Daniel Brubaker answers Yasir Qadhi

In this video, Dr. Brubaker answers in more detail the criticisms leveled against him and his academic work by Yasir Qadhi on November 25, 2020. He begins by pointing out that some of the criticisms are recycled, having been developed by apologists and polemicists over the past year. Qadhi himself, in his critique, referenced a parody Twitter account displaying cherry-picked photographs of mistakes in Brubaker's 2014 doctoral dissertation.

With grace, Dr. Brubaker answers the general concerns and points out that the heavy spotlight on occasional mistakes in the form of a wrongly-parsed Arabic verb, or a suboptimal translation choice (all the sort of things that will exist in any doctoral dissertation - - and indeed even occasionally in published books that are otherwise excellent), while not unimportant, are largely irrelevant to the bigger picture.

Brubaker notes that he is unaware of anyone who has found fault with him for misidentifying a chapter and verse of a correction or a variant, misidentifying the portion of skeletal text (Arabic: "rasm"), and so forth. Indeed, the only thing that comes close is one of the items that Yasir Qadhi mentions: the mistaking of a red Arabic "lam-he" in his dissertation for the word "lahu," when it actually was a number according to the Arabic "abjad" numbering system. But this is old news, and Brubaker was aware of that for years.

Among the thousands of actual corrections he has documented are some that are the result of mere scribal error, others the result of developing orthography, and others (Brubaker believes) that are the result of true textual variations that were later drawn toward conformity with each other via physical correction.

Brubaker makes the suggestion that criticisms of important but non-central details (such as word choice in translation, occasional incorrect verb parsing, or pronunciation), in the way often expressed by Qadhi and others, are not only a diversion, but also a form of ad hominem attack, presented as an plea for hearers to discredit Brubaker as an authority in his area of research.

In the latter part of this video, Brubaker shows and talks through Yasir Qadhi's response to the email Brubaker sent him on November 26. Key topics include:

"islamophobia" and "islamophobe" as terms of rhetoric and (indeed) of cowardice

Whether discussion or consideration of ultimate concerns (i.e. theology and other matters that are beyond the reach of science) have a place in the academy (Brubaker suggests that the pursuit of truth via science and reason may legitimately include consideration of such things)

Who has biases? Everyone. In good academic work, it is important to recognize and account for biases.

Left largely unaddressed in this video are the matters of the legitimacy and worthiness of a PhD from Rice University in this area. It was inadvertently omitted during recording, is mentioned in text on-screen at the appropriate point, but will be discussed in a little more detail (plus some other addenda) in a short follow-up video in the next few days.
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Видео Daniel Brubaker answers Yasir Qadhi канала Variant Quran