A few weeks ago I was sent a preview copy of a book which I was to soon discover could be as crucial to Muslims in the West as Gai Eatons’ ‘Islam and the Destiny of Man’ or Jeffrey Lang’s ‘Losing My Religion’. The reason was the same as for those two essential works: it actually addresses, in a cogent and frank way, the main causes of Muslim and non – Muslim doubts about truth of Islam. And it provides answers – but not the easy populist and frequently falsifiable ones that Muslims have hitherto had to be contented with.

Under the deceptively bland title of ‘Hanafi Principles of Testing Hadith‘, the authors have produced a wide ranging exploration into the truth of Islam and more fundamentally, how we know anything is true. Both a survey of controversies and sectarianism in modern and classical Islam as well as a…