Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: is there a bart erhman equivalent in islam — October 22, 2024 · lt7dime | Ali Shukri Amin

>Two things:

>OP never said anything about this.

OP said,

>However, I’ve been having trouble finding unbiased, secular, critical, and reliable scholars. ... In my opinion, the difficult aspect of Islam from a critical point of view is that all of the texts were consolidated and unified by the Caliphates (eliminating controversial opinions, differences in manuscripts), the major historical analysis and contributions clearly seem to have a highly biased (pro-Islam) take (most scholars are devout Muslim).

Why his request did not make sense in terms of Islamic studies was the exact content of my response.

>If by methodology you mean textual criticism and historical criticism (i.e. the HCM), they *are* mainstream in Islamic studies (and by extension it does have quite a bit of "purchase").

As mentioned by OP, the kind of textual criticism and historical criticism that is popular in Biblical studies has almost no ground in Islamic studies outside of some very small circles in Western universities. Muslims have their own kind of textual and historical criticism which is methodologically totally distinct and also much older. Academic Islamic studies is highly skeptical of this tradition.

>Indeed, since you bring it up, I just noticed that it is a little curious that the only popularizer in the field is from the traditionalist perspective.

Yes. There's a reason for that. The reason for that is what I'm trying to communicate. Now that you have noticed the conclusion, we can work backwards to ask the *why.*

>FYI, I would definitely call Freud outdated. I've never read Adam Smith, but I know that his work is where we get [rational-choice theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_models) in economics, which continues to be a leading theory of how things "work" to this dyy. \[sic\]

The idea that Freud is outdated is laughable and demonstrates a lack of understanding of the field of psychology. Freud's ideas were never based on research or even his experience in a clinical setting (which was a disaster). Whether you think they correspond to reality or not is irrelevant, he was one of the pioneers of the entire field because of his way of thinking about the human mind. Without Freud, you don't have modern psychology, because one of his biggest contributions is introducing this field of the study of the mind as independent.

Also there are tons of Freudian clinicians practicing today under many different schools and sub-schools of his thinking.

It's interesting that you brought up one of the *only* things that can be definitively disproven to be false and outdated, which is rational-choice economics. As demonstrated by the large body of work by Kahneman and Tversky, who gave birth to the field of behavioral economics, rational-choice theory and the idea of "homo economicus" only exists in theory books and is not observable in reality.

What makes these founding intellectual books valuable is not always their conclusion, but their introduction of a process and their demonstration of where thinking was in their time. They are historical records in themselves and therefore have value.

>My problem with this is that it sounds like over-contextualization. Obviously everything has a history in terms of its development and application, and Nicolai Sinai does discuss that history in his writings on the HCM. The problem is that there are people who think that because Spinoza first elaborated the HCM in 17th-century Europe to deal with the Bible, it therefore is an essentially "Western" method that cannot be applied outside of biblical studies. This is false! It is a ***general way to describe an approach*** for studying sacred texts (and implicitly it is always applied with non-sacred texts).

The only way you can postulate this is if you lack the context. It isn't an over-contextualization. We are disagreeing about HCM when the actual core of our disagreement has nothing to do with HCM. It has to do with much more fundamental questions we are ignoring like, "what is truth?" "Can truth be known?" and "What constitutes truth?" To accept HCM you're accepting a bunch of much larger, more consequential, assumptions.

When a Muslim scholar refuses to engage in HCM because of a principled system of thinking that belies those assumptions, it isn't some backwards blind-faith refusal to accept the bright light of modern truth and science. It's that you aren't aware of all of the baggage that comes with a methodology like this and why there are very good reasons people prefer other systems of thinking.

>This is ***not*** a good analogy.

The analogy is not between Ehrman and Luther, the analogy is between the person that is asking why there is no Muslim Martin Luther and why there is no Muslim Bart Ehrman. They have the same reasons for their misconception, so the analogy holds.s.

>I feel that the issue we're having already in this discourse is that you're stuck in the abstract world whereas I'm trying to get any sort of concrete explanation or reason as to why Islamic studies could not have a popularizer come out of the field (without getting "that's too Western! That's like saying Muslim Martin Luther!").

The reason is because the methodology of HCM doesn't make sense in Islamic studies and so, such a scholar could never exist in the traditional Islamic studies world, and such a scholar from academia could never gain much popularity because the intellectual premises that kind of scholarship is based on is already denied out-of-the-gate by religious Muslims. But none of that makes sense without the context.