A friend asked me “what’s good about tradition?” Lots! Comfort, familiarity, a sense of belonging, ritual or automaticity that frees up the mind for new learning which is incredibly taxing on the nervous system. But the more appropriate question is perhaps: “What’s good about traditionalism?” Nothing.

Tradition itself does not impose any rules, but prescriptivists wield it (fallaciously) under the moniker of traditionalism. For example, a tafsir specialist recently insisted I root my interpretation of the Quran in “the tradition”. What he means is “you must adhere to my favorite medieval scholar’s beliefs”. Of course, this proposal becomes obviously false and logically fallacious when we expose the underlying contention, but his mistake reminded of the problem with the question “what’s good about tradition”. Traditional-ism as a validator or gatekeeper of interpretation is incoherent. While traditionalism may be reassuring in terms of pietistic customs (e.g. my uncle was an upright person, so I’ll do what he did), role models impart no value in the interpretation of a text, except in the effectiveness of their methodology. The traditional<>novel binary is itself inadequate and confused with other polemical frames which only mimic the core dilemma (4 and 5 below) underpinning the more ambiguous binaries.

(1) is mostly meaningless and should be rejected. It is the most abstract and ambiguous

(2) hinges on a fallacy ad populum and moving goal post (one man’s orthodoxy is another man’s heterodoxy). It is slightly more formal than (1).

(3) is poorly defined (where does tradition end and how is membership defined?) and is the least abstract of the false dichotomies.

(4) and (5) are the workable.

The reflections and analyses I propose are often mistaken as progressive, heterodox, and anti-tradition. This simply is not the case, as none of those dichotomies play a role in my interpretative methods to reach the potential of explanatory adequacy – methods that adequately explain the observations yielding a falsifiable interpretation. The methods I use are straightforwardly descriptive and inductive: I show my work as I reach a conclusion. This contrasts sharply with much of the medieval era when publishing was expensive, thus the bulk of exegeses were committed to preserving and relaying the conclusions of other scholars, not prescribing those conclusions. Today, however, enthusiasts of medieval discourses mistake those exegetical remarks as:

• authoritative ipso facto
• intended to be prescriptive.
• gatekeepers to propositions unfamiliar to the enthusiast.

Two things to bear in mind, however.

First, an exegesis is a derivative of linguistic and/or semiotic description, which in turn is a derivative of linguistic observation. Once observational adequacy and descriptive adequacy are achieved, an explanatory adequacy can be pursued. In other words, every interpretation or explanation of the Quranic utterance itself is twice removed from the signs themselves, dependent upon linguistic analysis, and must be validated primarily by way of the linguistic observations and descriptions.

Second, a linguistic descriptive analysis is neither subject to nor subordinated by any tautological prescriptivism. It requires no validation from an imagined tradition. These linguistic observations need only be validated by the 6th century Arabian sociolinguistic context and the intertextuality of the Quranic utterance itself.

• “How were the utterances used by the native speakers in situ?
• What pragmatic function did they serve?
• How well does a particular description of the utterance fit in the Quranic narrative?”

These are the first order questions of any exegesis, not “what did al-Razi say?” What al-Razi or others had to say must be validated through the inspection provided by the first order questions above. There are more questions of a pragmatic nature (why is the speaker telling me this?, can I confirm this?, etc) though not necessarily foundational to every interpretive approach. What is foundational, however, is observation, description, and inductive reasoning to construct an interpretation or theory.