Part 1: Is It Scientific? https://www.reddit.com/r/MuslimAcademics/s/36V1ZXchNE

Part 2: Probabilities, Probabilities https://www.reddit.com/r/MuslimAcademics/s/1avNTPEekQ

Part 3: Part 3: Cognition & History https://www.reddit.com/r/MuslimAcademics/comments/1t2t37l/muslims_should_not_use_the_historicalcritical/

Part 4: You are here!

Part 5: Orientalism (Coming soon!)

Part 6: Secularism (Coming soon!)

Part 7: Materialist Theory of Religion (Coming Soon!)

Part 8: Modernism (Coming soon!)

Part 9: Methodological Atheism (Coming soon!)

Part 10: Empiricism (Coming soon!)

Part 11: Naturalism (Coming Soon!)

Part 12: Hegelian Dialectic (Coming Soon!)

Part 13: Epicurean Atomism (Coming Soon!)

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

1.      Pre-Understanding in Hermeneutics

The HCM postulates that it suspends conclusions about the truth of a text until after analysis is conducted with respect to historicity. According to Nicolai Sinai, professor of Islamic Studies and academic scholar of Qur'anic studies,

>"To interpret a literary document critically means to suspend inherited presuppositions about its origin, transmission, and meaning, and to assess their adequacy in the light of a close reading of that text itself as well as other relevant sources.

This assertion flies in the face of developments in textual analysis among Continental philosophers and social scientists.  Researchers arrive at texts and conduct hermeneutics based on their cultural background and personal biases. This concept of baked-in preunderstanding is termed Vorverständnis in German. Vorverständnis is what allows researchers to be able to conduct research in the first place, but denying it opens up a proverbial Pandora’s box of hermeneutic issues.

Hermeneutics refers to the methodology of interpretation. The HCM contains, but is not limited, to hermeneutic tools. Vorverständnis describes the circumstances of individual researchers and of similarly situated researchers before and during their hermeneutics. It should be noted that Vorverständnis is not something imposed or something that can be eliminated, rather it is the mechanism by which hermeneutics is even possible.

Without vorverständnis, a scholar examining Hamurrabi’s Code would be unable to determine that it is a legal text. They would have eliminated their frame of reference from Western jurisprudence and would no longer maintain their legal reasoning or ethical framework. Hence, Vorverständnis guides researchers in determining what is familiar, what is different, and why that matters. Texts are not authored in a vacuum and they can never be read in a vacuum.

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger argues that all interpretation necessarily happens within “fore-structures of understanding,” which are pre-emptive frameworks allowing interpreters to grasp preliminary orientations before formal engagement can occur. All interpretation that intends to understand a text must have pre-understanding, or it will be indecipherable. Hence, Vorverständnis is a structural component of human interpretation and understanding.

Subsequently, Hans-George Gadamer (d. 2002) in Truth and Method redeployed Heidegger’s concept of fore-structures to describe Vorurteil or prejudicial prejudgment. Vorurteil allows texts to challenge our preconceived notions and puts us in a dialogue with texts that contradict our pre-understandings. Gadamer argued that our pre-structures are dictated by a larger context of historical inheritance. As a result, tradition was a legitimate source for interpretative understanding according to Gadamer; not merely an obstacle to be overcome. It is the basis by which any understanding may be done.

We are strained to find HCM scholars who admit the entire methodological and philosophical stack underpinning their analyses. However, to reject that there is such a series of arbitrary, historically defined, layers is to reject the very basis upon which the analysis stands. We then arrive at a startlingly realization; that HCM academics are engaging not only in a form Orientalism, but a form of Occidentalism. There is a sort of deeply naïve and mis-informed hyper-reduction of the Western tradition itself baked into the idea that it can all be cast aside for an “objective” or “unbiased” analysis of Islamic texts.

By admitting Vorverständnis, we can acknowledge Vorurteil, and then engage in a true dialogue with historical texts. This would allow for the possibility that our pre-judgement could actually be challenged by these texts, once we acknowledge the existence of such pre-judgements. Ultimately, a sort of dialectic between the researcher and his research could possibly occur. Gadamer terms this a “fusion of horizons” or Horizontverschmelzung.

Gaddamer primarily framed Vorurteil within the lens of history (Wirkungsgeschichte, or effective history). He tasked researchers with acknowledging this so that their horizons could expand through sincere encounters with the text, something impossible under a reductionist Occidentalist framework.

In the Islamic tradition, historical texts are not simply empirical documents. They are the product of a Divine historical process, meaning that God Himself may bar the interpreter from certain textual realities if they are lacking a particular ethical or spiritual station. It is not merely a matter of prior biases, but of current inability to see with spiritual insight.

2.      Colonialism

In developing a robust understanding of HCM academics’ Vorverständnis, we must turn to history. The modern field of comparative religious studies began during European colonialism of Africa. Following the Enlightenment, European researchers were fascinated by the “absence” of religion in Africa and the New World. Of course, their frame of reference for what religion constituted was Christianity but more specifically Protestantism. These colonial researchers saw religion as a hallmark of civilization, and the lack of Protestant-style religion indicated how savage Africans and native Americans were.

Hence, the distinction between “true” and “false” religion under Protestantism may be traced to this period of post-Enlightenment colonialism. This kind of comparative religion or proto-anthropology was framed in scientific fetters. Philosophers such as David Hume argued that testimony is not trustworthy, only direct experience can produce knowledge. Jonathan Edwards argued that authentic Christianity produces claims that are always verifiable. So, authentic religion was conceived of as having few ritual practices and being in the mold of Protestantism.

In these early works, Protestantism becomes synonymous with the highest forms of civilization, whereas indigenous African and native American “religions” were seen as “superstition” or “fetishism.” Later thinkers, such as Karl Marx, argued that African indigenous religions were no more worshipful of fetish objects than Christians did the cross. Marx went so far as to argue that capitalist Christians assigned human attributes to commodities, such as rights, similar to African fetish-worshippers. Yet, even this betrays a racialized trope.

Ultimately, these tropes of superiority are refined and refigured under secularism. A fetish becomes a “a racially coded secular term for mystification, ignorance of cause and effect, and irrational attributions of subjectivity to inanimate things” (pg. 181). These early social “scientists” held that the civilized are in control of their bodies. Religion should contain no ecstatic experiences or performative rituals. That material objects or symbolic representations are heretical. Indeed, we continue to see these tropes in HCM methodology. For example, the presumption that all kinds of Muslim testimony are automatically suspect and hold nearly no evidentiary value.

3. Racialism

The colonial enterprise in Africa was undergirded by the concept of race. Therefore, key to understanding the HCM’s assumption stack is to understand the impact of race as a worldview (referred to as racialism). Racialism is a pseudo-scientific approach to categorizing humans according to a concept of race. It should be noted that merely having a concept of races or biological differences between people from different areas does not constitute racialism. Racialism is a sophisticated worldview with specific beliefs and a particular history.  As Audrey and Brian Smedly describe,

>The people most instrumental in the development of the idea of race as experienced in North America were the English colonists who began settlements in the seventeenth century. The book thus focuses on English beliefs, values, and social practices, brought with them to the colonies, that set the stage for a racial worldview in America. Under the influence of English customs and beliefs, Europeans in the United States developed and institutionalized the concept to a more extreme degree than any other society outside of twentieth-century South Africa. The book therefore concentrates on the American experience and some of many influences that led to the formulation of the racial worldview most familiar to Americans. (pg. 21)

Furthermore, Howard Zinn race explains how constructed as a solution to the needs of wealthy European landowners in the nascent United States,

>We see now a complex web of historical threads to ensnare blacks for slavery in America: the desperation of starving settlers, the special helplessness of the displaced African, the powerful incentive of profit for slave trader and planter, the temptation of superior status for poor whites, the elaborate controls against escape and rebellion, the legal and social punishment of black and white collaboration.

>The point is that the elements of this web are historical, not “natural.” This does not mean that they are easily disentangled, dismantled. It means only that there is a possibility for something else, under historical conditions not yet realized. And one of these conditions would be the elimination of that class exploitation which has made poor whites desperate for small gifts of status, and has prevented that unity of black and white necessary for joint rebellion and reconstruction. (A People’s History of the United States, pg. 43)

This concept of a pan-European “race” can be identified as early as the European wars against the Ottoman empire, wherein figures who had historically conceived of each European state as its own “race” began to identify with all other Europeans against the “Turks” and “Arabs.”

This concept of pan-European “whiteness” cum racialism was developed in the Americas and then exported back to Europe, where we see it in the analysis of proto-social scientists and in comparative religion during the period of European colonialism in Africa. Audrey and Brian Smedly,

>What modern scientists are saying is that race as a biological concept cannot be supported by the facts that we have learned about human biophysical variations and their genetic basis. The frames of reference and database of science have changed dramatically. Most scientists work with definitions and conceptions of human variation specific to their disciplines—that are confined to physical, genetic, biochemical, and molecular factors. These fields have had the benefit of tremendous advances due to highly sophisticated instrumentation for observation, identification, measurement, and analysis. New methods and techniques have enabled scientists to identify variability in perhaps thousands of hereditary traits from analyses of DNA, the genetic materials that determine our biophysical characteristics. The discovery of the range and complexity of genetic variation has prompted scientists to rethink the ways by which we classify populations and to question the extent of real differences between so-called races. (Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview by Audrey & Brian Smedly, pg. 18)

Modern capitalist secularism is inseparable from race. While race does not exist as a biological reality, it exists as a socio-cultural-economic reality. It informs any analysis conducted under a secular paradigm, as racialism is a part of wider capitalist realism. This is a particular bias present in HCM that is not present in traditional Islamic methodology. The Smedley’s,

>It is significant that many contemporary scholars have concluded that race is a relatively recent concept in human history. The cultural structuring of a racial worldview coincides with the colonial expansion of certain western European nations during the past five centuries, their encountering of populations very different from themselves, and the creation of a unique form of slavery. Expansion, conquest, exploitation, and enslavement have characterized much of human history over the past five thousand years or so, but before the modern era, none of these events resulted in the development of ideologies or social systems based on race. Dante Puzzo put it explicitly: “Racism . . .is a modern conception, for prior to the XVIth century there was virtually nothing in the life and thought of the West that can be described as racist” (1964, 579). Though referring only to the West, this view unambiguously challenges the claim that race classifications and ideologies were or are universal or have deep historical roots.  (pg. 28)

Part 1 | Is It Scientific? https://www.reddit.com/r/MuslimAcademics/s/36V1ZXchNE

Part 2: You are here!

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

Before dealing with the philosophical conundrums that the HCM exposes its adherents to, we should deal with the oft-invoked refrain of “common sense probability and plausibility.”

As discussed in the previous post, hard sciences and social sciences validate theses based on experiments or, when experimentation is not possible, statistical analysis of historical data. HCM proponents often argue that their inferences about history are based on probability.

Quasi-Probabilistic Approach

When an HCM researcher looks at available evidence, they then attempt to draw a conclusion as to the most probable and plausible explanation – without relying on unjustified external explanations from religion or tradition. Probabilities are invoked as common-sense, it is simply intuitive to utilize naturalistic explanations based on available data and lead to the most “plausible” inference. These inferences are asserted to best explain the data, being closest to the truth. According to Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser,

>“Not all historical events are difficult to explain, of course. Physical events, say a fire, can be diagnosed after the fact. Their source, say a faulty electrical wire or a dropped cigarette, can often be found. Events that occur multiple times are easier to assess. Often, indeed, analysts do employ probabilities to describe such happenings.”^([i]) ["Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis." Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, Oct. 2019, updated Nov. 2019, RWP19-032. Working paper]

Certainly, these kinds of small inferences are necessary. However, do they translate to the scale and scope that HCM researchers engage? HCM researchers invoke probability in such a way as to vastly oversimplify the complexities of history.

It should be noted that there is a categorical demarcation in method here between faith-based history and naturalistic history. Followers of Abrahamic faiths believe that observed history was guided by God intentionally. The Qur'an often encourages believers to reflect on the meaning of past events. However, from a naturalistic paradigm, we must assume that all historical events have no inherent meaning imbibed from on high and that they are the product of random forces. Therefore, the following critique only applies to historiographies that assume history has no guiding force and is a product of random natural forces.

The forward procession of events into the future is not linear. There are potentially infinite possibilities at any time, with a similar degree of possible outcomes. Quantifying every possible future scenario is analytically impossible.

Yet, when observing the past, only one historical outcome is observed in reality. The exact reason for this outcome can never be known, yet HCM scholars will attribute inferences and probabilities to these outcomes.

Plausible Interpretations

Plausibility, probability, and science are highly severely conflated in discourses around the HCM. I have demonstrated in the previous part that the HCM is neither a hard science nor a social science, but most akin to an interpretative science.

A common misconception is that plausibility and truth are correlated or even causal. However, plausibility has nothing to do with actual truth, it simply describes whether something subjectively seems reasonable. The plausibility fallacy, as articulated by Dr. Mitchell Handelsman and Nassim Taleb, is a logical error of assuming that the more plausible an explanation is, the more likely it is to be true. Oftentimes, the most implausible explanations are true.

Additionally, crafting plausible theories does not beget knowledge. To many people historically, the most plausible explanation as to the shape of the earth was their experience of it; that it was flat. The more implausible explanation, that the Earth is round, was determined initially by trigonometry. Scientists such as al-Biruni performed calculations, looking at the angle of the horizon from atop a mountain. These are a reproducible methods with clearly defined parameters and variables.

Therefore, enterprises that are based on creating plausible theories must have other mechanisms to arrive at truth. Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser,

>“First, many historians write works that are permeated with deeply-held theoretical assumptions about how the world works. A person who believes that market capitalism is a primary determinant of human behavior, will probably be more likely to think market capitalism was a primary determinant of any particular historical event. The same might go for rational actor theory, racial theories, gender theories, or any number of other theories of behavior that appeal to particular historians. But it is implausible that a single theory of human interaction could explain the multiple events that a single historian might address in a career. Some events should be explained by some reasons in a hierarchy of causation, and others by a different set in a different hierarchy. We would thus expect explanation bias to more acutely afflict more ideologically driven individuals.”

As will be demonstrated in later posts, the HCM is latent with the assumptions of modern secularism. These assumptions color all interpretations. Therefore, some objective mechanism must be required so as to parse "plausibility" from actuality.

When advocates of the HCM claim it is “ probabilistic", they do not describe how they have set down the parameters & variables to achieve reproducibility. This leaves them highly subject to imposing their deeply held views about the world, informed by a secular framework; then calling it objectivity.

It may seem intuitive to cross compare evidence, investigate at plausibility, and arrive at the best "common sense" solutions. However, this is itself a "plausible" method and is not rigorous.

It should be noted that this is a problem of historiography and not of history. And it is a problem of secular empirical historiography, not religious historiography that believes history is not random. Documentation of history as simply collecting & retelling of facts is not the same as historiography.

Least Deserving Outcomes

As we observe modern historical events proceeding in real time, oftentimes outcomes deemed the least probable or implausible occur. This is despite the consensus of experts and vehement certitude of scholars. History regularly surprises us going into the future, yet we assume the generator of historical events in the past is linear enough to dissect. Very few pundits or analysts have any kind of remarkable track record with predicting the future, and the few that do fall within the statistical variance of the survivorship bias. Simply put, there is no Nostradamus.

From an empirical perspective, historical events are the product of random sequences of events without a deterministic mechanism that we know of. This does not mean that human actors do not have intentions or goals, or that there are no discernible behaviors. It simply means that there are no decipherable consistent historiographical laws, unlike physics.

Yet, the HCM method purports to be able to look at these events and “infer” the most probable conclusions as to why events occurred or how religious texts were produced. The method of attributing meaning to these data points by inference and rough "probability" occurs without creating sample paths for invisible unrealized histories.

This is a fatal flaw. Since pure randomness and coincidence are not accounted for by calculating other possible permutations, it is never clear whether the inferred explanations are simply a byproduct of historical noise or indicate something substantial. HCM academics do not investigate sequences of unrealized scenarios over time, meaning that HCM historiographers are only ever dealing with a control group.

This fails to account for the fact that the most correct explanation for observed data or for history may be the most opaque and least intelligible. Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser,

>“A third source of explanation bias could relate to discomfort from the cognitive dissonance encountered when giving fair hearing to competing theories. Humans generally have a hard time juggling competing hypotheses. A single explanation, especially one explained narratively, can be preferable precisely because individuals have an easier time understanding and being persuaded by it. While this could help account for explanation bias among producers of history (of any kind), it may better explain the strength of explanation bias's adoption among its consumers. Consumers of history who have less knowledge than its purveyors may also be less aware of competing theories and, therefore, even more susceptible to explanation bias.”

Back-Testing

HCM scholars frame the method as probabilistically back testing historical data, unfettered by religion or tradition. This is intended to be a claim of objectivity and accuracy.

Back-testing itself is not a foolproof method. While it may provide valuable information in some fields, like cosmology, we also see the abject failure of back-testing in other disciplines. Applications of back-testing on certain historical medicine trials demonstrate that some trials succeed simply due to randomness. There are documented cases of miraculous recoveries from cancer which can be arbitrarily pieced together to form a nonexistent pattern by back testing. Back-testing regularly produces stock market trading algorithms that can be projected to produce tens of millions of dollars, only to go negative within hours of trading in real world scenarios.

The English mathematician Karl Pearson discusses the reference case problem, that true randomness is unattainable because we experience only one sample history. Therefore, we are unable to create proper control and variable groups on past back-testing. This calls into question methods of empirical research into history.

To reiterate, this is a non-issue for those who believe God designs our single observed history with intention and calls upon us to draw lessons from the past. Muslims do not believe history is the outcome of random naturalistic forces, but rather a selected chosen outcome of God that He intends for us to draw inferences from. However, it is a huge issue when the assumption is that history is naturalistic, random, with no guiding force.

Life is nonlinear. This is observed in all domains of empirical inquiry. If we take a sandcastle and continue adding a single grain of sand in a linear fashion until it collapses, the collapse will be non-linear. In fact, it is practically impossible to predict where any particular grain of sand will end. Oftentimes the final outcomes of historical sequences or events, or the explanations between events, are the ones that are least path-dependent. They are the “least deserving” from a human perspective, occurring due to extraneous network externalities (see the Matthew Effect or the Gambler’s Fallacy). The results of future random processes are often unaffected by past results. This calls into question any empirical attempt to derive historical rules.

Additionally, the current success of empirical sciences also does not independently indicate truth. The famous Charles Dawkins fallacy, "It's true because it works" fails to take into account the problem of induction (which will be discussed later). Stock traders often have a successful market strategy for many years that produces billions of dollars and is therefore "true" due it's perceived efficacy until their fund explodes overnight. This problem is severely compounded when no statistical analysis or experimentation can be done. Then we cannot even know if a theory is true within a short time window, and nothing is falsifiable.

Complexity in History

The three-body problem and wider complexity theory illustrate this kind of quantitative nonlinearity. If we have two balls in a pool table, we can model their exact trajectories with astonishing accuracy if they are hit at any particular angle by a billiard cue. However, the moment a third ball is added, the complexity of potential outcomes becomes incalculable. Why a particular ball will end up where is so statistically difficult to compute that it is beyond the computation power humans currently possess. Yet, when looking at past data from an empirical lens, Historical-Critical scholars attempt to justify and explain why or how certain events are correlated.

A fascinating example of this is Qur’anic parallels with Judeo-Christian traditions at the time of Muhammad’s mission. Despite a dearth of direct causal evidence, the standard position of the HCM field is that the Qur’an is a byproduct of the intellectual, cultural, and religious milieu of seventh century Arabia. This conclusion is informed by parallels in mythology, Targums, Homilies, romances, poetry, the Torah, the Talmud, Christian writings, and other sources. Yet the logical leap between apparent correlation, which is unquantifiable empirically, to causality is totally unexplainable given the extant evidence. These kinds of conclusions would require computational capabilities trillions of times more powerful than computing the location of a third billiard ball upon being hit by a cue; something currently impossible.

Normal Distributions

These quasi-probabilistic claims of HCM scholars fail to account for typical statistical measures like significance, the normal range of fluctuation in a range, and data distributions. If a range of data has normal range of fluctuation, anything within that range is insignificant. In fact, it would be difficult for an HCM scholar to prove that much of the field cannot distinguish itself from statistical noise.

HCM’s conclusions often rely on distributions with well-defined moments (e.g. finite mean, finite variance). However, reality rarely models according to a normal distribution. Randomness is often based on power-law or fat tail distributions. Especially in the realms of social science.

So the assumption that something would be extremely abnormal or even impossible today in terms of people is less reliable in history than when it comes to physics because human social dynamics are more exposed to fat-tail distributions. This is further compounded when we are more critical about the science we are putting out about human behavior.

The problem stems from reliance on models that assume stability in systems that are too complex to be accounted for in such a fashion. HCM starts by assuming that empirical reality contains a typical or an average that we can then analogize from, and draw explanations according to that baseline “reality”. This is assuming that these matters are distributed with "well-defined moments (e.g. finite mean, finite variance) which is misleading and inaccurate.

Social sciences and even history deal with non-ergodic systems. They don't convene to predictable averages overtime in any demonstrable fashion. They are described more accurately by models that consider wild swings or extreme singular events, which makes uniformitarianism problematic. It isn't just that studies have a problem of reproducibility, these methods are too fragile to draw inferences from.

Power-Law Randomness

The problem with well-defined movement distributions (e.g. Gaussian or bell curve) is that you can't model some kind of randomness with it. The problem is that real world phenomenon - especially pertaining to historical events - actually follow power-law distributions where there are extreme exceptions that are sparsely distributed. These are called “fat-tails” and these fat-tails dominate the course of history. Extreme rare events have an outsize impact and a normal Gaussian distribution would fail to account for that even though they are the story. The kind of assumption of normality you're suggesting here is problematic because it underestimates extreme deviations.

The problem is that HCM researchers assume a type of Gaussian randomness when history is defined moreso by power-law randomness.

In non-linear, complex systems (such as markets, economies, societies, human history as a whole), local observations and empirical consistency do not necessarily generalize on a grand scale or project backwards. That's why in science theories are tested - and even that leads us to efficacy not truth. We can't run backwards experiments on history so our conclusions are much more fraught.

An empirical approach to history should indicate that things for which there are no evidence should not be considered. However, things that have never happened before (for which there is no prior evidence) occur routinely in history. As will be discussed later when critiquing naturalism, outliers are important because of the problem of induction.

Since there is no repeatability in a closed environment for history, secular empirical methods of explaining history cannot result in expertise.

[i] Mukharji, Aroop, and Richard Zeckhauser. "Bound to Happen: Explanation Bias in Historical Analysis." Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, Oct. 2019, updated Nov. 2019, RWP19-032. Working paper

Part 1: You are here!

Part 2: Probabilities, Probabilities https://www.reddit.com/r/MuslimAcademics/s/1avNTPEekQ

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

Two Muslim academics recently published an article entitled, The Historical-Critical Method and Why Muslims Should Use It: Response to R.A Jabal in which they advocate for Muslims to apply the Historical Critical Method (hereafter referred to as the HCM) in Islamic studies. Their article was itself a response to another article by Rafay Jabal entitled, What is the Historical-Critical Method and Why Muslims Should Care. In Ahmad & Rasheed’s article, they argue that Jabal has not proposed a solution to his critique of the HCM,

>Ultimately, while Rafay proposes that what he is doing is pointing out the biases and limitations of the method, he falls into a trap that many critics of the method fall into. He does not actually provide a firm solution to the problem.

Rafay’s critique was heavily focused on the epistemological commitments the HCM has and how this, in his view, biases the method to the point of unreliability. Ahmad & Rasheed argue that the HCM is valuable as it has produced historical knowledge “from pre-historic times to societies of modern history” and, therefore, Jabal’s deconstructive arguments and prescription to shed the HCM are unwarranted. Ahmad & Rasheed conclude that Muslims should utilize the HCM.

I will dissect their arguments in several parts, dealing in turn with the entire assumption stack of the HCM.

Pseudo-Scientific Approach to History

Ahmad & Rasheed find the metaphysical and epistemological critiques leveled at the HCM to be baroque. This betrays a lack of appreciation as to the depth and importance of these arguments. However, I have chosen to begin with a critique which was wholly undiscussed by Rafay, Ahmad, or Rasheed. This critique operates within the accepted parameters and assumption stack of the HCM. I begin with a critique that is compatible with presupposing the entire secular modernist assumption stack for the purpose of demonstrating evident flaws in the HCM as a method which are unaddressed, before expanding outwards to increasingly higher levels of inquiry.

The HCM is advertised as a secular, evidence-based, unbiased method for approaching history. According to Nicolai Sinai, professor of Islamic Studies and academic scholar of Qur'anic studies,

>"To interpret a literary document critically means to suspend inherited presuppositions about its origin, transmission, and meaning, and to assess their adequacy in the light of a close reading of that text itself as well as other relevant sources. A pertinent example would be the demand voiced by Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679) that discussion of the question by whom the different books of the Bible were originally composed must be guided exclusively by the 'light … which is held out unto us from the books themselves' ... While critical interpretation in this basic sense is perfectly compatible with believing that the text in question constitutes revelation, it may nonetheless engender considerable doubts about the particular ways in which that text has traditionally been understood. Benedict Spinoza (d. 1677), one of the ancestors of modern Biblical scholarship, goes yet further. In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus he criticises earlier interpreters of the Bible for having proceeded on the basis of the postulate that scripture is 'everywhere true and divine'. This assumption, Spinoza insists, is to be rigorously bracketed. This is not to say that scripture should conversely be assumed to be false and mortal, but it does open up the very real possibility that an interpreter may find scripture to contain statements that are, by his own standards, false, inconsistent, or trivial. Hence, a fully critical approach to the Bible, or to the Qur'an for that matter, is equivalent to the demand, frequently reiterated by Biblical scholars from the eighteenth century onwards, that the Bible is to be interpreted in the same manner as any other text.

>"Moving on to the second constituent of the adjective 'historical-critical', we may say that to read a text historically is to require the meanings ascribed to it to have been humanly 'thinkable' or 'sayable' within the text's original historical environment, as far as the latter can be retrospectively reconstructed. At least for the mainstream of historical-critical scholarship, the notion of possibility underlying the words 'thinkable' and 'sayable' is informed by the principle of historical analogy – the assumption that past periods of history were constrained by the same natural laws as the present age, that the moral and intellectual abilities of human agents in the past were not radically different from ours, and that the behaviour of past agents, like that of contemporary ones, is at least partly explicable by recourse to certain social and economic factors. Assuming the validity of the principle of historical analogy has significant consequences. For instance, it will become hermeneutically inadmissible to credit scripture with a genuine foretelling of future events or with radically anachronistic ideas (say, with anticipating modern scientific theories). The notion of miraculous and public divine interventions will likewise fall by the wayside. All these presuppositions can of course be examined and questioned on various epistemological and theological grounds, but they arguably form core elements of the rule book of contemporary historical scholarship. The present volume, whose concerns are not epistemological or theological, therefore takes them for granted.

>"The foregoing entails that historical-critical interpretation departs in major respects from traditional Biblical or Qur'anic exegesis: it delays any assessment of scripture's truth and relevance until after the act of interpretation has been carried out, and it sidesteps appeals to genuine foresight and miracles."

Therefore, the HCM is designed to be in the model of modern empirical and scientific inquiry. Yet, a key lapse in defining HCM is that the kind of method is not articulated. For example, is the HCM a scientific method? According to Wikipedia,

>"The scientific method is an empirical method for acquiring knowledge through careful observation, rigorous skepticism, hypothesis testing, and experimental validation. Developed from ancient and medieval practices, it acknowledges that cognitive assumptions can distort the interpretation of the observation. The scientific method has characterized science since at least the 17th century. Scientific inquiry includes creating a testable hypothesis through inductive reasoning, testing it through experiments and statistical analysis, and adjusting or discarding the hypothesis based on the results."

By definition, if you cannot test a hypothesis and run controlled experiments or statistical analysis – a method is not scientific. Does that preclude the HCM from being a science?

Modern academia respects a few fields of research as being reliable for producing truth. These consist of the natural sciences, engineering and technology, medical and health sciences, agricultural sciences, and social sciences. Humanities/arts are not considered to be self-reliant methods of accomplishing truth, but seen as valuable for human expression and administration.

So, within the secular method, not everything must be a hard science to produce objective truth. However, if the HCM is not a natural science or social science, then it becomes pseudoscientific when proponents claim it can produce that truth. HCM proponents do claim that it is the best method for arriving at objective historical truth, although they may temper that claim with the fact that all historical truth is “probabilistic.”

Yet, that caveat does not deal with a major problem with the Historical-Critical Method has. The HCM cannot validate or justify its own existence. Upon what basis does a proponent of the method justify that the HCM is superior to the historiographical method of ibn Khaldun? What is the methodological evidence that one approach & its conclusions are superior to another?

In hard sciences, such as evolutionary biology, there are evidence-based methods by which scientists may determine that other methods of scientific inquiry lead to erroneous conclusions in the past and due to these facts this other method is better.  If this is the case then the HCM is not a scientific method. With a scientific method, we would be able to isolate the exact variables and have reproducibility of results

In fact, proponents of HCM offer no way to measure historiographical frameworks for their value in explanatory function – since history is an environment where experiments are impossible and therefore there is no reproducibility & scientific conclusions cannot be achieved. However, the concept of nonexperimental sciences is oxymoronic. If neither experiments nor statistical analysis can be done, it's not a hard science. An example is Freudian psychotherapy. To some psychologists, psychotherapy is a very useful method. However, it cannot be validated experimentally though it may produce invaluable insights. The value of such insights is totally subjective.

This is contrasted with some of the hard sciences that are almost entirely based in past data. An example may be cosmology, which is based on observation & statistical analysis of datasets. There can be no controlled experiments but there are theoretical experiments that can be validated or disproven. Furthermore, cosmology and other similar sciences, such as geology, are heavily based on statistical analysis; not on the subjective opinions of researchers on increasingly far-fetched “parallels” (which betray the causality-correlation fallacy). Historiography is categorically different than cosmology. This renders the entire field more like psychotherapy. A researcher cannot come up with a formula to validate a thesis in historiography that can be back projected on historical data. That is not scientific.

If the HCM is not claimed to be a hard science, can it be claimed to be a social science? Proponents of the HCM may claim that HCM is a probabilistic social science. However, they offer no mechanism by which probabilities are being calculated. There are no variables being assigned or underlying rules. Instead, we find narratives based on assumptions that researchers arbitrarily deem most “probable” that are then projected onto the data. Until some statistical framework is proposed and actually utilized, the idea that the HCM is “probabilistic” is not a serious claim.

The HCM is best understood as an “interpretative science” along the lines of Freudian psychotherapy or Marxist economic theory. When the conclusions of an interpretative science are claimed to be objectively true or most "probable," it becomes a pseudoscience. Since the "engine of historical events" that contains any potential laws of history is invisible to us, if such an engine exists and if such laws exist, we cannot study it in an empirical naturalistic fashion. From a secular perspective, that renders all of historiography no better than subjective interpretation.

Since HCM is not a hard science, it has no basis upon which to validate competing methods or conclusions for objectivity. Experiments and statistical analysis do not apply. How the HCM ensures that it is, itself, a legitimate method, and that it is superior to other methods, and that it can be used to reliably arrive at truth? Why do scholars of the HCM trust the HCM if not for experiments, statistics, and the other accepted tools of modern academia?

The only recourse to determining this would be to raise to the “higher sciences” which were handwaved by Ahmad & Rasheed in their article. Indeed, this is where we find our answer.