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

PART 2

4. Empiricism (epistemology)

Empiricism assumes that true knowledge can only be derived from direct human experiencd/the senses. Extended to history, the HCM presupposes an empirical approach. The meaning or authenticity of texts is determined solely through empirical analyses of history, archaeology, linguistics, etc.

The problem is that empiricism is unjustified. Empiricism itself is not derived from empirical observation. It is a philosophical assumption. This is a self-referential problem: if empiricism were true, it would need to be proven empirically, but it is a precondition for investigation, not an empirical discovery.

This is the same issue with logical positivism.

On this basis, HCM supposedly excludes non-empirical forms of knowledge - but even this is selective at best.
Much of human knowledge is non-empirical, including: logic, mathematics, ethics, and even the historical-critical method itself (which is based on methodological assumptions that cannot be proven by sense experience alone).

HCM asserts that historical events can only be reconstructed based on empirical evidence (manuscripts, inscriptions, archaeology).

However, historians and practitioners of the HCM itself often work in inferences, interpretation, testimony, and reasoning that is not empirical. What makes this more egregious is systematic flaws in these non-empirical analyses which I bring up in a later point.

This means that HCM assumes an overly narrow epistemology that is still selective applied, which may lead to rejecting potentially legitimate sources of historical knowledge unless they can be empirically verified.

Please provide a justification for empiricism as an approach to epistemology.

(Cf. Experimental Philosophy and the Origins of Empiricism by Alberto Vanzo)

5. Secularism (metaphysics/sociological)

The HCM unjustifiably presupposes secularism by aasuming that a secular approach is objective or neutral.

Talal Asad, in Formations of the Secular, argues that secularism is not merely the absence of religion but a constructed epistemological and political framework that redefines religious knowledge as private, contingent, and historically conditioned rather than authoritative or transcendent. In doing so, secularism simply positions itself as the predominant religion.

HCM operates within this secular epistemic framework, assuming that religious texts must be analyzed with the same methods used for secular historical documents. The consequence is bringing these histories in line with secularisms unjustifiable faith assumptions about metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology. This is naturalizing religious belief and subordinating theological meaning to historical contingency.

Such a presumption ignores the possibility that religious traditions themselves may offer alternative epistemologies that do not conform to secular notions of history and truth - but may yet have as much validity.

Furthermore, Asad critiques secularism as an ideological project that enforces a particular conception of rationality and historical development, privileging modern, Western modes of inquiry over traditional religious epistemologies. HCM embodies this secular historicism, treating religious beliefs as socially constructed phenomena that emerge from power structures, political shifts, and cultural evolution.

In doing so secular approaches to history elevate themselves above such scrutiny and become the unquestioned dogma.

HCM unjustifiably presupposes secularism as a neutral starting point, when in reality, it is a historically contingent framework that reframes religion in terms alien to its own self-understanding. This methodological bias limits its ability to engage with religious texts on their own terms, instead imposing a modern, secular worldview as the only legitimate way to interpret the past.

Please justify HCM's reliance on secularism.

(Cf. Formations of the Secular by T. Asad)

6.Post-Hegelianism (epistemology)

The HCM presupposes a Post-Hegelian epistemology, as essentially all of the Western academy does.

Hegel's modal ontology is supposed to prove that all aspects of reality, including religious phenomena, can be understood through rational analysis and historical development.

This unjustifable presumption is that reality can be fully explained through historical materialism and human rationality, a position rooted in Hegel’s erroneous grounding of reality in the noumenon. Hegel’s modal ontology sought to resolve major questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and ontology by positing that reality unfolds through a dialectical process, where the rational progression of history actualizes the Absolute.

However, as Professor David Pensgard critiques, this framework improperly locates the foundation of reality in pure thought (the noumenon) rather than in an independent ontological ground, leading to an epistemic circularity where reality is merely a function of conceptual necessity. This misstep justifies an overreliance on materialist historiography, where the study of religious texts within HCM assumes that all religious phenomena emerge from socio-historical conditions rather than from divine revelation or transcendent truth.

This flawed Post-Hegelian materialist outlook shapes HCM’s rejection of metaphysical or theological dimensions in religious texts, reducing them to cultural artifacts produced by dialectical necessity rather than as expressions of an encounter with the divine.

Since Hegel’s system erroneously subsumes ontology into historical rational processes, it provides an intellectual justification for naturalistic and materialist readings of history, where divine action is dismissed as unnecessary or illusory. This presupposition restricts the epistemic possibilities of HCM, as it forecloses any engagement with the possibility that reality contains transcendent dimensions beyond dialectical materialism. By mistakenly grounding reality in the noumenon, Hegel’s model legitimizes a historically contingent, immanentist view of truth, which HCM inherits, often without critically examining whether its methodological naturalism is itself philosophically tenable.

Please justify this.

(Cf. Dissertation "Hegel's Modal Ontological Argument" by D. Pensgard, "The Philosopher of Freedom" by K. Vieweg)