u/chonkshonk

Dr Hugh Thomas is an expert Arabian archaeologist at the University of Sydney with a focus on the prehistoric archaeology of north-western Arabia.

He publishes actively, and one can find a lot of his work here. More importantly for the community here, he is by and far one of the best communicators of the research scholarship in this area to a general audience. He made his YouTube channel, "Dr Hugh Thomas", last year and now has around 20,000 subscribers.

His two most popular videos, for anyone who wants to give his channel a quick look, are What Is This? 7,900-Year-Old Structures Found in Saudi! and The Mystery of Harrat Khaybar: The Densest Archaeology on Earth?.

>I haven't read Gräfenstein's PhD dissertation and her analysis therein of the hadith of Aishah's marital age, only a summary thereof provided to me by a colleague in a review article comparing her dissertation with mine (forthcoming in ZDMG). She speculates that the hadith might ultimately derive from Aishah, but from what I can tell, her analysis does not incorporate all of the evidence and considerations that I cover in ch. 3 of my dissertation, which together strongly point to the hadith's origins in Iraq in the middle of the eighth century CE. Moreover, her ICMA of the hadith seems to overlook some of the textual evidence of borrowings, dives, etc., that I uncovered in ch. 2 of my dissertation, leading her to accept certain false CLs (e.g., Abu Ishaq al-Sabi'i) as genuine. This is a common problem with some applications of ICMA, discussed in ch. 1 of my dissertation: the overlooking of evidence of false CLs. In short, Gräfenstein and I come to different conclusions on some aspects of the Aishah hadith, but it seems that my analysis incorporates a lot more evidence than hers. Again, however, I have not read her dissertation, so these comments are very preliminary.

(quoted from private communications with Dr. Joshua Little, with permission to post; the subject is the PhD dissertation: Miriam Gräfenstein, ʿĀʾiša und Muḥammad: Sunnitische und Schiitische Überlieferungen zum Heiratsalter, Islamikon Verlag, 2024)

Hello all,

We at r/AcademicQuran are excited to announce that the mod team has grown again!

We are now joined by two new moderators: u/Rashiq_shahzzad and u/DhulQarnayn_.

Regulars here will already be familiar with Rashiq, who has become one of our most active contributors of high-quality content. DhulQarnayn_ has likewise been a valued member of this community and may also be known to some here for his role as a long-time moderator over at r/religion.

We are confident that these additions will further strengthen the subreddit, and we hope the community will join us in welcoming them to the mod team!

Hello all, a quick message to the community. Three months ago, u/Rurouni_Phoenix announced the five-year anniversary of r/AcademicQuran. It's bewildering to see how much this community has grown, and with that growth, we also face new challenges.

Despite receiving a thousand contributions per week, our subreddit is still managed by a small handful of part-time moderators. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to manually review everything posted to the website. Some people may not immediately realize how easy it is for a problematic comment to float on the internet indefinitely: the only conditions that need to be satisfied to do this are that the comment is missed by the mods (which is inevitable, given the weekly volume of comments and posts we get) and then for other people who read that comment to simply not report it. And a lot of people will sometimes reply to that comment or downvote it, but not report it. A reply does not bring problematic comments to our attention, nor does a downvote, nor does the age of the comment.

We are trying to work improve this situation by slowly growing the mod team and coming up with other technical solutions. In the meantime, we wanted to remind you, the reader, that you can also help us. And it is extremely easy to do so!

If you see a problematic comment, please report it! We need more people doing this than happens as it is. Second of all, since our mod team is small and hobbyist, we will be unable to always deal with user-reports right away; if you feel that there is too much of a delay in a user-report being addressed, please try sending the report via ModMail or try tagging a mod. This often speeds things up. That's it!