Reddit reply in r/MuslimAcademics: seyfeddin karas critique of mustafa alazami and — April 13, 2025 | Ali Shukri Amin

I find it incredibly strange that we are still criticizing al-Azami's History of the Quranic text over 22 years after it's publication. A criticism was warranted at the time of publication or perhaps a decade after, but the field has advanced so much since then.

If Azami claimed that none of the sahabah had masahif then even traditionalist sources disagree with that. What was Uthman burning if not people's masahif? It's also documented in traditional sources that Ubayy b. Kab and AbdAllah bin Masud both objected to the codification.

Azami makes an attempt to justify traditional methods of hadith criticism elsewhere, although I agree his justification doesn't deal with the modern problems presented by secular academia.

What's disappointing here is the assumption that Azami's handwaving of secular methodologies is unjustified. It may seem justified and would indeed be unjustified in other circumstances. But as I have discussed here extensively and on r/academicQuran and also to the OP here, the entire method of secular academia is unjustified. What can be asserted without evidence can similarly be dismissed without evidence.

Perhaps we are still referring to Azami because traditional scholars are by and large totally disinterested in academia or ill-equipped to engage with it. That's being generous. Being less generous it seems like cherry picking the only available author in the English language who is over 2 decades out of date in the field while also being well known.

I wouldn't try to take Hagarism as representative of the best arguments secular academia has so I don't know why Azami, a formidable scholar in his own right but nonetheless outdated, is still being brought up.