Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: western academia methodology and its islamic — March 3, 2025 · mfsd0z2 | Ali Shukri Amin

This comment is a really good example of why someone who is within the paradigm and assumption stack of the Western intellectual tradition today would be convinced that HCM is a more objective and unbiased approach than traditional Islamic historiography or hadith criticism for example.

Within the paradigm and assumptions you're operating from, everything you mentioned here makes sense and is valid.

The problem is that you reduce the problems of HCM and the wider Western assumption stack as applied to Islamic sources to claims of "intellectual colonialism."

While questions of colonialism and geopolitics are definitely important for discussions of orientalism, I don't think that represents the bulk of the critique.

If I had to sum up the primary critique of the epistemology underpinning the HCM it is that academics operating with that methodology have blind faith for a myriad of core beliefs that are totally unjustifiable. They are unjustifiable in terms of being unproven or outright falsifiable as premises. However, most academics don't even realize all of these assumptions they are making, so they operate from a first-person perspective of objectivity within their paradigm.

We know the assumptions of the Muslim historians. God exists, He speaks to humans, He sents Prophets, Muhammad was a Prophet, God preserved Muhammad's message, etc. Muslim theologians, philosophers, and historians constructed complex justifications for all of these assumptions and attempted to make them as robust as possible to justify further inquiry.

HCM and source criticism looks at the texts that these scholars just assumed were valid or at least had an origin of validity and attempts to deconstruct them.

What is not happening is a critique in the opposite direction within Western academia towards it's own assumptions.

Both sides are operating out of faith. My contention is that the Western academy does not acknowledge that it is doing so although any rigorous analysis can demonstrate that blind faith assumptions about things like metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology are the hallmarks of "religion."