture that did not have the deep-rooted prejudices still present in the West. Timbuktu was a center of learning where light skinned Arabs went to learn from sub-saharan Africans. Mauritania, Morocco, and Sudan still enjoy a great deal of intermixing and stability across what would be called in the West "racial" lines. There may be some discrimination or elitism, but isn't some formalized ideology of racial hierarchy like what came out of the states and was exported from Jim Crow to Nazi Germany.

Other cultures and civilizations didn't have these terms or ideas in their lexicon because they were more or less irrelevant to them. Backprojecting them onto history and literature is chauvanistic. White supremacy is a modern ideology coming out a very particular historical context. Do not legitimize it by anachronism.

I'm not white and I believe racism is real. I just don't think that this is the way to deal with it. It should be properly contextualized as a historical development alongside Hegelianism, capitalism, secularism, and modernism.

When seen as a fringe line of flawed philosophical thinking, it's much easier to delegitimize than claiming that Virgil or Dante are the inheritance of some multi-millenial "white" tradition. The entire idea of pan-European descent being "white" is less than 300 years old. The project of white supremacy and the white tradition is plain ahistorical. There is no such thing.

I have been at the end of some pretty extreme racism in my life, we can DM if you'd like to discuss. However that doesn't make the idea of what I call "racialism" any more legitimate. There is no biological component to race. It is a social construct we choose to accept or reject.

If we agree, then nothing 😁

I quote your other comment,

"That is my issue. Your misunderstanding of my words is your issue.

Race is not uniquely American, that is asinine. The subjugation of races did not begin with Americans, nor did the redefining of race as skin color."

I think there's a big difference between discrimination based off of skin color or ethnicity and racism or "racialism." There is a unique ideology of this thing called "race" which is only a few hundreds of years old. People always discriminated or harmed each other over physical and cultural differences, but it didn't come into its own as a worldview until pretty recently historically.

So awesome

There is no original copy of the sahifah. If you had studied Dr. Muhammad Hamidullah's research on this, you'd know he was operating on a copy of an original and cross comparing the mutun/asanid with narrations in Musnad Ahmad. Being…

May Allah forgive a talib al ilm that speaks on issues he doesn't know about and lacks basic adab. We can continue conversation in DM, in a respectful fashion, or not at all.

Genuinely curious:

Was it haram when the sahabah used to tell tales of the sinful things they used to do in jahiliyyah?

Are actions in video games judged like actions in the real world? If so, what is the evidence of this? Are actions in the imagination or dreams also judged similarly?

I'm aware that looking upon haram unless it is to change it is haram, especially if it is with a feeling of pleasure or admiration. However, if it is in a virtual world or fictional, what is the ruling and what is it based off of?

Based on this, nearly all video games would be haram because they depict haram violence, including first person shooters. Killing people in the kinds of military operations depicted in Battlefield or Call of Duty or Arma would be just as haram in real life as sexual content.

Is it that something which normalizes haram is haram or is it the actual depiction of something haram which is haram? If it is the depiction itself, then nearly all forms of entertainment are haram: sports (awrah or haram hitting), video games (violence, sex, music, shirk, magic), movies/TV (women, music, all of the other categories), and in fact almost all of Western literature (and some Islamicate literature as well).

Or is it the participation in haram? And if so, what is the distinction and justification for this?

I have some thoughts from ibn Taymiyyah's al-Zuhd wa al-Wara but I'd like to hear your feedback first

ولا ننكر الطريقة الصوفية وتنزيه الباطن من رذائل المعاصي المتعلقة بالقلب والجوارح، مهما استقام صاحبها على القانون الشرعي، والمنهج القويم المرعى، إلا أننا لا نتكلف له تأويلا في كلامه ولا في أفعاله، ولا نعول ونستعين ونستنصر ونتوكل في جميع أمورنا إلا على الله تعالى، وهو حسبنا ونعم المولى ونعم النصير.

We do not deny the Sufī path nor internal purification from the vices of sins connected to the heart or limbs - so long as he who does it follows the rules of Shari'ah and the correct observed methodology. However, we are not obliged to interpret his speech and actions [which seem to be bidd'ah or kufr]. We seek assistance, victory, and rely on - in all of our affairs - only Allah the Exalted. He is our trusted and the best of guardians and the best of victors.

- AbdAllah bin Mohammed bin Abd al-Wah'hab

It's better to say that what these people are doing is a bidd'ah than throw out huge labels like "Sufi."

Boycotting is counterfeit resistance. It's what people do to make themselves feel better about being cowards.

Why would you introduce these concepts to children?

Why are you selling it?

Dying to have this

Antichamber x Stanley's Parable x Amnesia. Love it

Gorgeous

Please cross reference the Patriot Act.

The entire US terrorism statute? US government consistently puts people in jail for political statements they don't ageee with. From Eugene Debs to the Red Scare to Patriot Act to Assange etc. US has a horrible record of free speech. You see this nowadays with Muslims, conservative Catholics, and even recently far right-wingers. The old enemy was the left and socialists.

In American law free speech is defined by the "no prior restraint" doctrine. I.e. so long as the government doesn't stop you from saying it beforehand, you've already been afforded your rights. So they can do whatever they want afterwards.

Certain Scandanavian countries have way more free speech protection than the US, like Finland. Not all of Europe is moving towards dictatorship like UK.

Most pre-modern societies also had greater free speech because they had a bottom-up social structure and it was impossible for the government to monitor speech on a mass scale.

So US ranks pretty poorly internationally and historically. Also US regulates some political speech even more drastically than the UK.

You seem to think a few examples are an exhaustive list. Go back to logic 101. Did you think I was going to reference every violation of free speech in a reddit comment? What sense does that even make? Also you ignored the entire discourse about the terrorism statute which is used to surveil and curtail free speech across the entire globe including the USA.

Is this a libertarian sub or just a status quo circlejerk sub?

70% of what?

Most religious Muslim men will not mind. I'd venture to say the majority.

The more successful you are as a man, the less value the wife provides in the relationship and the less sense it even makes sense to get married in the first place. If a woman shows up after you've conquered all of your challenges alone, now it's you who has to support her through her unconquered challenges. Marriage makes less worldly sense the higher up you go.

Most highly successful men are married long before they are successful because the woman believed in his potential. If the potential is already proven, there's no risk and also no opportunity to bond over faith in one another and hardship.

Honestly without the requirements of Islam and nikkah, I don't see what the potential benefit is in marriage for a very elite Muslim man. Sisters that are hoping to find a brother at the finish line are getting someone that is as disinterested in them as he can possibly be and they are providing the lowest possible value to him.

It's much better to find someone you believe has potential and support him in accomplishing it, if a sister wants deep love, attachment, and to be irreplaceable/invaluable. You cannot waltz into the life of a man who has it all and fantasize that you are somehow exceptional. The deep love comes from early investment and support, it will not be handed out to you if you hold nikkah hostage.

Organically is not intentionally. The idea that you are going to meet your perfect husband on your terms is ludicrous. Men don't prefer to meet women organically because there's a lot of tension around rejection and getting called a creep. Men prefer to interact with women they already know they have some shot with.

1. Matchmakers
2. Apps/websites
3. Masajid
4. Social connections

Muslim men do not come from cultures of approaching women in public. This is how you end up with a player.

I don't think so. I think he just began tweeting and adding a bunch of random stuff towards the end. The structure began to collapse.

Zillow says it was sold in March 2023?

Men prefer to meet women they know are already interested in them. Women prefer to meet men organically and develop attraction over time. This is a conundrum which has been amplified by hyper-individualism, the internet, and extreme pickiness.

I think male and female attraction operate very differently due to biological reasons and the different levels of physical risk. It's a discrepancy traditional societies used to manage through sophisticated courtship rules we just don't have anymore.

Took about 30 minutes for me at 8am.

Maybe Otakon should consider set up a speed dating booth for anime nerds.

This is a good idea for next year

I don't know why you're getting downvoted for suggesting reality exists

Wittgenstein initially tried to create a philosophical model that was systematic to answer all philosophical questions (like many before him, and after) but then he realized all of that was so abstract that it became meaningless, and you really need to tether your worldview in human intuition. However, the impulses of human intuition, as manifested through language, are not meaningless, arbitrary, or "come on bro." He thought that they represented the axiomatic truth which we could tether our epistemology on, as opposed to more abstract conceptualizations of atoms, accidents, or Hegel's logic/nature/spirit trinity.

He attempted to deconstruct systematic philosophical discourses on epistemology and metaphysics and then determine what the most undeniable axioms were, like many philosophers who go down the skepticism route (Ghazali, Decartes, etc.) However to paint Wittgenstein as a Pyrrhonian skeptic or as a total logical nihilist I feel is inaccurate.

Umm... no?

The lack of long-term perspective in these comments are truly shocking. If enough people don't reproduce, then there is a population collapse. What is remarkable is that this is already happening in other countries, we are well on the way, but no one is highlighting it here. Fertility issues on the rise plus a lack of marriage and procreation means that the population of Western countries could collapse in the next fifty years, putting these countries at a huge disadvantage in comparison to countries that are investing in marriage and procreation (namely China).

There's also the risk of a Clockwork Orange type reality if enough young men check out of society.

The idea that we will just shift to a gynocentric civilization where the majority of men accept their biophysiological needs to go unmet their entire lives but still fulfill all crucial societal roles without any incentive to do so, and do it with 1/5th of the population, is truly bonkers.

Just because we can't see a clear solution or don't want to be involved in a solution doesn't mean the problem isn't serious.

https://theintercept.com/2021/01/24/toxic-chemicals-human-sexuality-shanna-swan/

This isn't a slow decrease

https://theintercept.com/2021/01/24/toxic-chemicals-human-sexuality-shanna-swan/

Your mom isn't justified to hit you even if she is justified to worry about you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Nabra_Hassanen?wprov=sfla1

Women are ultimately always vulnerable because of lack of physical strength to defend themselves. It's not okay for you to be out alone that late, for your own wellbeing. It's haram.

Does that justify her response? No she should just talk to you. But you know how Sudanese can be with regards to emotional intelligence, self awareness, and immaturity.

Most useless distinction ever

They basically glue those bolts in

The shop that built my bike did this with the bar ends and the signal lights. Absolute pain to switch them out.

Why is it like that?

Even the cheapest mashed roots of tea oxidized and made into black tea from China doesn't have a petroleum aftertaste. They must be breeding varietals to taste like that

Petite Cerise

History

That Indonesian festival was wild yesterday, huh?

Were you able to get in? Just had to reschedule an exam for this very reason.

Were you able to get in? Just had to reschedule an exam for this very reason.

Were you able to get in? Just had to reschedule an exam for this very reason.

Love the cardigan. Are we getting any patterned cable knits?

Grail piece but my chest is too large 😔

Coolest brand out there! Thanks for always being Mauro

Such a cool texture on it right?

How are you guys building anything and NOT using CI/CD or devOps? 💀 Being able to automatically deploy and scale code securely is a minimum viable thing. Unless you're doing a pure POC to show a concept without customer, this is ridiculous

It might take a day or two to set up a pipeline so your changes are automatically pushed. What happens if your product goes viral? Are you not planning to rapidly scale massively?

I agree in proportion to it being the right idea. If you're still experimenting sure don't worry about devOps.

The winning combination is going to be a young technical founder who can quickly grasp cutting edge and a much older domain expert with business experience.

Can you send me the browser war video?

The best combination I feel is a technical guy with some interest in the subject matter even if he isn't an expert and a SME with an intereet in tech even if they aren't technical. Very rare to find though

Charged me $250, including shipping.

Came out to 250

Awaiting Fedex to pick it up now