Reddit reply in r/MuslimAcademics: ama with dr yasir qadhi — October 24, 2025 | Ali Shukri Amin

Bismillah.

Thank you for doing this AMA Dr. Yasir Qadhi.

Full disclosure - I am a moderator here in this subreddit but also someone who has followed your work closely for years now. I greatly appreciate your perspectives on the intellectual history of Islam. To be fair, I have also been very critical of a lot of your positions outside of the abstract theological realm.

I really have two major sets of questions for you, one pertains to the Western academic study of Islam and the other one pertains to the traditional contentious issue of al-istighatha.

Istighatha:

1. You have rather famously argued that Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wah'hab fundamentally misunderstood the nature of polytheism and ascribed henotheism to Quraysh.

My question is, why do both sides of the istighatha argument seem to take a monolithic approach to Qurayshi religion and attempt to reconcile the Quranic/Sunnah texts accordingly? Since we have texts that prima facie contradict each other, shouldn't we take an anthropological approach of assuming that Quraysh did not have a single organized theology and rather a syncretic one (as nearly all communities without organised religion do)?

What concerns me more about this is that the epigraphic record primarily indicates a henotheistic outlook among Quraysh (which contradicts the Awni position) but there is forthcoming research from Sulayman Dost that demonstrates some purely polytheistic strains in the record (as discussed by Juan Cole & Ramon Harvey).

Doesn't this indicate the Quran is dealing with different categories of people, some who had shirk in "Rububbiyyah" and others in "Uluhiyyah"?

2. Why have Salafi & Ashari commentators struggled so much with defining what constitutes a unit of physical ibadah? It would seem that in ibadah is a formulaic act dedicated to someone for the purpose of venerating them in return for receipt of some supernatural aims (forgiveness of sin, reward in the afterlife, changing of reality beyond typical means).

Yet we see the Sultan al-Umayri crowd struggling with the Taymiyyan definition and the Hatim al-Awni crowd making ibadah about theology.

Is this due to a desire to stick to the definitions of previous scholars?

HCM:

1. Why does it seem that Muslim scholars and academics have accepted the secular-religious divide and subsequently do not engage with the academic study of Islam in a critical fashion vis-á-vis methodological critique? More specifically, if we take the work of Talal Asad seriously and deconstruct the origins of the HCM, why have Muslim theologians and academics not yet presented a robust challenge to the epistemological assumption stack underlying the HCM?

2. Do you believe personally there is such a thing as methodological neutrality?

3.Do you think the HCM requires metaphysical and epistemic commitments and if so how can they be justified?

4. How do you personally account for a factual historical approach within academic studies that takes into consideration behavorial economics & decision theory (in particular cognitive biases)?

5. To what extent do you think Hegelian teleology, 19th-century Protestant concerns, and orientalist priors still structure HCM in practice?