Covenant_watch on Nostr: Thoughts on Azmeh's "Allah and His People," rereading, intro-thoughts: prior to ...
Thoughts on Azmeh's "Allah and His People," rereading, intro-thoughts: prior to chapters,
"The category of Paleo-Islam is designed
to denominate a historical category bounded in space and in time, with time accelerated and space rapidly dilated."
Islamic "Big Bangism" has always come across as a exceedingly encumbering artifact the traditional sciences imposes on the contemporary exercise of Islamic Archive-mining. It developed for good reason of course. The fiction of "emergent-Islam-in-Tabula-Rasa" allows the primary mandate of the clerical class to operate in an environment amenable to arguing orthopraxy and orthodoxy without unhelpful "noise." The limits that prevented medieval scholars from gleaning beyond low-resolution images of antiquity naturally make any notion of their contrasting Islamic scripture to Syriac and Byzantine Christianity, for instance, moot.
Developed methods and epistemologies, however, despoil the anxious assertion that we ought still operate without that body of evidence. I understand that Muslims shy away from the enterprise, given, aside from what it may invite of uncomfortable evidences, its aIslamic origins. But, I would suggest that there's much there to buttress the faith if, in inviting said body of evidence, we did so with a prior that offers the consensus of our tradition epistemological priority, supra-rationally conceived/argued though that may be, and an elevated sense of history-openness.
"The category of Paleo-Islam is designed
to denominate a historical category bounded in space and in time, with time accelerated and space rapidly dilated."
Islamic "Big Bangism" has always come across as a exceedingly encumbering artifact the traditional sciences imposes on the contemporary exercise of Islamic Archive-mining. It developed for good reason of course. The fiction of "emergent-Islam-in-Tabula-Rasa" allows the primary mandate of the clerical class to operate in an environment amenable to arguing orthopraxy and orthodoxy without unhelpful "noise." The limits that prevented medieval scholars from gleaning beyond low-resolution images of antiquity naturally make any notion of their contrasting Islamic scripture to Syriac and Byzantine Christianity, for instance, moot.
Developed methods and epistemologies, however, despoil the anxious assertion that we ought still operate without that body of evidence. I understand that Muslims shy away from the enterprise, given, aside from what it may invite of uncomfortable evidences, its aIslamic origins. But, I would suggest that there's much there to buttress the faith if, in inviting said body of evidence, we did so with a prior that offers the consensus of our tradition epistemological priority, supra-rationally conceived/argued though that may be, and an elevated sense of history-openness.