IamAbdul_👳🏾‍♂️

We really need to exercise more humility in the way we approach Islamic education, particularly those of us who have been trained in Western or secular academic traditions. And I say this with the recognition that what we call Western education itself owes a considerable intellectual debt to earlier Islamic scholarship. But I digress. The way Islamic scholarship establishes, evaluates, interprets, reconciles, and rejects evidence operates within an epistemological and methodological framework that is different from those of modern secular academic disciplines. Having a BSc, MSc, or PhD equips you with certain analytical skills, but it doesn’t automatically qualify you to approach Islamic texts with the same assumptions about evidence, authority, interpretation, and truth. And I think this is where a certain intellectual arrogance creeps in. You become sufficiently competent in one intellectual tradition and begin to assume that its methods are universally transferable. You read a translation of the Qur’an, encounter an authentic hadith, and imagine that your ability to reason critically is sufficient to independently determine what the texts mean, even where generations of scholars have developed rigorous principles for precisely those questions. This doesn’t mean Islam rejects logic or critical reasoning. Far from it. The Qur’an repeatedly calls us to reflect, reason, and examine evidence. Islamic scholarship itself has sophisticated traditions of reasoning, disagreement, and critical scrutiny. But reason operates within a methodology, and the authority assigned to different forms of evidence matters enormously. Some analytical skills are transferable, certainly, but methodological competence in one discipline does not automatically confer expertise in another. The humility required is to recognise where our competence ends, learn the principles of the discipline before challenging its conclusions, and understand that unfamiliarity with a scholarly method is not evidence of its intellectual inadequacy. You can be exceptionally educated in one field and still be a complete beginner in another. There’s absolutely no shame in that. The arrogance begins when we refuse to recognise the distinction.