Massoud Vahedi

"The central tension in Islamic intellectual history is NOT reason versus revelation. It is NOT rationalism versus traditionalism. All schools of thought – the Hanbalis, the Ash'aris, the Maturidis, and the Mu'tazilah – use reason. Even the ḥadīth scholars use reason: to evaluate the authenticity of a ḥadīth, they use rational methods to study the biographies of transmitters, to identify contradictions, and to determine the reliability of chains of transmission. The real differences lie in three areas: (1) how reason is conceptualized, (2) what methods of reasoning are employed, and (3) where the limits of reason are placed relative to revelation. The debate is about competing versions of rationality, not about rationality versus irrationality." - Dr. Ermin Sinanovic (with some changes)

"...in the madhhab-law tradition, ‘precedent’ is not judicial but juristic. It is the weight not of past court decisions, but of previous juristic opinions, delivered by scholar-jurists, that bind those who follow them: any other person, jurist or layman, whose learning and standing in the madhhab-guild does not equal theirs. On any human act—fiqh, in Muslim schemas of disciplines, being that science that treats human acts—there may be a great number of opinions delivered by scholars associated with a given madhhab. Each of these opinions is verified, preserved, and analysed in the social forums of the madhhabs: in ‘academic’ debates taking place in classroom and in salons, to be sure, but more importantly, and permanently, in the books of fiqh, where commentary especially afforded jurists removed by both time and space the ability to engage with one another.... The forum in which rule-determination occurred in the madhhab-law tradition was neither the court room nor the legislative body, but rather juristic writings. It was in legal compendia, commentaries, super-commentaries, and other discursive genres that jurists posited or argued for the preeminence of one legal opinion over all the others generated and transmitted by the jurists associated with a given madhhab. Until the appearance of the Majalla as part of Ottoman modernising reforms during the nineteenth century, there was no ‘code’ to which inexperienced jurists, judges, or muftis could turn in order to learn the legal rule to be applied in a given case or issue. Rather, master jurists engaged with their equals, often over a remove of hundreds of years, in different genres of legal writing, most important of which for rule-determination were the legal compendium (mukhtaṣar) and the commentary (sharḥ, and ḥāshiya for super-commentaries)." - Dr. Talal al-Azem

The contemporary Hanbali scholar Muhammad ʿAbd al-Latif al-Subki maintained that the disagreement between proponents and opponents of the existence of majāz in the Qurʾān constitutes a semantical - and not a genuine - dispute.

The "Understanding the Quranic Readings (Qira’at)" course appears to have been taken down from the site.

Facebook timeline right now: Post #1: Early Muslims only cared about preserving the Qur'an — the Sunnah came later. Post #2: Early Muslims cared too much about the Sunnah — even putting it over the Qur'an. Post #3: Wait, forget about the Sunnah… did they even preserve the Qur'an properly word-for-word in the first place? Me, looking at these theories:

"[Yasir] Qadhi’s model encompasses three distinct types of human-origin variants: synonymic substitutions made by Companions under the aḥruf concession, word variations produced by memory lapse (which he identifies as a feature of the concession, citing the case of Hishām ibn Ḥakīm as a new convert, p. 225), and ijtihad by grammarians and reciters of the first two centuries in vocalizing the Uthmanic skeletal script. He describes the last category as “an extremely narrow field of ijtihād“ but acknowledges it is operative. [Sohaib] Saeed’s formulation is softer — he does not attribute variants to memory lapses and retains the three classical conditions for a valid reading as genuine gatekeeping criteria — but the operative claim is the same: words a human produced from himself can acquire the status of divinely revealed Quran through a sufficient authorization framework. 'We sent down the Reminder and We are its Guardian.' God is the guardian of the dhikr itself, not of a human scholarly effort to approximate it through careful selection and transmission. A model that grounds the preservation of the canonical recitations in a process that included human synonymic substitution, memory-lapse variants, or ijtihad-based decipherment of the skeletal script is in direct tension with this guarantee, because what is preserved under such a model is not the dhikr as sent down but a human approximation of it, however refined." https://joebradford.substack.com/p/what-the-quran-says-about-adding?r=g7n9x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true&utm_id=97758_v0_s00_e223_tv0&fbclid=IwY2xjawRXu_hleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETE4MmcwdHo0aEwxVHFsN2t0c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHlNUIDcB2uCpCgjpaM5bguTawmBQQ3uY9DcCnjyx-S8LeoULTnJBy9JKNu2x_aem_WwoNlZ6GIIsfsMQmOcgLrg

What usually happens when you try to research the authenticity of a hadith found in al-Suyuti's al-Jami' al-Saghir.

This is Shaykh Nadhar al-Faryabi (or al-Farayabi for Arabs), a hadith scholar from Afghanistan (Faryab) who is based in Saudi Arabia. He has written several works on the science of hadith, edited a number of commentaries (including Fath al-Bari), and has a tremendous library. Here the Shaykh is sharing one of his regrets: he wishes that he would write and record any point of benefit he came across when reading and researching during his younger years. When reading, we often come across subtle points of benefit or amazing facts, but we then fail to pen them down, which then causes us to forget them. We should always have a notebook or have a file reserved for the subtle benefits we come across.

“The term shubhah (specious doubt) earns its name because it engenders ambiguity and confusion (ishtibah). It is not a purely false claim, but contains an element of truth within it to confuse listeners.” - summarized from Dr. Muhammad Ghalib (with slight changes)

A frank assessment regarding the new "Understanding the Quranic Readings (Qira’at)" course.

استحالة رؤية النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم يقظة ( وهذا قول يدرك فساده بأوائل العقول، ويلزم عليه أن لا يراه أحد إلا على صورته التي مات عليها، وأن لا يراه رائيان في آن واحد في مكانين، وأن يحيا الآن، ويخرج من قبره، ويمشي في الأسواق، ويخاطب الناس ويخاطبوه، ويلزم من ذلك أن يخلو قبره من جسده، فلا يبقى في قبره منه شيء، فيزار مجرد القبر، ويسلم على غائب، لأنه جائز أن يرى في الليل والنهار مع اتصال الأوقات على حقيقته في غير قبره. وهذه جهالات لا يلتزم بها من له أدنى مسكة من عقل.) القرطبي https://t.me/hnblyl

When the Imam arranging the nikah enters the wedding hall early to finish the iijab and qabul but finds out the music and dancing has already started.

ChatGPT Overview This article seeks to relocate the central point of dispute in contemporary hadith studies. It is not primarily a rebuttal of a series of isolated conclusions in recent Western scholarship, nor is it a general apologetic for the inherited Muslim hadith-critical tradition. Rather, its aim is to argue that the most consequential issues arise at a prior level: namely, the historical and methodological assumptions that govern how hadith evidence is read before any particular analytical technique is applied. On this basis, the authors contend that Isnād-cum-Matn Analysis (ICMA), despite its apparent procedural sophistication, remains dependent upon a set of antecedent historiographical commitments. It is in this sense that the article argues that ICMA requires a “historical anchor”: the method cannot interpret the history of hadith transmission in a methodologically secure way unless the larger historical premises informing its use are themselves adequately grounded. A central contention of the article is that the disagreement between the traditional Muslim hadith-critical method and much of modern Western hadith scholarship is not best understood as a disagreement over technique alone. It is, more fundamentally, a disagreement over the broader historical framework within which the evidence is approached. The traditional hadith critic works within a cumulative and internally developed critical apparatus shaped by long engagement with transmission as a lived and scrutinised practice. That apparatus includes, among other things, transmitter classes, isnād analysis, al-jarḥ wa-l-taʿdīl, ʿilal criticism, comparison of variants, and detailed knowledge of the conditions, habits, and reliability of narrators, as well as the modes of audition and performance through which reports circulated. By contrast, many modern scholarly approaches begin with general hypotheses concerning lateness, growth, isnād retrojection, and the progressive expansion of prophetic attribution, and then interpret particular case studies within that pre-existing framework. The authors are careful not to suggest that the traditional method is devoid of assumptions; rather, their argument is that assumptions do not acquire epistemic authority simply by virtue of belonging to a modern critical paradigm. They must themselves be tested against the full range of hadith and historical evidence. Within this context, the article makes strategic use of Harald Motzki’s observations on historical method. The authors cite him in order to underline a point of broad methodological importance: that Schacht’s approach rests on “assumptions regarding the general development of Islamic legal thinking”; that “all dating methods must rely on assumptions derived from other sources”; and that the reliability of any dating procedure depends not only on the method itself but also upon the historian’s broader preconceptions regarding early Islam. These observations are integral to the article’s argument. They are deployed to show that the decisive question is not whether assumptions are present, but what kind of assumptions are operative, how securely they are grounded, and whether they remain provisional and revisable, or instead function as prior commitments that pre-structure the interpretation of the evidence. The authors accordingly distinguish between two analytically separable stages: the collection of evidence and the interpretation of evidence. The first includes the gathering of transmission lines, comparison of textual variants, mapping of isnād clusters, and identification of convergences and divergences in the available material. None of this, they argue, yet yields historical judgement as such. Historical judgement begins at the point of interpretation: when one asks who the common link is, what precisely a given nodal position signifies, whether a cluster indicates collection, invention, attribution, or stabilisation, and what specific textual variation is historically meant to imply.

Muslim podcasts and shows in the Anglosphere suffer from a serious efficiency problem. Like a revolving door, they all - one after the other - host the same figure to discuss the same talking points in a short sequence, leading to a huge virtual waste. Instead of having all the basic points of the discussion compressed into one or two episodes, you now have 5-6 different videos (which in total can amount to more than a dozen hours), where the same concepts and talking points are regurgitated with little differences between them. And if the speaker in question is known for having controversial views or tendencies, you end up creating multiple online controversies in a short span of time. No podcast or channel seems to have the veracity to realize that repeating the same topic over and over again is a waste of time, and that the honourable thing is to save the time of people from listening to the same topic or list of points for 2-3 weeks straight. But it seems that every channel only cares about meeting their weekly views quota, so they must jump on the trend and take a slice of the gains. Take this as a principle: if you see a channel publishing and pumping a lot of content/shows, there is a risk they are not properly vetting or filtering the points brought up by their speakers. Viewer beware.

One common yet unfortunate paradox seen in the contemporary age is that some students spend so much time learning the adab of 'ilm and the importance of learning different Islamic sciences that they never end up doing actually learning any of the disciplines themselves. There is a point where you need to take the plunge and start doing the discipline itself instead of just learning about it. This is like someone admiring the outer dimensions and features of a house but never taking the step to enter inside it!

Here is a better link for the book, from Sapience Institute's website: https://www.sapienceinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Is-Muhammad-Truly-a-Prophet-of-God-Dr.-Sami-Ameri-Sapience-Institute.pdf?fbclid=IwY2xjawRTf_pleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFnVVVTMklmdThiaVNFTVl4c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHnLtDWnZgAfet0FzppvANU0wMuyeMWsfBRrKeitBAIFliijbi97UO2av7rvz_aem__rUXte038wfGIOFtGCNFFQ

I really enjoyed the opportunity to professionally edit this book (which took more than a month!) before its release. Some enhancements and changes were made to improve the book's readability for an English-speaking audience. In my opinion, this is Dr. Ameri's most important book, and it requires a careful read. I can't do justice to the book by giving it a summary, but it provides rational proofs for why Islam is true, establishing this thesis in a clear and logical fashion. If you don't have the time to go through it all, at least go through the first two chapters, as they contain many foundational arguments and precepts that any person in the contemporary world must know. You can download the book for free here: https://t.me/MakkanMusings/3274 And in case you didn't know, I have been doing edits of Islamic literature and Arabic-English translations for several years! Chances are you've read something that I edited 🙂.

"Qur'anic gems should not end by just saying 'SubhanAllah'. We should take one step ahead. Ask: 'What are we learning from this?!' These stories are not just meant to be reduced to storytellers so that we can enjoy and go to sleep. This should wake us up from spiritual sleep. We should have a spiritual awakening." - Ustadh Asif Hirani (Forwarded from Ustadh Abdul Sattar)

A nice point from Shaykh Mawlud al-Sariri on how one progresses from following experts in their field to developing independent abilities: "Knowledge is like commerce: you may use the investments of others as capital, but that capital must then be invested and made into further profit from your own effort." (Paraphrased)

“The purpose and object of ijtihad is not to replace the Divine Law by man-made law. Its real object is to understand the Supreme Law.” - Maulana Maududi