Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: western academia methodology and its islamic — March 4, 2025 | Ali Shukri Amin

>Currently, I am reading Talal Asad’s Formation of the Secular, and one thing that has become increasingly clear to me is that many of the assumptions I once took for granted within my own (admittedly limited) epistemological framework are, in fact, built upon unexamined presuppositions.

I'd also recommend Mark Fisher and Gramsci on capitalist realism as cultural hegemony. The foundational work in that regard is definitely The Protestant Ethic of Capitalism by Weber.

Everyone inherits some epistemological outlook, but kudos to you for having the intellectual self-awareness to want to examine yours. It's an important journey every serious intellectual must take.

>However, as I work through the process of deconstructing this framework, I find myself grappling with a fundamental question: how does one evaluate the quality of their own set of epistemic assumptions?

It depends what you decide you want your epistemology to accomplish, which can be arbitrary. A person who is looking for truth will come to very different conclusions than someone interested in what mode of interpreting reality will be most advantageous to them. It really is just a decision. Some paradigms are really good at helping you accumulate wealth and power at a civilizational scale, others are more robust in terms of ethical or metaphysical thinking.

>I see a clear parallel between this and the discussion at hand regarding Historical Critical Methodology and the Islamic tradition. While we can agree that both operate on unproven axiomatic foundations, can it be argued that some of these foundational assumptions are more effective in leading us toward an unbiased truth if such a thing even exists?

I think there is such a thing as objective truth and most of what philosophers are trying to do is arrive at it. Does truth exist? What is truth? How can truth be known?

That being said our interpretative methods are always flawed because that's what it is to be human. We just have to choose the best method available to us.

>For instance, you earlier mentioned medicine as an example of how all sciences function within an underlying framework of assumptions. If modern medicine demonstrably outperforms traditional medicine in treating human ailments, could this be because the epistemic assumptions underlying modern medicine are more effective and if so, does that imply they are closer to the truth? In other words, does the ability of a system to yield more reliable and functional outcomes serve as an indicator of the validity of its foundational assumptions?

If your goal is to quickly heal patients with drastic results then the methods that have lead to modern medicine are effective at that. However, I wouldn't personally acquiesce to those methods just because modern medicine is so admittedly effective. The same methods - empiricism, the secular academy, capitalist society - have also produced climate disaster, danger of mass infertility, microplastic contamination, etc. We also rarely know the generational impact of transformative medicines.

Is it better for 1000 people to be healed from a debilitating illness and live fulfilling lives if it comes at the then unrealized cost of 100,000 people being infertile later and all of their progeny never existing?

Sometimes we are too short-sighted with our efficacy consequentialist calculations.

Traditional medicine sometimes healed people and sometimes killed them at much greater rates than nowadays. Oftentimes it just worked as placebo. But societies and civilization under the frameworks that produced traditional medicine were fit to continue existing forever in relative happiness. So is the modern Western assumption stack more effective at achieving more happiness for more people or is it just a flashier demise?

>Rather, my curiosity lies in how one can approach truth in an intellectually honest manner without falling into Pyrrhonian skepticism. If all knowledge systems rest on foundational assumptions, how does one navigate between uncritical acceptance and radical doubt?

I think we are well outside the scope of the sub now and this is more well suited to a philosophy sub. That being said, I think skepticism is an important and underrated tool for deconstructing problematic beliefs. I think skepticism itself rests on assumptions and the reason why it never gained popularity is that it is quickly self defeating (1. I am skeptical of all statements. 2. Are you skeptical of that statement ad well?)

Decartes essentially threw his hands up and said that we have to trust a loving God would not allow a malicious demon to control our brain and put us into a false world. Practically all philosophers had to construct a kind of ultimate good or God to escape this until Hegel presented a revolutionary model to ground reality in the material world (which I offer critiques for).

After reading contemporary and Greek philosophy, al-Ghazali actually entered into a period of radical doubt. That process of him deconstructing his inherited Islamic worldview is what lead to his rebranding from being a jurist to a mystic, and he went on to reform the Ash'ari theological school imbibing it with what he took from ibn Sina.

Essentially we have: logic, skepticism, empiricism, revelation, and intuition. Those are the tools at our disposal. I would suggest using them to check each other, not trusting all of them entirely, and having a healthy dose of humility towards the frailty of our own intellect. But you have to either develop a materialist epistemology on solid philosophical grounds (I don't believe it's possible) or have faith that the epistemic source of things allows you to determine SOME truth.

>I fully agree with the last part of your comment, it seems like a Herculean task to construct a coherent belief system that one can truly be satisfied with while maintaining genuine intellectual honesty. Identifying the foundational axioms that underpin any epistemic framework is already a time-consuming endeavor, and confronting them, especially when they pertain to beliefs that have shaped your very identity,can be an unsettling and deeply disorienting experience. But engaging with the critics of those axioms seems to be an even more arduous task.

It is in fact so difficult that most people refuse to even consider it but it is the work of the greatest minds in history. That being said, people much more talented than us have litigated these issues to the n'th degree, so we're not at a loss for resources.