Thread on Ghamidi:

Would you follow a doctor’s opinion if he didn’t submit himself to the rigors of the scientific method required of doctors? In other words, methodology? Not following a methodology is often what leads one to anomalous opinions that are at variance with >

established positions of a discipline. In medicine, you will see this as anomalous (qualified) doctors opposing vaccines because they do not submit to the rigors of medical sciences. Rather, these doctors, despite being doctors, aren’t qualified enough to give opinion on >

the issue of vaccines. So the problem is 2-fold: (1) no submission to a methodology; (2) not being qualified enough in the first place to have an opinion on the matter. This is where Ghamidi gets a free pass with our “educated” lot. Educated in secular sciences, but not so >

in religious sciences. Ghamidi saheb does not submit to any Jurisprudential school of law. A school of law has a methodology that requires its practitioners to go through the rigors and due diligence to arrive at an opinion. Why is this important? Because doing so gives us an >

objective criteria to judge the validity of the opinion. Sans a methodology, you can say anything you want and pass it for an opinion. In the religious context, your methodology is important so that people know on what basis do you take the interpretation of a Hadith >

or on what criteria do you take a Hadith over another. Without a methodology, you are under no compulsions to do so and can base an opinion on one half of the Hadith and then summarily reject the other half of the Hadith. In modern times, Amina Wadud demonstrated this when >

she quoted a famous hadith (with an incorrect interpretation) to justify women leading jama’ah prayers. Yet, she rejected the second half of the Hadith because it was obviously problematic from a modernist perspective.

So Ghamidi saheb can say all the nice things that can >

make ‘sense’ to our educated lot. However, the core issue here is that there is no framework (or methodology) by which we can gauge the accuracy of what he is claiming. And, no, “Quran and Sunnah” are not frameworks; they are primary texts. The framework/methodology is meant >

to interpret the primary sources/texts.

Note: This has nothing to do with Tarawih as Ghamidi’s opinions are consistent with that of the overwhelming majority of Muslim scholarship (consensus). Just like an anti-vaxxer doctor can be right in diagnosing your flu.