A Classical Methodology for Contemporary Daʿwah: Taşköprüzade’s Ādāb al-Baḥth wa al-Munāẓarah in Dialogue with New Atheism

Abstract

The rise of New Atheism in the early twenty-first century has posed a substantive intellectual challenge to religious communities, including Muslims engaged in the practice of daʿwah. Characterised by its assertive rationalism, reductive scientism, and systematic critique of religion, New Atheist discourse demands from Muslim respondents not merely doctrinal counter-arguments but a disciplined methodology of engagement. This article argues that Tashkopruzade's classical treatise Ādāb al-Baḥth wa al-Munāẓarah (The Etiquette of Inquiry and Formal Disputation) offers a rigorous, ethically grounded, and epistemologically coherent framework for such engagement. Employing a qualitative research design grounded in classical text analysis and descriptive-analytical inquiry, the study adopts purposive sampling in its selection of sources: Tashkopruzade's treatise serves as the primary source, whilst the principal works of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris are selected as representative texts of New Atheist discourse. Data is collected through systematic documentary analysis of the Arabic primary source alongside relevant secondary scholarship, and subsequently subjected to thematic and comparative analysis. The article examines the core components of Tashkopruzade's dialectical system including the functions of the questioner (sāʾil) and the respondent (muʿallil), the tripartite mechanisms of objection (munāqaḍah, naqḍ, muʿāraḍah), and the normative etiquettes of disputation and maps these onto the argumentative strategies characteristic of New Atheist discourse. The findings suggest that Tashkopruzade's framework equips daʿwah practitioners with a principled method for identifying logical fallacies, maintaining epistemic rigour, and sustaining productive intellectual exchange. This article contributes to the growing scholarship on classical Islamic intellectual resources for contemporary daʿwah methodology.