
إِنَّ هَذَا العِلْمَ دِيْنٌ؛ فَانْظُرُواْ عَمَّنْ تَأخُذُوْنَ دِيْنَكُمْ
“Indeed this knowledge is the religion, so be careful about whom you take your religion from.” – Muhammad ibn Sirin, one of the great tabi`in.
Towards the end of my studies at Harvard, I briefly considered pursuing Islamic Studies. I had taken nearly enough Islamic Studies courses to major in it. I had taken classes and interacted with many of the major academics in that field who were at Harvard at the time, from old school Orientalists like Baber Johansen to Saidian decolonialists like Leila Ahmed.
Problem was, I hated it. I was constantly butting heads with the professors and graduate students. The highlight was probably when I told Leila Ahmed to her face that, despite her illusions to the contrary, her approach to Islam contributed directly to the Western chauvinism that drove violent intervention in Muslim societies. She wasn’t too happy to hear that, as you can imagine.
Belly of the Beast
The source of these conflicts was the fact that I was also studying traditionally with a number of scholars in Boston. And the differences between traditional study of Islam versus Western academic study of Islam were clear as day.
Studying Islam in academia begins from a number of key assumptions, the most important of which are:
1. Islamic Studies as a Western academic discipline is objective. Or (if “objective” is too reductive of a term, then) Islamic Studies transcends the Islamic tradition insofar as the former is able to dissect, analyze, and critique the latter from an external epistemic basis.
2. Islam, on the other hand, is a man-made tradition. This is not necessarily to make a strong claim like, “God did not reveal the Quran.” Islamic Studies as a field is agnostic on that, and there are plenty of believing Muslims in Islamic Studies, as well as Christians, Jews, atheists, etc. BUT what the field is not agnostic on and what is NOT negotiable is the fact that everything that is known as the “Islamic tradition,” past and present, is the product of men competing with each other to champion their subjective interpretation of Revelation over others. Another way to say this is that Islam is irreducibly sectarian., i.e., blindly prejudiced sects fighting with each other.
These two assumptions are embedded in academic Islamic Studies and they are predicated on the belief that the academic way of knowing, i.e., the academic epistemology, is superior. If it weren’t, why would anyone bother studying Islam at the university instead of the masjid or madrasa? The only Islam that can be learned at the masjid or the madrasa is sectarian, subjective, man-made Islam, and the academic, in his quest for knowledge and understanding, doesn’t care about that. He has to “go beyond” that.
Creeping Tentacles
What we are seeing now is that these core academic assumptions are being advocated by supposedly “traditional” Islamic figures and institutions. I’m sure you have noticed it.
For example, you might have noticed some faux-traditionalists pushing these lines:
– Fiqh is a man-made, human interpretation of the Divine Sharia, which cannot be accessed, but can only be inferred through a fallible human process, i.e., fiqh.
– The schools of aqida were sectarian groups advancing certain interpretations over others.
– The classical scholars interpreted Revelation according to the limited resources at their disposal, but now we are able to revisit based on our greater access to nusus.
Here you see the academic modernism in these statements. It is subtle but absolutely deadly.
This might help clarify.
The scholars of Islam NEVER thought of themselves as giving a subjective, personal interpretation of the Sharia and correct belief (aqida). Imam Abu Hanifa did not think of himself as “developing the Hanafi madhhab.” Imam Ahmad did not think of his work as “formulating Hanbali aqida.” Imam al-Tahawi wasn’t thinking of himself as writing and teaching a personal take on aqida.
They all understood themselves as expressing the actual Sharia, the actually correct aqida of RasulAllah ﷺ. They understood their work as fully representative of the singular Truth.
Now, of course, they didn’t view themselves as infallible! This is where the subtlety lies. They recognized that they might be wrong. But they DID believe that they were right!
In other words, there is a difference between:
1. Recognizing that a position in fiqh or aqida might be mistaken, but ultimately there IS a singular true position that the scholar strives to identify and establish.
2. Thinking of the positions of fiqh and aqida as subjective interpretations that are all valid opinions, and insisting on one opinion being the only correct one is base sectarianism.
The Irrational Animal
Here you see how the academic and the faux-traditionalist converge on the same fundamental point, though they come at it from two directions.
The bottom line for the academic is: To understand Islam, we must transcend the classical tradition because that tradition is just a bunch of medieval men obsessively reading their biases into 7th century religious texts.
The bottom line for the faux-traditionalist is: To understand Islam, we must transcend the classical tradition because that tradition is sectarian, i.e., everyone thinks he has the singular truth. (Some faux-traditionalists are more direct and plainly admit that they don’t trust the classical tradition because all scholars were wrong about X, Y, or Z, e.g., slavery or some women’s issue.)
Both the academic and the faux-traditionalist suffer from the same intellectual error. They uncritically see themselves as transcending it all and occupying a privileged, objective position that allows them to evaluate the subjective, sectarian Islamic tradition.
But their position is hardly objective. Just the opposite! They are the most biased and their analyses of the tradition are superficial schlock at best. They consider the classical ulama as biased and sectarian, but the ulama painstakingly strived to avoid even the smallest cognitive blind spot. How? Through making sure their positions were all internally self-consistent, down to the last detail, down to even the grammatical level. The reasoning used to justify Position A had better be consistent with the reasoning used to justify Position B, etc. For fiqh, this hyper-concern with self-consistency was formalized in the subject of usul al-fiqh. Application of usul, after all, helps ensure consistency.
In contrast, both the academic and the faux-traditionalist have no formal usul and they have absolutely zero consistency. Some faux-traditionalists in fiqh, for example, will take all the positions of the madhahib on an issue and then will “look at the adilla” and then choose the “strongest” position. This tarjih, however, is based on what? What principles are guiding this selection of the strongest position, from one mas’ala to the next?
In contrast, when the fuqaha arrived at a position, they were not analyzing the issue at hand in isolation. What was also important was the reasoning process used to arrive at other positions, too. In Western legal practice, this amounts to appealing to precedent, i.e., past cases and judgments. Those past cases might not seem relevant to the case at hand, but the reasoning used to arrive at judgments in those cases ARE relevant, and logical consistency demands bringing those cases into consideration. Without that consistency, the entire enterprise would be ad hoc, inconsistent, bias-laden, etc. In fact, this is precisely how to characterize so much of the modernist tarjih in fiqh in its opposition to the madhahib.
The madhahib in the Islamic tradition were concerned with this internal consistency on a massive scale and with attention to the smallest details. This was clear proof of their intellectual superiority AND their spiritual superiority, because they were operating with the sincere conviction that there is a singular truth from Allah that is rational and rationally attainable, and they were putting their utmost effort to realize it and abide by it. (On a related note, the fastest way to become a star in academic Islamic Studies is to pick out inconsistencies and supposed “logical gaps” in the work of classical scholars and madhahib. This serves to justify the key assumptions above, and faux-traditionalists often dabble in this as well with superficial quote-mining.)
Truth with a Capital T
Important to the scholarly understanding of there being a single true Islam is the statement of the Prophet ﷺ: “If a judge makes a ruling, making ijtihad and he is correct, he will have two rewards. If a judge makes a ruling, making ijtihad and he is mistaken, he will have one reward.”
This means that there IS a correct position. This does NOT mean that “All scholars have their own interpretation, and all fiqh and aqida are man-made anyway, and since there is no way to tell definitively either way, we should just consider them all correct and valid opinions and then just pick and choose whatever seems right to us from among them and correct what seems wrong to us.”
This is a modern deviance and innovation. And you can see how this attitude is espoused by reformists (faux-traditionalists are reformists at heart): If classical fiqh and aqida are “just man-made interpretations,” we can feel safe discarding them whenever they conflict with modern sensibilities. Such-and-such Hanafi position is contrary to liberal human rights? Trash it! Such-and-such Maliki position makes social justice warriors squeamish? Chuck it! Such-and-such Shafi`i position makes the woke hijabis sad? Into the garbage bin it goes! It’s all human interpretation anyway, right?
This maneuver allows the faux-traditionalists to cleverly maintain plausible deniability. We are not anti-Sharia, they insist. We are simply, opposed to man-made fiqh.
This is the very essence of modernism!
By the way, here we also see the wisdom of studying one school of thought completely, immersing one’s self in it, progressing through the traditional learning path within one school up to mastery, and seeing oneself as LEARNING ISLAM, LEARNING THE TRUTH, not “learning the hanafi madhab,” “learning athari aqida,” per se, etc.
But doesn’t this lead to blameworthy intra-Sunni sectarianism? Not at all! The traditional scholars discussed at length that on subsidiary issues (furu`), one operates on the conviction that he is correct with the possibility of being wrong and opposing positions are wrong with the possibility of being correct. On primary issues in deen (usul), one has conviction that he is on truth and opposing positions are false.
Every intellectual tradition concerned with truth operates in this same fashion. Let me give an example from my studies in theoretical physics. In physics, there are schools of thought. The string theorists think of themselves as being on the truth and they consider the quantum loop gravity folks as mistaken. And vice versa. But none of them thinks, this is all just human interpretation and there is no way to know what the universe is really like. If that’s what they believed, they wouldn’t be physicists (they would be philosophers). These physicists are, nonetheless, able to work in the same departments and generally get along. Does this mean that any and all positions in physics are acceptable? Absolutely not! Physicists have drawn a line dividing acceptable from unacceptable disagreement in their field. If there is too much divergence in the realm of physics “usul,” there will be swift “tabdi`” or even “takfir.” An astrologer, for example, is NOT a physicist. But, again, none of this detracts from the conviction in a singular truth that can be discovered. (Obviously, I don’t have that conviction in physics, but that’s another story.)
Ultimately, we cannot “academize” the learning of Islam. This is because it leads to confusion. We see this with the faux-traditionalists themselves and many of the Muslims who go into Islamic Studies. They become disillusioned with Islam. They fall into all kinds of doubts. They think of the tradition as a subjective joke, even if they don’t always admit it (but it always eventually comes out because they love cracking jokes and insulting traditional scholars and students).
And for those who want to say, “Some good comes out of academic Islam,” that’s not saying much. The enemies of Islam, whether the outright Islamophobe or the decolonial reformist, both know a lot about Islam and one can learn a lot about Islam from them. But it is knowledge meant to destroy and unravel. The most dangerous lies are those mixed with truth.
In writing this, I would like us to become more sensitive to the faux-traditionalist project so that we can recognize it, resist it, and ultimately dismantle it. This is becoming a major fitna because figures with big followings are starting to spread this poison under the guise of traditional, orthodox Islam. May Allah protect us.
Jazak Allah khair. One minor correction: “This is where the subtly lies” should be spelled subtlety.
So true. The traditional Scholars studied Islam considering it as an act of worship. “Islamic studies” department studies Islam as it it were some kind of bygone historical phenomenon. Many practicing Muslims become atheists or agnostics after coming out from Islamic studies course. May Allah guide us all, Ameen…
Never seen that but the psychology and philosophy departments are indeed notorious for that. Islamic Studies is basically a branche of history. People major in it because it’s an easy degree, not to gain serious knowledge. Most people coming from these departments barely know Arabic – same is true for the professors. It’s hot garbage.
Especially the new quranist heretics claiming that the sunnah is invalid because it’s “man made” and subject to corruption
Even though their entire interpretation is man made themselves… such contradiction
It is enough to look at the people who go into “academic Islam” and the way they simply look before and after. People mock the beard and the trousers above the ankle, but fact is they do say much about you. Also i totally agree with the part about the fact that they can’t hide their real feelings. You see them joke and mock traditionalists! And then they say “its just a joke”.
There may be a single truth, but no indisputable evidence on who has it. There is nothing wrong for you to argue that you have the truth. But for God’s sake, be humbler, that is the command of the Quran is not it?
Muslim academics seem to be a source of misguidance in many cases. Dangerous times when deviants who ascribe to Islam are awarded Phds and disseminate their ‘knowledge’ via public platforms.
“Muslim academics seem to be a source of misguidance in many cases.”
I’d emphatically say ***ALL*** cases.
It’s a tragedy of the times that we live in that this topic even needs to be accorded webspace.
Our scholars have written centuries ago that our deen can’t be learnt from kuffar. We have a strict tradition of transmission that doesn’t even take narrations from deviants. Just review our sciences of jarh and ta^deel to know what I’m talking about.
Yet, “Muslims” think they can learn deen from christian and jewish orientalists in western academia!
Do the British come to us asking us to teach them British history, let alone Christian theology or legalisms? And yet we take “Islamic jurisprudence” and “Muslim theology” courses from kuffar! Even if the professor delivering the lecture is a Muslim by name, the fact that the course is sanctioned and offered by a university run by the kuffar, makes it a big haram. Can the professor teach something that goes against the university’s value system? Who is the final approving authority for the course and the course content?
We are forbidden from even asking them narrations of their own!
“But for God’s sake, be humbler, that is the command of the Quran is not it?”
No it doesn’t. The Quran and Sunnah commands you to have yaqeen in your aqeedah and be humble in your akhlaaq/manners. Western thought is based upon Greek philosophy which has as its fundamental principle doubt (skepsis) ie. the opposite of yaqeen. This is why Western academia produces a lot of agnostics and atheists. Ironically enough atheists are the most arrogant people you’ll ever meet. Which actually makes sense if you think about it. Negating God means you’re deifying your own aql (or emotions).
“The believers are only the ones who have believed in Allah and His Messenger and then doubt not but strive with their properties and their lives in the cause of Allah . It is those who are the truthful.”
Quran 49:15
https://quran.com/49/15
“Negating God means you’re deifying your own aql (or emotions)” so true.
Baraka Allaho Fik Akhi Daniel. May Allah Protect His servants from the fitna. Allah Al Haq.
This was a great article. I myself took Islamic Studies courses and had almost automatically come to understand that while the Professors there unsurface interesting facts about Islamic Scholarship, they study it as one would study books of alchemy, assuming the goal cannot be achieved but admiring their attempts to achieve it anyways.
It is indeed an environment which does not help one cultivate yaqeen or certainty in Islam. But coupled with worship, strong rituals, and regular attendance at a mosque or place of traditional Islamic learning, it can be a great additional source of information.
If you know what Br. Daniel has written here about the assumptions underlying Islamic Studies in the academy, you will be well equipped to glean what you can from such courses while resisting the bad (i.e. the secular bias).
Thanks Br. Daniel for this article. Inshallah you are rewarded in this life and the next for spreading this knowledge.
Assalamu alaikum Br. Daniel,
I enjoyed reading your article. Is your intention to eventually study Islam traditionally? It does seem so based on this article, and it would greatly benefit us to have someone like you with a traditional background to combat the pseudo-traditionalists.
This is a GEM of an article ماشاء الله it’s unpacking so many things. However I am afraid only a few will understand and identify what Br Daniel is trying to say here. It may in fact be the case that 20-50 years down the track people will Realize the true value of what is being said and regret not taking action earlier. It grieves my heart that some of these scholars used to provide so much benefit and now are causing so much harm (even though they sincerely believe they are still providing that benefit). And they would think it’s “too below” them to even read something that Br Daniel has written. جزاك الله خيراً
Hamza Yusuf talks about marrying the two systems
www. youtube. com/watch?time_continue=64&v=2cWunxa5zho&feature=emb_logo
“It was narrated from Abu Hurairah that the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said:
“You will most certainly follow the ways of those who came before you, arm’s length by arm’s length, forearm’s length by forearm’s length, hand span by hand span, until even if they entered a hole of a mastigure (lizard) you will enter it too.” They said: “O Messenger of Allah, (do you mean) the Jews and the Christians?” He said: “Who else?””
https://sunnah.com/ibnmajah/36/69
Asalamu alaikum. So could we say that Dr Qadhis doubts about the huroof and qiraat are due to viewing Islam through an orientalist post modernist lens and making that the scale?
The so called academic methodologies are far from objective. They usually start with a thesis, theory or hypothesis and then go on to prove (or supposedly disprove) the same! And in that is the biggest problem: the very origin of the inquiry is the product of one’s bias, based on limited personal experiences. There are so much criticism of social sciences from life sciences and vice versa. On the other hand, traditional Islamic inquiries are the product of external factors: Allah in His relationship with His creation. From this point of view, Islam is truly objective and the academic approach is the product subjective human endeavour.
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