Origins & Biases of the Western Historical Critical Method

Routes into the study of Islamic tradition

• Colonial administration (‘progressive Islam’)
• Diplomatics
• Extension of Biblical studies/’world languages’
• 🡪 the question of ‘shedding light on origins’

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Historical Critical Method

• Through interrogation of sources we can reconstruct ‘what really happened’ (von Ranke)
• Default is suspicion (of certain things and towards certain people)
• Uniformitarianism, Anachronism, Dissimilarity
• Its origins explain these biases
• Renaissance rediscovery of the Classics
• The Age of Discovery
• Protestant Reformation

Rediscovery of Greco-Roman Past

• Sense of historical distance 🡪 realization of change (anachronism)
• Notion of unchanging human nature (Herodotus)
• Historian as detached and lofty pseudo-cynic
• Skepticism about metaphysics (Sextus Empiricus)
• Germ of scientific method: Lucretius, Padua, 16^th cent.
• Figures:
• Petrarch (d. 1374) & Cicero (d. 43 BCE)
• Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457)
• Erasmus (d. 1536)

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Age of Discovery

• Explosion of Biblical geography/genealogy
• Isaac de la Peyrere (d. 1676) & Adam & the Flood
• New Cosmology
• New perspective on new peoples
• Deism, Roman perversion & noble savage (later undone?)

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Protestant Reformation

• End of Church control on interpretation & canon
• Non-canonical gospels
• Bible as product of specific time/worldview, not primary vessel of truth
• Luther (d. 1536) -> Quakers: the holy spirit rules
• Calvin (d. 1564) & reading Bible in context

The Result: Germany 1700s-1800s

• Truth from outside scripture + locality of scripture + corruption over time - Spinoza (d. 1677)
• Sense of power & position: Wolf (1795) and Remarus (d. 1786)
• The spirit of Christ, not Christ himself (Johann Semler d. 1791)
• History no longer serves Theology, all has been historicized
• The English historian Edward Gibbon (d. 1794): miracles, ‘science’ of human nature
• Crass materialism of Diderot (d. 1784)
• Progress!