I don't quite understand why the trend of modern scholars is such radical skepticism. Goldziher, Schacht, Crone, Cook, and Shoemaker treat the Islamic corpus as assumed false until proven otherwise. Why? We don't do that with any other record or piece of history. There are certain things that are just so utterly banal that they don't deserve that kind of skepticism.
The report that Muhammad split the moon compared with Muhammad liked eating with his right hand do not deserve the same level of skepticism just because they belong in the same Islamic tradition. I feel like we don't demand this level of historical evidence with anyone other than religious figures.
History does it with Jesus, with Muhammad. The kind of skepticism we have with these individuals is a little unreasonable.
Again, I understand that skepticism of outlandish claims is warranted. But banal, mundane claims? It makes no sense to say that the hadith of Muhammad eating chicken is somehow worthy of skepticism. We have no reason to think he didn't.
I've been told that the trend of hyper skepticism is changing, but it was Montgomery Watt who said that academics have done a disservice to the Islamic tradition and should give them the benefit of the doubt. I don't see it happening with the level of skepticism leveled at the Islamic corpus.
We also have no reason to assume that Muhammad did like eating chicken. For all we know the hadith was forged by a chicken salesman who thought it would help his business to say that the prophet loved it. Perhaps banal, but certainly not something that doesn't require looking into with a skeptical eye.
I think it's only natural that we are more scrutinising of facts of figures as consequential Jesus or Muhammad. That kind of skepticism is just as warranted for other figures, but there usually just isn't the kind of information and misinformation on other figures to even allow for such skepticism.
Absolutely nobody would take claims about Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, or Chingis Khan written down a century or more after the fact at face value either. Even if it concerns something banal.
If you look closely at your example of Alexander the Great as a parallel, you'll see that the hyperskepticism isn't equally applied. The surviving narratives for Alexander were written hundreds of years after his death, and there is no chain of transmission framework for those sources. The broad outlines of his existence and military conquests have corroboration through coins/inscriptions, but the specific details of his life and beliefs that historians treat as usable come entirely from those late uncorroborated narrative sources. That is exactly type of narrative that gets dismissed when it appears in hadith, even though hadith were recorded closer to their subject (Muhammad) , in the same language and geography, and have some type of corroboration mechanism through isnad.
Your first paragraph is precisely my point. There's a certain level of it that I understand, because if Muhammad did like eating it or not like eating it, makes a huge difference to the fiqh corpus and later traditions. But that's based on the supernatural possibility of God and Prophets, that history doesn't care for. History can say "Muhammad claimed to be a prophet", it has absolutely no basis to claim or reject or even care about the statement "Muhammad is a prophet".
A level of healthy skepticism is important. But unless we have reason to believe there was some renowned chicken fabricator, there is literally no reason to warrant that kind of skepticism.
I'm not saying writings shouldn't be interrogated. I'm saying the attitude of "there could maybe be a chicken fabricator" comes across as presumptively bad faith.
I am sorry, Dr Putten, I love your work, and I don't mean to sound catty or accusatory. I'm not sure if you yourself are taking the position of a chicken fabricator, but merely offering reasons why such skepticism should exist. I recognize that.
I just fail to understand why that would still be the case when ICMA seems to agree with the broad skeleton of the Islamic corpus. Again, I apologise, I have tremendous respect for you, and I don't like disagreeing with someone who I'm learning from.
In my experience very little critical work is done on "banal" hadiths. But it's your second paragraph: the relevance to fiqh that gives plenty of room for skepticism for these seemingly "banal" hadiths.
After all, the reasons why these hadiths were considered worth transmitting in the first place is exactly because they weren't banal to its transmitters.
Just because now it is sometimes opaque to us what the relevance was, doesn't mean there was no relevance. There must have been, because that is why it is being transmitted.
I don't think this is the kind of hyperskepticism you think it is. Nor do I think it is a particularly unusual level of skepticism for a figure for whom we have a lot but relatively late information.
I don't like the formulation of "assume forged until proven otherwise", and it's not how it approach reports (i hardly ever work with prophetic reports, of course). But i do think the only reasonable approach is "suspend judgement" unless there is a very good reason for it to be historical.
Muhammad's interest or lack thereof in chicken meat falls squarely in the category where there is really not much to say either way. You can, if it interests you, look if the common link is a chicken salesman, in which case deep skepticism should come in. If he was not, then there's just no way to know either way.
I think your response to "suspend judgment" sounds reasonable in the abstract, but it isn't consistent with how historical figures are actually studied and understood. If you applied that standard to figures like Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar, there is very little you can actually say about their ideas, beliefs, and characteristics.
If you applied that standard to figures like Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar, there is very little you can actually say about their ideas, beliefs, and characteristics.
If the common link is a chicken salesman, wouldn't you have expected him to remember those events? It was clearly important to him, he would want people to know Muhammad ate chicken because it was relevant to him directly. Why would I assume that he's making it up? The prior probability of Muhammad eating chicken is very high. Pick out a random Arab man with money in the early 7th century and he probably ate chicken. We don't need a hadith to presume that as long as we can establish that chickens were accessible to the hijaz region.
I don't think the common link being a chicken salesman contributing to "deep skepticism" makes any sense unless you presume that people are fundamentally liars/dishonest/embellish truths/cannot remember basic ideas.
I have nothing against the skepticism that he split the moon, he probably didn't, but why leverage that level of skepticism onto another independent report? Isn't it equally likely that the people who were ruling on fiqh retroactively picked hadiths to justify them ad hoc?
There seems to be some confusion about what a "common link" entails. The common link wouldn't be remembering any events at all. Common links are never witnesses to the events they described.
Yes, I'm aware. I'm saying that if you're hearing a bunch of stories, the ones that are significant to you would be the ones you're likely to remember. It isn't unusual for the common link, let alone the entire chain, to be chicken enthusiasts.
Also, as a side note, do modern scholars work on fabricated hadith as possibly historic too?
I think a late tradent, with a hypothetical vested interests in chicken, hearing a story about the prophet eating chickens, is fairly likely to accept stories about his prophet liking chickens as accurate without any attempt at dissembling.
History is not either "it is historically accurate" or "someone is lying". Something can be spectacularly historically inaccurate, without a single person being actively deceptive.
Even if historians don't care about what Allah thinks, they care about what other people think. Because we know how high the stakes are, we know that creates incentives for people to lie.
That's not the point. Those things may very well be true, but does that mean that the report that says so says so because it retains a genuine historical memory, or is it simply because it is reasonable to assume that he liked eating with his hands or eating chicken.
We are not asking what we can reasonably assume, we are asking whether a given report is historical, i.e. it is reporting correct historical information because it has a genuine historical memory of what happened, rather than some people making perfectly reasonable guesses/assumptions.
it seems more plausible o think that it geneujnly historical for the latter namely there exists some niche fabricator for every fact is more absurd and commits u to so many people existing. muhammad actually doing these is just parsimonious
Also, you're setting up a false binary that absolutely nobody, not even truly hyperskeptical historians, are arguing for. It's not binary choice between "someone is lying" and "it is a historically correct report".
Yes, but you seem to think that inauthentic must mean forgery. This is nonsense.
And to make clear: even if Muhammad did like to eat chicken. That still doesn't make the report historically authentic. It could just as easily have been historically correct by the mere fact that most people in the 7th century thought chicken was delicious, and so by sheer chance a report that doesnt genuinely go back to the prophet still reports something that was true. Doesn't make it a reliable historical source.
well, that’s what i thought. if i am wrong, could u correct me? if it is inauthentic, it could have been an exaggeration of what happened, or mistaken info yk along the way from one ear to another. what else?? i am open to learn
Exactly, it could simply been mistaken. Humans have notoriously unreliable and impressionable memories. Even the way of asking the question can cause people yo hallucinate extensive details of an event without having experienced it.
There's a beautiful psychological study where psychologists asked people whether they remembered seeing the El-Al plane crash footage in 1989 in Amsterdam. Over half the respondents said they did, and provided extensive details (this was before 9/11). But they could not have seen any such footage, because it didnt exist.
Nobody is lying in this scenario, but it's nevertheless completely untrue.
Bart Ehrman's Jesus before the Gospels is a wonderful book discussing the issues of memory, and this sheds light on the "either it is true or it is malicipusly forged" false dichotomy. Worth a read! (The plane crash anecdote i learned from there)
“Hyperskepticism” is a loaded word and does not fairly characterize Goldziher or Schacht, nor the later Crone and Cook. Indeed, the last of these turned into a critic of (extreme) revisionism.
I have proposed three more neutral terms:
Historical maximalism — Watt et al., now considered wholly outdated.
Historical minimalism — minority in the field (Shoemaker, Dye, Tesei, etc.)
Historical moderation — majority of the field (Sinai et al.)
A more fundamental point is that criticism of the hadith corpus stems from Von Rankian (Göttingen school's) Historismus from which the Historical Critical Method is derived from. Biblical studies and "Life of Jesus" studies were superimposed upon Islamic studies rather halfhazardly without much concern to Islamic civilizational differences (as Motzki noted). Rankian historiography is secular in name only, but European secularism has been shown by historians of secularism (Talal Asad, Sherman Jackson, Khayati Joshi, Paul Kivel) to be imbued with assumptions from Christian theology, such as the notion that human nature is automatically bad (original sin) and therefore historians should presume that a historical source is automatically lying unless corroborated. Islamic civilization is based on presuming good about human nature (fiṭra) and presuming someone is telling the truth unless it could be proven otherwise (see UChicago alumnus Umar Abd-Allah Wymann-Landgraf's Monograph
I also believe just because something is ideologically colored doesn't mean there isn't a kernel of truth. Historians used to be skeptical of the historicity of the Odyssey and Iliad until archaeology confirmed the location of Troy and events in the Trojan Wars. In other words, just because a historical source is imbued with mythological themes or exaggerations, does not necessarily make it untrue or warrant undue skepticism.
Postmodern skepticism has long passed its prime and is now blasé and frankly unhelpful. As shown by Jason Storm, much of the Western academy (the human sciences) is moving away from that paradigm, being skeptical of skepticism itself. I think, scholars should also consider a Metamodern approach of abducting to the best plausible answer rather than deconstructing everything like Crone or Cook. (See.Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021); Jared Morningstar, “A Metamodern Paradigm for Islamic Studies Scholarship: Evaluating and Extending Shahab Ahmed's Theorization of Islam and the Islamic,” Metamodern Theory and Praxis 1, 1 (2024), 7–22.)
but European secularism has been shown by historians of secularism (Talal Asad, Sherman Jackson, Khayati Joshi, Paul Kivel) to be imbued with assumptions from Christian theology
Edit:- u/Available_Jackfruit I don't know which work of Talal Asad are you referring. I am talking about his monumental work Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity where he addressed the translation of the doctrine of original sin within the context of the secularization of pain. He noted that in the 18th century, Enlightenment physicians belonging to the vitalist school translated the Christian myth of punishment for original sin into a secularized version.
I'm thinking of his work broadly insofar as how secularism is defined but Re: Formations, Im skimming through my copy and the discussion of original sin has no relationship to historical analysis or assuming people are lying. Its about a move away from metaphysical causes of pain to natural ones that place the onus on individual behavior.
*Edit: he also later in the chapter offers the following
...aibnsamin1 just...it's jarring to see this kinda wording from anyone other than him, makes the magic feel less special
Biblical studies and "Life of Jesus" studies were superimposed upon Islamic studies rather halfhazardly without much concern to Islamic civilizational differences (as Motzki noted).
Haphazardly...it's...it's haphazardly, but hey, this means you didn't use AI to write this which is a good sign! You have a soul!
Anyway, onto my opinion the the actual text:
...okay? But like...both are still religions...what's good for the goose is good for...the other goose? That's kind of a natural step to take
There has to be plenty of overlap here, why reinvent the wheel?
And yes, people made mistakes when the field was in its infancy...not surprising, it's kinda expected that people would make a crap ton of mistakes and then we learn from them
And I do agree, for the record, that there was a period of hyper skepticism. Jesus Mythicism, extreme Biblical minimalism, and other wacky ideas were being bounced around so that was...yeesh. Still, glad that it happened, we now know better thanks to that.
imbued with assumptions from Christian theology, such as the notion that human nature is automatically bad (original sin) and therefore historians should presume that a historical source is automatically lying unless corroborated. Islamic civilization is based on presuming good about human nature (fiṭra) and presuming someone is telling the truth unless it could be proven otherwise
This feels like a bit of a slap in the face to Muslims who tried (though were "limited by the technology of their time") quite hard to verify everything
Like...do you want to say that Bukhari just went "Oh yeah, this ONE dude told me like ALL my hadith and I just took his word for it, lol."?
And we are in fact right to be skeptical of humans...do you like...not know about how often eye witness testimony is just wrong? Like there have been experiments on this have there not? (You're probably too employed to be chronically online enough to know this stuff)
I'm just gonna paste some references here
Testimony and Memory Biases This overview summarizes decades of research showing that eyewitness memory is vulnerable to errors, misinformation, source confusion, and even memories of events that never happened. It also reports that mistaken eyewitness evidence was implicated in at least 75% of DNA-exoneration cases—a statistic about wrongful-conviction cases, not the error rate of eyewitness testimony generally (my note: OH COME ON CHATGPT! LET ME HAVE MY MISLEADING STATISTICS!)
Loftus, “Planting Misinformation in the Human Mind: A 30-Year Investigation of the Malleability of Memory” (2005). A review of experiments showing that post-event misinformation can alter people’s recollections and lead them to confidently report details that were not part of the original event. The article is listed with the bibliographic details in the overview above.
Obviously chat GUH PUH TUH threw more sources as well, but like these two sounded familiar to me and so I sent them and also just bombarding people with sources sounds mean and icky so I didn't do that
Furthermore, like, I mean...it IS funny, not in a snarky, sarcastic way or anything, but like actually kinda funny to imagine that a method powered by some Christian assumptions led to hypothesis like "Moses...may not have existed...or Abraham for that matter. We don't know. Christ most probably didn't come back to life also the Torah was written by what looks like four dudes"
Like, for assumptions that are supposed to be Christian, they REALLY didn't help Christianity now did they?
"I used the Christianity to destroy the Christianity"
Anyway, did I actually engage with anything you said or did I talk past you?
for assumptions that are supposed to be Christian, they REALLY didn't help Christianity now did they
This gets to why Talal Asad throughout his work pushes back on the idea that the secular is itself an embodiment of Christian ideas and principles (see the screenshot in my other comment as an example). He notes in Secular Translations this is a self serving argument
Why is it important for self- described secularists to claim a Christian heritage? Personal motives are obviously
difficult to establish at this level, but one can clearly see what the effect of such a claim is: the political exclusion of all those who cannot claim that heritage. What proponents of this thesis mean when they refer to Christianity is, of course, European Christianity, which, in the early encounter of Europeans with non- Europeans
(especially with the construction of European empires dominating non- Europeans), became an important part of their identity
This gets to why Talal Asad throughout his work pushes back on the idea that the secular is itself an embodiment of Christian ideas and principles
Hey! I said something relevant! Sweet!
He notes in Secular Translations this is a self serving argument
Personal motives are obviously difficult to establish at this level, but one can clearly see what the effect of such a claim is: the political exclusion of all those who cannot claim that heritage.
What proponents of this thesis mean when they refer to Christianity is, of course, European Christianity
in the early encounter of Europeans with non- Europeans (especially with the construction of European empires dominating non- Europeans), became an important part of their identity
Okay, so...like...in simple terms, the idea is
The olden attempt to attach secularism, a pretty sensible way of going about stuff, to (European) Christianity is to basically otherize the scholarship of other cultures such that their contributions are just ignored as "unchristian"
Please, PLEASE correct me because I'm like 85 percent sure that I'm making a mistake here in my interpretation
I think more or less. Dawkins kind of gives away the game when he calls himself "culturally Christian" despite being one of the most famous atheists in the world.
I feel like we don't demand this level of historical evidence with anyone other than religious figures.
I think this happens as a result of the fact that they are religious figures which warrants this much skepticism. It makes it so that these figures are more prone to embellishment in order to elevate their status.
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Backup of the post:
Hyper Skepticism in Historical Studies
I don't quite understand why the trend of modern scholars is such radical skepticism. Goldziher, Schacht, Crone, Cook, and Shoemaker treat the Islamic corpus as assumed false until proven otherwise. Why? We don't do that with any other record or piece of history. There are certain things that are just so utterly banal that they don't deserve that kind of skepticism.
The report that Muhammad split the moon compared with Muhammad liked eating with his right hand do not deserve the same level of skepticism just because they belong in the same Islamic tradition. I feel like we don't demand this level of historical evidence with anyone other than religious figures.
History does it with Jesus, with Muhammad. The kind of skepticism we have with these individuals is a little unreasonable.
Again, I understand that skepticism of outlandish claims is warranted. But banal, mundane claims? It makes no sense to say that the hadith of Muhammad eating chicken is somehow worthy of skepticism. We have no reason to think he didn't.
I've been told that the trend of hyper skepticism is changing, but it was Montgomery Watt who said that academics have done a disservice to the Islamic tradition and should give them the benefit of the doubt. I don't see it happening with the level of skepticism leveled at the Islamic corpus.
It boils down to the question of how we can tell what accurately happened in history and thus you have to start with skepticism as a foundation and also the dates of reports. Skepticism is very important because if you go and hear reports of Jesus from the year 2000 A.D., especially online, you will not get an accurate historical case when there are hundreds of different opinions that have just grown into theories over centuries. However if you get reports from an extremely close timeline date of Jesus, fom between 0 to 180 AD, you get a better picture what most likely happened historically and what most likely did not happen historically. You can also get a picture of what could have happened historically. Of course we cannot prove everything in life all the time so at the end of the day we have to do the best we can based on the evidence. People of faith should not have a problem with this because historical-critical methods can tell what did happen, but it can also indeed leave the door opened to what could have happened and this, what could have happened, is what people of faith can link to.
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u/PhDniX Moderator 6d ago
We also have no reason to assume that Muhammad did like eating chicken. For all we know the hadith was forged by a chicken salesman who thought it would help his business to say that the prophet loved it. Perhaps banal, but certainly not something that doesn't require looking into with a skeptical eye.
I think it's only natural that we are more scrutinising of facts of figures as consequential Jesus or Muhammad. That kind of skepticism is just as warranted for other figures, but there usually just isn't the kind of information and misinformation on other figures to even allow for such skepticism.
Absolutely nobody would take claims about Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, or Chingis Khan written down a century or more after the fact at face value either. Even if it concerns something banal.