Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: deleted by user — January 12, 2025 | Ali Shukri Amin

Secular academia presupposes that objective truth can be known from the senses observing the material world while hadith studies presupposes that truth can only be known by first tethering knowledge to some objective anchor outside the material world.

If you assume that: 1. The senses are reliable, 2. There is a material world, 3. There is no noumenon (extra-material world), 4. Validated knowledge can only come from the material world, and about 30 other unprovable assertions, then you would go the Western academic route. The problem is that these are essentially faith-based and highly prone to skeptical criticism.

There hasn't been a robust critique of HCM at this layer, starting from the top of the epistemological chain and then going all the way down to the nitty-gritty issues like failure to account for decision-theory or cognitive biases like the narrative fallacy.

Within the world of the hadith scholar, their epistemology is totally alien to these assumptions. They also make their own assumptions which could be analyzed and critiqued. However the point is that HCM/ICMA come out of the very idiosyncratic assumptions a secular academic historian would adopt and it wouldn't be sensical to expect a Muslim hadith scholar to operate from that paradigm.

Most secular academics and hadith scholars are unaware of the assumptions underpinning their approaches. In Islamic studies this is studied under advanced didactic theology and in the Ivory tower it's studied in philosophy/behavioral economics departments.

I firmly believe this is really the entire discussion and until this gap is bridged both sides will just talk over each other.