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  1. “In Imam Baydawi’s time, men and women would not have interpreted Imam Baydawi’s interpretation of the Qur’an as patriarchical…they would not understand what that means” or something to that effect.

    Indeed this is true.

    What indeed is also true is that if the souls of Imam Baydawi and the people around him, both men and women, were born today in Western countries and educated in the West through graduate school, they would not have the same interpretations.

    And it is absurd to think that they are somehow holy if they are born 1 thousand years ago but evil if born 1 thousand years later.

    Get real. It is time to get out of our layers of cocoons ….we can and must interrogate and critique the presumptions of the modern and post modern world but so we must do just as much of the medieval world.

    I have great respect for Shaikh Abdul Hakim and may Allah preserve him. Ameen. And may keep benefiting from him.

    But his obsession for the interpretations of the medieval past is disappointing.

    His hermeneutics of the medieval is problematic as is the hermeneutics of suspicion.

    There should be an effort at no lens of hermeneutics.

    Just use your intelligence and keep looking for presuppositions that are deforming our intelligence.

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