This situation is more dangerous than it looks. There is a huge crisis of authority here split among academically "verified" scholars and more traditionally verified scholars.

The position being claimed is the same, the ability to interpret the religion of Islam and to .. https://twitter.com/tametanias/status/1361031191575621640

.. produce normative judgments for Muslims. However, the authorities appealed to in order to legitimate the claim to this position are completely different.

The important thing to realize, as a Muslim academician, is that the university as a whole, and especially Western ..

.. universities legitimize scholarly authority through a framework that is completely alien, and perhaps even antithetical to Islam (for example, today university education is McDonaldized).

One of the favorite phrases of Islamic academia can then be turned against it.

Even if this young Muslim academic is Muslim, by educational formatting, this person is a modernized subject. If Islamic (essentializing or not) ideas or in any substantial way non-European, the condition of a Muslim trained throughout their life in this European thing ..

.. called "the university" is very peculiar. In a sense, he embodies the "imperial," and not the colonial.

Hence, through this lens, the battle between modern forms of legitimizing scholarly authority and traditional forms is (using terms familiar to academia) can be ..

.. presented as a battle between empire and colony.

As I said, I am also a student in modern academia (even though I studied classically too, my "verification" is from the universities I graduated from). As such, this is not an accusation.

It is a call for "modern educated" scholars to reflect on their own positionality, and to engage in a form of "self-purification" that aims to remove all vestiges of imperial hubris that might have infected them.

To add, this call for self-reflection works both ways. There is no %100 traditional Islam in the world. We all are, in some way or another, touched by the modern. The world we live in is modern, even if we try to be Muslim. As such, the ideal Islamic scholar who can truly ..

.. realize his positionality needs to know enough of both worlds.

Furthermore, this is not something that can be done and finished. It is a process of self-reflection that must persist throughout our lives.

Recep Senturk examines this duality of authority in this article of his but he does not use the kind of terminology I use.