References
Even today, the city is often referred to affectionately as Baldat al-Ṣiddīq (the City of the Truthful One) as an homage to Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq.
The term “tradition” is used throughout in a sense close to Alasdair MacIntyre’s, as neither a static archive nor merely a sociological phenomenon, but a historically extended argument about the goods and ends that constitute a way of life, and which develops precisely through internal contestation and through encounters with rival traditions. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), esp. chap. 1; and After Virtue, 3rd ed. (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), chap. 15. More discussion ensues below.
I am purposely using the French mémoire here as it carries a richer semantic field than its English cognate. As a feminine noun, la mémoire, it denotes both the faculty and act of memory itself, individual and collective simultaneously. Henri Bergson, in his Matière et mémoire, distinguishes between mémoire pure—the spontaneous, image-based recollection of past events as they were lived—and mémoire habitude—the embodied, repeated memory that has been absorbed so deeply into the body that it resurfaces as disposition. I find the dual valence of mémoire here particularly illuminating, especially given that the founding narrative of Tarīm partakes of both insofar as it is recalled as a living image (mémoire pure) and transmitted through a community of practice whose very habits and orientations it helps constitute (mémoire habitude). Hence my underlying argument that the tradition therein preserves itself via mémoire signals a depth of meaning and knowledge. See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (Zone Books, 1988).
Tahera Qutbuddin, Arabic Oration: Art and Function (Brill, 2019).
See, for example, Jessica M. Marglin, “Written and Oral in Islamic Law: Documentary Evidence and Non-Muslims in Moroccan Shariʿa Courts” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, no. 4 (2017): 884–911.
Qutbuddin, Arabic Oration. Cf. also Eva Mroczek, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2016). Mroczek argues that the concept of the “book” as a closed, authoritative, bounded unit is a distinctly modern projection onto ancient textual culture; premodern writers operated with a far more fluid literary imagination in which texts were not fixed objects but living, expansive formations. Mutatis mutandis, the same caveat applies to much of early Islamic transmission in which the fluidity of oral and written channels is not a deficiency measured against some imagined original fixity, since the very standard of fixity is itself historically conditioned. (The Qur’an is of course a significant exception; its canonical text was established under the third caliph ʿUthmān, and the subsequent insistence on precise preservation through tawātur reflects a deliberate and theologically grounded commitment to textual immutability and aural fidelity, and shaped the broader Islamic epistemological culture of rigorous transmission.)
This phrase also means, in essence, “A man is bound by his word.” In tribal custom, a man’s word (kalima) is tantamount to a pledge and often equivalent to an oath. He essentially binds himself to do what he states. One’s honor, integrity, trustworthiness, and social standing rest heavily on whether one upholds what they promise, and breaking one’s word could damage an individual’s reputation as well as that of their lineage or tribe. This has parallels to the Islamic principle of ʿadāla, where being true to one’s word (ṣidq, wafāʾ bi-l-ʿahd) becomes a condition of legal credibility and moral uprightness.
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Routledge, 1982).
Jonathan A. C. Brown, Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, 2nd ed. (Oneworld, 2017), 75–110.
To assume therefore that the oral origins of late antique Islamic sources undermine their reliability is mistaken; and oral transmission, as the primary medium of preservation, should not be regarded per se as inherently less dependable than written transmission, especially given the prevalence of scribal errors and the challenges of textual preservation. This is all the more important to consider in the modern world.
The Qur’an itself underscores these concerns: It warns against interpolations into scripture, condemns the fabrication of claims about God as a grave sin, and forbids slander and falsehood. Consider how it treats the exact number of the Companions of the Cave as theologically irrelevant, decentering the question of their number. After rehearsing rival guesses—three, five, seven—it concludes: “Say: My Lord knows best their number; only a few know it. So do not argue about them except with evident argument, and do not consult any of them concerning them” (Qur’an 18:22). The very next counsel—“Do not say of anything, ‘I will do that tomorrow,’ except [by saying] in shāʾ Allāh” (Qur’an 18:23–24)—redirects attention from antiquarian curiosity to dependence on God. Theologically, no doctrine turns on whether they were three or seven; the narrative’s point is moral and eschatological: steadfastness, divine protection, the sign of resurrection. Methodologically, the passage models epistemic humility and warns against polemics over indeterminate details—guidance that later scholars echoed in resisting the elevation of such marginalia into matters of creed.
On this reading, the isnād-cum-matn method is not merely a pious ornament but a historically structured system of knowledge. See, Harald Motzki, “Dating Muslim Traditions: A Survey,” Arabica 52, no. 2 (2005): 204–53; see also Harald Motzki, “The Question of the Authenticity of Muslim Traditions Reconsidered: A Review Article,” in Method and Theory in the Study of Islamic Origins, ed. Harald Berg (Brill, 2003), 211–57.
I have deliberately chosen to use lowercase for western and eastern throughout this essay in an effort to avoid essentialisms or insinuations that west or east mean one singular thing. This essay, in its own way, seeks to complicate such discourse.
It is worth noting, of course, that the muḥaddithūn themselves had long been aware of precisely these structural features of the isnād; what Motzki’s external analysis supplies is not a correction of their conclusions but a corroboration of them from within a different methodological framework. For an account of how classical scholars theorized the epistemological weight of isnād chains, see M. M. Azami, Studies in Hadith Methodology and Literature (Islamic Teaching Center, 1977).
While my main focus will be on the scholarly tradition and probing the diverse epistemologies therein, I also allude to the import of cultural sensibilities and the myriad social forces that either act upon it, or work in tandem with it.
I will have more to say about lifeworlds below; but briefly, “lifeworld” denotes the pretheoretical horizon of meaning within which experience and action are embedded—the worlds of meaning, cultural and spiritual, from which each tradition draws its orienting force.
Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, al-Musnad, ed. Shuʿayb al-Arnāʾūṭ et al. (Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 1999–2013), 2:199, no. 6872.
In the Sunni madhāhib, killing bees is haram as a general rule, because the Prophet ﷺ forbade killing them. An exception is made if there is real harm and no reasonable alternative (e.g., a person is at risk and relocation or driving them away has failed); then killing is permitted to the extent of the necessity, though one should avoid burning or cruel methods. If removal is possible—calling a beekeeper, relocating the hive, smoking them out without burning them, sealing entry points—those options are preferred. This is derived from the hadith:
For more on embodied knowledge, see the section “Against the Bird’s-Eye View.”
Al-Bayhaqī preserves a chapter on al-Shāfiʿī’s strong censure of ahl al-kalām in Manāqib al-Shāfiʿī, where multiple reports warn against engaging in kalām and shun its partisans. This is the locus commonly cited for statements like “whoever engages in kalām will not prosper” and the famous hyperbolic reprimands directed at ahl al-kalām. See Abū Bakr Aḥmad b. al-Ḥusayn al-Bayhaqī, Manāqib al-Imām al-Shāfiʿī, 2 vols. (Dār al-Tawfīq, 2011), 1:469–76, “Bāb mā jāʾa ʿan al-Shāfiʿī fī mujānabat ahl al-ahwāʾ… wa-dhamm kalāmihim.” For a modern scholarship and an academic critique of madrasa pedagogy, see Ebrahim Moosa, What Is a Madrasa? (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), esp. chaps. 2–4 on pedagogy, canon, and the limits of critical inquiry.
It should be noted here that the mutakallimūn, unsurprisingly, didn’t accept al-Shāfiʿī’s blanket censure of “kalām.” They reframe the censure and read al-Shāfiʿī as condemning blameworthy kalām—polemic that breeds doubt—not the disciplined, defensive theology used to protect creed. Ibn ʿAsākir says this explicitly when defending Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī and the Sunni theologians; see Abū al-Qāsim Ibn ʿAsākir, Tabyīn kadhib al-muftarī fīmā nusiba ilā al-Imām Abī al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī (al-Maktaba al-Azhariyya li-l-Turāth, 2000), esp. the sections defending Ashʿarī and reinterpreting anti-kalām reports from early imams. In the tradition I later studied, al-Sanūsī especially, holds a different view, namely that kalām is necessary. In his Sharḥ al-Sanūsiyya al-kubrā, he argues that denying kalām would effectively nullify those revelatory commands, since “kalām is their exposition,” and he classifies advanced kalām as a farḍ kifāya for qualified scholars. See Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-Sanūsī, ʿUmdat ahl al-tawfīq wa-l-tasdīd fī sharḥ ʿaqīdat ahl al-tawḥīd (al-kubrā) (Maṭbaʿat Jarīdat al-Islām, 1317/1899), where his position can be found in the introductory discussion on the definition and ruling of ʿilm al-kalām.
Kalām, to be sure, does exist elsewhere in Yemen, particularly in the highlands of and around Ṣanʿāʾ and Ṣaʿda, albeit primarily among the Zaydīs in the form of a Basran Muʿtazilism.
The Maghreb, Turkey, and Damascus being a few notable exceptions. See Khaled El-Rouayheb, Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb (Cambridge University Press, 2015). El-Rouayheb masterfully rebuts older claims of stagnation and provincialism with case studies of scholars, curricula, and cross-regional networks, focusing primarily on the practice of verification (taḥqīq) via dialectical argument and close readings across logic, kalām, and other rational sciences.
Ibn Taymiyya essentially argues that the Aristotelian categorical syllogism (qiyās al-shumūl) has no epistemic advantage over qiyās al-tamthīl (analogical/representative inference). In practice, both rest on induction (istiqrāʾ) and experience; the major premise of a syllogism is itself a generalized analogy distilled from particulars.
That is, mass testimony by so many independent chains that concerted error or fabrication is deemed impossible; hence it yields certain (qaṭʿī) knowledge.
Ibn Taymiyya, al-Radd ʿalā al-manṭiqiyyīn (var. Arab. eds.); Eng. trans.: Against the Greek Logicians, trans. Wael B. Hallaq (Clarendon Press, 1993), passim on the equivalence of syllogism and analogy, the dependence of both on induction, and the critique of abstract universals.
Sherman A. Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering (Oxford University Press, 2009), see esp. chap. 1, and his discussion in the section “Muḥammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfiʿī and the Arabian vs. the Arab Regime of Sense.”
See Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, al-Mustaṣfā min ʿilm al-uṣūl, ed. Ḥamza b. Zuhayr Ḥāfiẓ, 4 vols. (Ḥ.B.Z. Ḥāfiẓ/Sharikat al-Madīna al-Munawwara li-l-Ṭibāʿa, 1413/1993), 1:30–39, esp. on the four “poles” of uṣūl and the mujtahid’s ẓann, and of the logical prolegomenon on ḥadd, taṣdīq, and burhān.
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Tahāfut al-falāsifa, ed. Sulaymān Dunyā (Dār al-Maʿārif, 1955), 68–73.
Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology (Oxford University Press, 2009), 55–92.
On the idea that traditions are constituted through ongoing argument rather than static inheritance, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), where he argues that traditions develop through epistemological crisis, rational conflict with rival traditions, and, at times, the incorporation of insights from those rivals. The Ghazālian synthesis is a close analogue of what MacIntyre calls a tradition’s “epistemological crisis” resolved through creative appropriation rather than simple rejection.
Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, al-Mabāḥith al-Mashriqiyya fī ʿIlm al-Ilāhiyyāt wa-l-Ṭabīʿiyyāt, ed. Muḥammad al-Muʿtaṣim bi-llāh al-Baghdādī, 2 vols. (Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1990); and al-Muḥaṣṣal: Wa-huwa muḥaṣṣal afkār al-mutaqaddimīn wa-l-mutaʾakhkhirīn min al-ḥukamāʾ wa-l-mutakallimīn, ed. Ḥusayn Atāy (Maktabat Dār al-Turāth, 1411/1991). Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, like Ghazālī before him, is also known for his philosophically inflected uṣūl that includes extensive preliminaries on language, semantics, and logic; see al-Maḥṣūl fī ʿilm al-uṣūl, ed. Ṭāhā Jābir al-ʿAlwānī, 6 vols. (Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 1992).
Khaled El-Rouayheb, The Development of Arabic Logic (1200–1800) (Schwabe Verlag, 2019). El-Rouayheb documents how, by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—especially from Ghazālī and Rāzī onward—logic had become central to madrasa curricula and theological method, suggesting a pivotal methodological transformation.
By “grammars of credibility,” I mean the structured systems of assumption, argument, and authority through which a given intellectual community determines what counts as a convincing claim—the implicit rules governing what can be said, to whom, and with what force. The phrase captures the idea that credibility is not a brute fact but is produced and sustained within particular discursive frameworks.
Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” Occasional Papers Series, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1986.
Michael Jackson, Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Cf. habitus in Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge University Press, 1977).
On the significance of embodied tradition, see Rudolph T. Ware III, The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
In fairness to the first claim, one could argue that Socrates is precisely trying to recover the practical grounding of ethics rather than abandoning it, and that the dialogue’s aporetic ending is a critique of unreflective piety rather than a departure from practical wisdom. It should likewise be acknowledged that debates about the origin and nature of the good are hardly absent from the Islamic tradition—the long dispute between Muʿtazilites and Ashʿarīs on whether the good is rationally knowable or divinely determined attests to this amply. The point, however, is that neither tradition, at its best, severs the pursuit of wisdom from its practical and ethical ends.
Michael Jackson, Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry (Indiana University Press, 1989).
Cf. Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd ed. (Continuum, 2004), 269–74.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 52–65.
On the immanent frame in particular, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), esp. chap. 15.
The focus on philology here is also a practical one. Many Muslims who receive traditional training subsequently pursue graduate study in NELC or cognate departments where philological assumptions remain dominant, even where they are no longer theoretically foregrounded. It is worth noting, moreover, that the classical philological challenges to the Islamic tradition—questions of textual emendation, scribal variants, source stemmatics—remain among the more substantive intellectual difficulties a traditionally trained Muslim is likely to encounter in the academy. Derridean deconstruction, for all its influence, is more easily held at arm’s length; the question of whether a given manuscript reading is “original” is often harder to dismiss, and deserves the kind of serious, informed engagement that this essay encourages.
The diagnosis of a loss of adab at the heart of modern western thought, as well as a confusion of hierarchy, finds one of its most sustained expressions from within the Islamic tradition in the work of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, whose concept of taʾdīb—the disciplined formation of the self in accordance with right order, binding knowledge to character and character to its proper end—offers a direct counterpoint to the fragmentation I describe here. Al-Attas argues that the crisis of modern knowledge is not primarily methodological but ontological: Having severed the connection between knowledge and its proper grounding in the divine, western education produces a knower who is technically proficient but existentially adrift. See Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Islam and Secularism (Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia, 1978) and The Concept of Education in Islam (Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia, 1980).
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). MacIntyre also argues that modern ethics has become fragmented precisely because it lost its teleological grounding in a shared conception of the good. Nietzsche anticipates this diagnosis from a rather different direction. In The Gay Science, the figure of the madman who proclaims the death of God is misread by many as a theological statement, but in fact it is more accurately an epistemological one by which, without the metaphysical horizon that once made values legible, the pursuit of truth loses its justification. As he puts it elsewhere in Twilight of the Idols, it was Socrates—with his privileging of theoretical reason over instinct and practice—who set western thought on the path toward this severance.
Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) adds a further dimension to this point. Barrett argues that emotions are not fixed, hardwired biological responses but constructed episodes, shaped by concepts, prior experience, and context. If even moral feeling depends in part on such constructive processes, then the distance between knowing and acting compassionately may be greater than standard philosophical accounts allow—thus sharpening the need for an orienting framework that bridges cognition and action, of the kind the Islamic tradition provides through niyya, which I discuss subsequently.
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, 4 vols. (Dār al-Maʿrifa, n.d.), see esp., “Kitāb al-niyya wa-l-ikhlāṣ wa-l-ṣidq” (Book on Intention, Sincerity, and Truthfulness).
Contrast this with the discipline and discourse of “philosophy of religion,” which is given pride of place in philosophy departments; as I have argued herein, despite its earliest origins as scripture-based, the kalām tradition, especially after Rāzī, ought to be taken more seriously as philosophical discourse.
Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); see also, Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2003). To translate a form of life on its own terms while also exposing how modern regimes (colonial administration, humanitarian law, rights discourse, laïcité, etc.) shape both that life and our analytic vocabulary.
I borrow the concept of a contrapuntal reading from Edward Said, who first developed it in his 1984 essay, “Reflections on Exile,” and developed it more fully in Culture and Imperialism. Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” Granta 13 (Autumn 1984): 159–72; Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (Alfred Knopf, 1993).
Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering.
Immanent critique denotes a mode of analysis that engages a tradition on its own terms, assessing its claims, practices, and institutions against the norms and standards internal to it rather than against criteria imported from outside. It asks not “Does this tradition meet the standards of liberal modernity?” but “To what extent is it faithful to its own constitutive commitments, and where does it fall into tension with them?” The term has Hegelian and Frankfurt School resonances, though I employ it here in a broader methodological and hermeneutical sense.
For an explicit example of the latter, see below. Though this approach is largely absent in western scholarship, it is not entirely so; two of my own teachers, Michael Puett and Cornel West, treat ethics as a matter of formation rather than mere choice, each articulating, respectively, the relational responsiveness of Confucian thought and the paideia of the Greek tradition.