My 2¢ on the ḥadīth scholarship vs. secular scholarship discourse
[1] Motzki (et al.) was mistaken to speak of the “authenticity” of the ḥadīth corpus, inasmuch as readers confused how he used authenticity with how ḥadīth scholarship uses words like ṣaḥīḥ, ḥasan, etc... “Authentic” for him means “not forged by the compiler/tradent”; authenic ≠ historical veracity.
Motzki ran into this problem repeatedly, but the toothpaste couldn't be put back into the tube. ICMA aims at *dating*, not *verifying*, traditions. See his statement from our book.

In Q Ḥašr 59:23, God is called: al-muʾmin al-muhaymin. The first name, muʾmin|مؤمن, usually means “believer” but in this context probably means, “faithful,” or “granter of safety (ʾamn).” But what about the second term, al-Muhaymin? If you've studied Aramaic, the answer seems pretty straightforwoard: al-muhaymin is easily recognizeable as mhaymen|ܡܗܰܝܡܶܢ|מהימן.
It means the exact same thing as al-muʾmin, i.e., “believer” or “faithful”.

This is not the original quote of Hitler AFAIK, but the original does have an interesting history behind , and it's key for understanding the Battle of Poitiers in modern Western historical imaginary ...

https://twitter.com/ApostateProphet/status/1899571925258539276

Hitler’s "Tabletalk" (Tischgespräche) – ranting monologues given at the Führer headquarters from 1941-44 – were recorded and transcribed, and this is the source of such statements. In a monologue from 28 Aug 1942, he bemoans Charles Martel’s victory at Poitiers in 732 and ...

As noted by @IraniRoxanna, Khamenei is quoting one of the more misogynist passages from Nahj al-balāġah here, in Arabic: al-marʾah rayḥānah wa-laysat bi-qahramānah.
Personally, I don’t think ʿAlī actually uttered these words... Why?
[1] It's strange forʿAlī to employ a word like qahramānah, a word borrowed into Arabic from Persian typically used in the Abbasid era to referred to an enslaved stewardess of a harem.
[2] The saying is attributed to other, later figures:

Reading a new essay by Devin Stewart, "Ignoring the Bible in Qur’anic Studies Scholarship of the Late Twentieth Century" (2024). It's on the history of qur'anic studies scholarship in the 20th century and the place of biblical literatere therein. Some thoughts ... Really it's an autopsy of what went wrong why the topic stagnated in qur'anic studies after WW2. He gives this example of Watt's revisions of Bell's Intro to the Qur'an as primary example of what changed. The language of the ToC speaks volumes.
scienceopen.com/hosted-documen…

Ehrman's right ofc, and the axiom isn't "hidden"
The Qur'an is a human text: it's written in a human language and as such ought to be analyzed as a product of humanity.
Ratifying a fideist "special pleading fallacy" as the foundation of your hermeneutic is against free inquiry

https://twitter.com/freemonotheist/status/1783122617966158051

Truth be told, the aims of HCM are very modest--a measured, rationalistic approach to assessing the plausibility of our historical knowledge and revising it using empircal tools and methods. Most of the frustrations with it are, as you can see on display in the replies, ...

Epigraphy can be dangerous! A quick tall tale from the Muʿjam al-buldān of Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī (d. 1229) about how an epigraphic discovery in Palmyra led to fall of the Umayyad caliphate…
The story is told by a grandson of Khālid al-Qasrī named Ismāʿīl. He recounts ... how he accompanied the last Umayyad caliph Marwān II to defeat the rival claimant, Sulaymān ibn Hishām. He says:
“I was with Marwān, the last of the Umayyad tyrants, when he destroyed the walls of Palmyra. They rebelled against him, and he slaughtered them...

A wonderful anecdote from Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī’s al-Imtāʿ wa-l-muʾānasah:
An agonistic/skeptic (mutaḥayyir) from 10th-century Sijistān was, “What leads you to still hold to the validity of your faith?” And he replies:
“A special quality nothing else has:...

I was born and reared in it. I imbibed its sweetness and grew fond of the customs of its adherents. I’d compare myself to a man who entered a lodge seeking shade from heaven’s brightness for an hour or so of daylight. The lodger brought him to one of its rooms without knowing...

In the early 1960s (?) the Egyptian scholar Muḥammad al-Bahī published a small tract called *Missionaries and Orientalists and their Stance towards Islam*. Though a mere 26 pages, it caught the attention of the German journal Die Welt des Islams, which...
archive.org/download/mbmsm…
published a review of it written by a Syrian scholar from Aleppo named Muḥammad Yaḥyā Hāshmī. The tract is interesting because it gives us a ‘pre-Saidian’ criticism of Orientalism from Egypt, and I think that one can encounter some familiar themes.
jstor.org/stable/1569728

Q. Naḥl 16:103 famously rebuts the accussation of Quraysh that the prophet Muhammad receives instructions from a man The verse is a good example of how a topos is created by the Qur'an that then generates many spurious stories in the tafsīr/exegetical literature ... Let’s just look at the stories compiled by al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) to gain a glance how this process unfolds. Basically, all these stories attempt to answer a simple (and entirely extraneous) question: Who was this man who supposedly taught the prophet?

The Qurʾan calls the messenger’s home umm al-qurā|أم القرى (Q. 6:29, 42:7), which some have sought to understand as a calque of the Greek μητρόπολις, “metropolis/mother-city”. But I think this is wrong. Usually, metropolis is translated as umm al-mudun|أم المدن ... While Umm al-Qurā is an honorific, the Q also indicates that the messenger’s home isn’t the only settlement that could be described by the term: umm al-qurā. Q. 28: 59 states, “Your Lord would destroy villages (al-qurā) until he sent to their mother (fī ummihā) a messenger…”

Qurʾan refers to “the believers, the Jews, the Christian, and the Sabians (allaḏīn ʾāminū wa’llaḏīna hādū wa’l-naṣārā wa-l-ṣābiʾīn)” (2:62, 5:69; cf. 22:17). Who are these Sabians? Scholars offer many answers, but I think the most interesting one comes from the ḥadīth corpus It’s often forgotten how frequently Muḥammad’s enemies call him “the Ṣābian” in the sīrah-maghāzī and the ḥadīth literature. The story of ʿUmar’s conversion from Ibn Isḥāq's Maghāzī (d. 767), for instance, depicts ʿUmar referring to Muḥammad as a Ṣābian b4 to his conversion

Jerusalem’s sanctity in Muslim belief is well known, and most famously expounded in a genre called ‘The Merits of Jerusalem (faḍāʾil bayt al-maqdis)’. But most collections of these traditions date after the 11th century AD. Are these traditions therefore late? Definitely not … The 1st exegete of the Qurʾan whose work survives is Muqātil ibn Sulaymān al-Balkhī (d. 150/765, Baṣrah). His tafsīr preserves an extensive early list of Jerusalem’s merits (faḍāʾil) in an excursus on Q. Isrāʾ 17:1. Muqātil was active in Iraq, but ...

In ca. 703-4, the Umayyad governor al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf completed a project to (re)codify the Qurʾan, refining the codex of the caliph ʿUthmān. What was the project, and what did it entail?
The question is difficult to answer... One of the most comprehensive attempts to piece together what the Arabic accounts have to about the project was pursued by the like of Omar Hamdan and Nicolai Sinai.
academia.edu/9381601/The_se…
jstor.org/stable/24692711

🧵A 9th-cent. historian of Mecca, Abū l-Walīd al-Azraqī, transmits several stories abt how the Prophet Muḥammad spared an icon (ṣūrah) of Mary and Jesus from destruction when he purged the Kaʿbah of the idols it contained. But if the icon wasn’t destroyed, what happened to it? An early Meccan scholar, ʿAṭāʾ ibn Abī Rabāḥ (c. 27–115/ 648–733), claimed to have seen it with his own own eyes. He was asked, “Did you see figural depictions (tamāthīl) in the Kaʿbah?” “Yes,” he said, “I saw the figures of Mary and her son Jesus in her lap finely adorned...

TIL that the Dome of Rock used to contained “a black paving-stone (بلاطة سوداء)” where Muslims used to pray and which, according to the geography Ibn al-Faqīh (fl. 900), had inscribed on it a depiction|خلقة of the prophet Muḥammad. In ca. 780, the caliph al-Mahdī ordered the extension of a stone bench next to it (text below from Ibn al-Murajjā), so it may have been part of the original construction of ʿAbd al-Malik.

Some captivating miniatures depicting biblical prophets from the beautifully illustrated Rabbula Gospels (6th cent.)
➀ Moses (L) and Aaron (R)
➁ Samuel (L) and Joshua bar Nun (R)
➂ Solomon (L) and King David (R) There's plenty more to be seen here: teca.bmlonline.it/ImageViewer/se…

Class consciousness Umayyad style (from 𝑎𝑙-𝐵𝑎𝑠̣𝑎̄ʾ𝑖𝑟 𝑤𝑎-𝑙-𝑑ℎ𝑎𝑘ℎ𝑎̄ʾ𝑖𝑟 of of Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdi, d. 1023):
Muʿāwiyah said to Ṣaʿṣaʿah ibn Sūḥān, ‘Describe humanity to me.’
He replied, ... ‘God created people according to classes: one group to worship, one to rule, one to attain knowledge and study law, one for valor and bravery, and another for trades and professions. Besides that the rest merely muddy the water and drive up inflation.’
archive.org/details/bsaer0…

Someone recently asked me about my thoughts on this "Mary, sister of Aaron" topic, and I warned him that they're pretty pedantic, so here it goes ...

https://twitter.com/provingislam/status/1491876550425387010?s=20&t=_v9Y2iwug_iIXKaOjc7DQA

I suspect that the comments refers to this old thread. My point there was NOT that the Qurʾan *definitely* thinks that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the sister of Aaron, but rather that the idea that it’s an error was never seriously ...

https://twitter.com/shahanSean/status/1161730325397028866?s=20&t=_v9Y2iwug_iIXKaOjc7DQA

Some instances citations of Q. 112 from the Umayyad period below ...

https://twitter.com/PhDniX/status/1484498586515746816

P.Berol. 12825 (CPR III, no. 43), ca. 705-708

Reports like these make me think that there’s a tendency to grossly underestimate of the multilingualism in the Ḥijāz.
In this report, the Prophet Muḥammad says to the young scribe Zayd ibn Thābit, “There are letters [kutub|كتب] coming to me, which ... I do not wish for everyone to read. Are you able to learn Syriac – or: Hebrew – writing?”
“Yes,” I said, and I learned it in 17 nights.
google.com/books/edition/…