Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: is there a bart erhman equivalent in islam — October 22, 2024 · lt6wsqv | Ali Shukri Amin

That wasn't what my answer was getting at. There are popular academics that discuss Islam and have some revisionist views. My issue was more with OP questioning why the attitudes and methodology of academic Biblical studies isn't mainstream in Islamic studies.

Jonathan Brown is a popularizer-academic who is widely read by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Wael Hallaq also writes extensively on Islamic studies despite being a Christian, and is almost universally accepted.

It's problematic that you'd call foundational texts "outdated." These texts are a part of the edifice of the academic study of religion and secularism broadly. Yes they've been discussed, criticized, responded to, and expounded on. But we don't call Adam Smith or Freud "outdated." They themselves are important as historical documents as much as they important as meta-commentary.

The last part of your comment is missing the entire point of what you're responding to.

My assertion is quite simple. No field exists in a bubble. Without a broader reading of philosophy, intellectual history, the academic study of religion, and the humanities more broadly - we will develop a myopic one-sided view of any speciality we hyper-focus on.

If you don't understand the key movements in Western philosophy, the history of Christianity, the history of secularism, the development of historiography, the popularization of the scientific method, the movement to naturalism, etc. - you are ill-equipped to understand how and why HCM specifically originated and developed out of Biblical studies, especially Protestant academic study of the Bible.

When you then abstract HCM as if it doesn't have this context and then apply it to an intellectual tradition like Islamic studies, it's no surprise that it gains little purchase.

The idea of a Muslim Bart Ehrman, from the perspective of a methodology and outlook, is as misplaced and decontextualized as the idea of a Muslim Martin Luther.

In fact, Jonathan Brown discusses why the idea of a Muslim Martin Luther doesn't make sense at length in Misquoting Muhammad. It's the same reason Islam as political philosophy isn't compatible with Westphalian states (see Impossible State by Wael Hallaq).

We can have popular researchers and academics that speak to Muslims and non-Muslim audiences. There's tons of them. Some of them proselytize, others don't. But the kind of approach that Ehrman takes will never be an indigenous or even widely adopted one among Muslim scholarship, in the way that the entire cadence of Biblical studies has begun to shift towards HCM.