If you were to survey the vast majority of the Earth's inhabitants, they believe in the afterlife, they believe in an unseen. Historical critical method is saying, ah,
there ain't no unseen. Only what we can see, only what we can taste, only what we can touch, only what we can measure. Problematic if you're a Muslim, because if you're a Muslim, the first descriptor of a believer or a muttaqi, a pious person in Surah Al-Baqarah,
al-ladhina yu'minuna bilghayb, the people who believe in the unseen. We have to understand that historical critical method came about as a technique of higher criticism in order
to subject the Bible to textual criticism. But the historical critical method has gone on to have a life of its own after that. It has become the dominant way from which, or
the dominant perspective from which history is written. Now, it's really important to realize that history does not have a static meaning across time and place. If you go
way back to the ancient Greeks, you go to Herodotus and his colleagues, they understood history in a very, very different way than from what we understand it today. They understood
it as storytelling, legend building in order to create a capacity. What capacity? The capacity for bravery, the capacity for virtue. That they weren't going to really concern themselves,
Did these details of this battle actually take place? They were more concerned in telling the story so that when you see an example of bravery, or you see an example of virtue, that the reader is going to take that in. It's going to help build who they are, reconstitute
themselves so that they then exemplify that virtue when they act in the world. They exhibit that bravery. They exhibit that virtue. Now, when you come to the Enlightenment, there came to be revolutions in how we think about things. And in fact, post-Enlightenment, there
was a period in the 1800s or the 19th century where many European intellectual movements had revolutionary ideas and very sweeping universal claims about how things should be
thought of. So this is the time of Marx, right? And Marx with his historical materialism, but also of Freud and also of Darwin, that these grand theories about how everything works and how everything can be explained in a different way, a way that's not so religious,
that's not so sacred, that's not so metaphysical. And the product of this was the historical critical method and certainly the dominant, the hegemonic way in which history is thought
about, told, and written today. What they didn't realize in articulating these perspectives about history and about reality was that it actually sat on top of a large layer of assumptions
about reality, about knowledge, about the world. And unfortunately, most history went on to be written from this perspective without very much attention being paid to these philosophical
underpinnings that were either taken as self-evident or ignored completely. So what are some of the points of the historical critical method or some of the assumptions that often go completely
unexamined? One of them, and probably the most significant one for our purposes, is that history only has naturalistic causes. Wow, that's a big claim. Yes, history only
has naturalistic causes. Why does this empire rise? Why does this empire fall? Why does this individual triumph? Why does this individual defeated? It's only within naturalistic causes,
meaning it's not about Allah, it's not about piety, it's not about divine favor or provision or prudence or anything. It's not part of a divine plan. It is simply, well, this had
more resources and that had more ability and this was more fit and that was more this. That's the idea here behind exclusively naturalistic causes. The historical critical method essentially
takes the dunya, takes the world, the created world, and it hermetically seals it off from any influence, activity, or anything from the unseen. Problematic if you're a Muslim,
because if you're a Muslim, the first descriptor of a believer or a muttaqi, a pious person in Surah Al-Baqarah, الَّذِينَ يُؤْمِنُونَ بِالْغَيْبِ the people who believe in the unseen. Historical critical method is saying, ah, there ain't
no unseen. Don't believe in any unseen. Unseen doesn't make history. Only what we can see, only what we can taste, only what we can touch, only what we can measure. And there are several
problems with this no gods, no angels, no miracles description or assumption of how history works. This is an extreme minority position to hold, like, especially when it
was first articulated. But even now, if you were to survey the vast majority of the earth's inhabitants, they believe in the afterlife. They believe in an unseen. They believe in divine. They might not hold the same detailed beliefs about those things, but the vast majority
of human beings believe in the divine and the unseen and that the divine and the unseen have real consequences on how history is made and how history plays out. So that doesn't necessarily mean that it's automatically true. We're not falling into a fallacy here where
we're appealing to the masses, but it should also give us pause and make us maybe double click on it and explore it even further. How is it possible that a small, tiny elite group
of people theorized this hegemonic way of looking and telling history that basically disqualifies the assumptions, beliefs and experience of the vast majority of humanity?
There's something going on there. And it does so not even with engaging. It would be one thing if it were to engage metaphysics and say, well, you know, metaphysical theories say this, that, the third. And we disagree because of this, that and the third. It doesn't
even it just completely sidesteps it and says, nope, there is no metaphysical. There is nothing that's beyond the natural causes. Now, some people who are passionate historians and advocates
of this method will try to sneak out of this or wiggle away here and say that, well, we're not saying that all that stuff is false. The gods and the angels and the miracles. We're
not saying that's wrong. It's just not history. It's not anti-historical. It's just a historical. We don't know the jury's still out. I don't buy that at all because you're basically telling
everybody how to tell history and how to write and you're writing history that this is what happened. Just the facts, whether you want to admit it or not, the historical critical method has demoted anything to do with the divine from the level of fact to the level
of speculation. That's your personal belief. It might have a functional, sociological, psychological influence on how you view the world, but you just basically brought that into
another naturalistic materialist cause. You see the problem with that? This is a very, very wanting theory that's very not reflective of its own self and the fact that maybe you're
trying to get some plausible deniability here by saying that you're not trying to account for everything, but you're actually trying to account for everything and purely materialistic naturalistic causes. In fact, one could argue that the historical critical method is not so much different from
Marx's strict historical materialism. Really kind of just a little bit reformed here and there, but when the assumption that everything has to be naturalistic, everything has to be materialistic,
is essentially the same. You assume that you're going to dispassionately report just the facts and you're not going to add your own biases and interpretations in there, meaning you are
portraying yourself as an objective observer and that possibility of pure objectivity is seriously in doubt. Are you really objective? We've already seen how the entire theory of the historical
critical method is not objective. It's actually very subjective. It's based off of very concrete philosophical assumptions and positions, and it doesn't even seem to be self-aware of that. And we
see this. We see the consequences of this when we get into the nonsense that historians come up with, like, for example, that one of the consequences of the historical critical method is the over-emphasis
on origins. The interpretive error that's going on there is that if we can explain the naturalistic origin of something, then that means that it also doesn't have a divine element to it or a divine
cause. So this is behind all of your annoying arguments that you have with evolutionists or people who are strict materialists who say that, well, we can prove that this came from that. Okay, that explains the how, but it doesn't explain the why. Right? We're talking about two
different things that just because you can explain the origin of something does not mean that you've dismissed or negated its purpose within a divine plan or divine causation. And that leads to some
really wacky reconstructions, very speculative in nature. And it's ironic that a method of history, knowledge, and telling that would portray itself as so objective and so dispassionate and so
neutral would come to such wild speculation when it comes to things such as the origins or the hypotheses about where this came from, where that came from. Just go into Qur'anic studies and look
at some of the cockamamie theories that people come up with about how the Qur'an really was Syriac first or it really wasn't written until 200 years later over here. Some of the theories will
make you laugh. Now we're supposed to take these purely naturalistic, purely materialistic theories as more believable and more objective than our own divine history that the Qur'an is
the eternal speech of Allah subhana wa ta'ala that was given to the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) and revealed by Jibreel. We're supposed to now say that that's less credible than these wild speculations about coming from here or coming from there, things that have no basis in, you know,
any fact whatsoever. We have to realize that this posture of objectivity is in fact a myth. You cannot have a purely ideology-free or subjectivity-free space that you are going to
speak from a position of your values and your biases and that that's going to color how you look at history and rather than ignore it you would do better to do a little bit of introspection
to identify what those things are and own them and to speak with the knowledge that you have that going on than to act like you don't have them whatsoever and you're speaking from, you know, I'm just interested in facts, I'm just being rational, I'm just being objective. That's a posture
and it's not actually realistic. Now the next tenet, if you will, or the point of the historical critical method is that people are inherently selfish and motivated by self-interest. There you
go, you have a whole theory of anthropology here and you're asking everybody to just take it at face value. It's extremely materialistic, it's extremely hedonistic even, and you're not even
opening this up for debate. Like we can't even talk like, no I disagree, like human beings are not just animals, they're not just driven by self-interest and by the need to eat, drink, and mate.
No, we have righteousness, we have piety, we have god-fearingness, we have taqwa, we have these sorts of things. They don't allow for any of that, right? So this colors how we look at individual
societies, that every individual is more or less the same. There's a fungibility that's part of the historical critical method that then makes any claim to prophethood look skeptical. It looks
unfavorably upon any claims to superiority or to excellence. And no, people are generally the same and therefore societies are generally the same. So rather than have, كُنْتُمْ خَيْرَ أُمَّةٍ أُخْرِجَتْ لِلنَّاسِ
which Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, no, you were the best people taken from mankind. No, historical critical method says no, sorry, that we actually, all societies are more or less the same. The same rules apply to them, they rise and fall due to the same materialistic causes.
And I hope you see here how the fungibility or the trying to make everything the same or essentially the same as the other is done or functions so that these scholars can supposedly
come to their naturalistic causes. That you can't have purely naturalistic causes if you're going to admit the possibility that one person is motivated by piety and righteousness and selflessness
and virtue. The other person is motivated by hedonism and baseness and whatever their pleasures and appetites are. That you need to reduce things to fungibility to being all the same in order to
be able to arrive at naturalistic causes for everything, the rise and fall, the success and failure, etc. Now a corollary of this or two corollaries of this are, one, that if people speak
good about themselves, they're probably lying. So people are self-motivated, they're selfish, and everybody's pretty much the same. So if somebody's speaking good about themselves, they're probably lying. And if someone's speaking ill about themselves, then they're probably being honest.
Now the second one we could maybe agree with, yes, that this has added weight, that if someone is confessing something that is normally, and we use this in apologetics for the Qur'an, عَبَسَ وَتَوَلَّى, right? There's different parts of the Qur'an where the Prophet (ﷺ),
if he had been a false prophet, if he had been lying, he would have concealed these verses or tried to downplay them. And this is actually a statement of Aisha (رضي الله عنها). In I believe Surah Al-Ahzab when we talk about the story of Zayd and what happened with Zayd,
she (رضي الله عنها) had said, had he wanted to conceal or hide any of the verses of the Qur'an, it would have been this verse. So we do ascribe to this one particular notion that
to tell something embarrassing or that goes against one's self-interest is an indication that it is likely true or that it is more likely true than other statements. However, we don't necessarily have this other side of the coin where we're saying that you say anything
good about yourself or your society and then that has to be just boasting or wrong, right? We have degrees of righteousness and quality. We know that the companions were in ranks,
that Abu Bakr (رضي الله عنه) was the best companion and they knew that. So we see that the hegemony of this particular method, right, this style,
the historical critical method, it displaces sacred history. It would be fine if this method of history, the historical critical method, were seen as one perspective and there are many perspectives and let's compare perspective and let's study them and maybe
this one is able to reveal an insight and this one is able to reveal another insight, but that's not the case. The historical critical method is hegemonic, meaning that it's the
dominant way that history is understood and told and therefore it is displacing to other ways of understanding history such as sacred history. We have Muslims that go to, I've actually talked to
them, that feel like Western history is more objective and that actually they're in doubt about hadith and they're in doubt about seerah, but they don't have any objections or doubts when it comes to the historical critical method. That's just bad philosophy. Like you have to
take a second and actually scrutinize what are the things that you believe in and how that is resulting in your theories of knowledge and then what you think that you can know.
In reality, the historical critical method is just as speculative as any other method. It makes tons of unfound assumptions epistemologically, methodologically, ontologically, anthropologically,
throw all your other ologies out there. So is it really just about you being skeptical in general or do you have a lack of objectivity? Do you have a bias? Do you have a prejudice even
towards religiosity, towards divine truths, towards these sorts of things? Right now we see the mask has fallen. So as a takeaway, let's distill some points and close. One is that if you are
a Muslim, especially in the college space or the university space or in academia, you have to challenge these perspectives. Don't let people get away with acting like this is just a natural,
obvious, self-evident way to look at history and tell history. It's not. It's absolutely not. Like they make tons of assumptions and those assumptions are often unfounded. At the very least, they need
to be named and subject to intellectual scrutiny. Challenge the posture of skepticism that people adopt. Are you really being consistent in your skepticism or are you only skeptical when it comes
to religion and when it comes to God? But you're not skeptical. You believe in lots of things unfoundedly with very, very little deliberation when it comes to your materialism or your
commitment to materialism. Challenge the claim to neutrality or to impartiality or to rationality. This is not any more rational than our divine history that's told from Allah subhana wa ta'ala.
This is certainly not any more impartial and this is not any more rational or objective. And then the last part, to try to reintroduce the moral. Again, this question of are you really this
skeptical across your life consistently through these different spheres in which you move or are you only skeptical in this one way? Are you selectively skeptical? And if it turns out
that you're selectively skeptical, is there a possibility that you're just hiding from an ultimate truth? Is there a possibility that you're running away from divine accountability?
That maybe you need to face these things and figure it out for yourself. That's all for today. As-salāmu ʿalaykum wa-raḥmatu Llāhi wa-barakātuh.
