Liberal Rights versus Islamic Law? The Construction of a Binary in Malaysian Politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why are liberal rights and Islamic law understood in binary and exclusivist terms at some moments, but not others? In this study, I trace when, why, and how an Islamic law versus liberal rights binary emerged in Malaysian political discourse and popular legal consciousness. I find that Malaysian legal institutions were hardwired to produce vexing legal questions, which competing groups of activists transformed into compelling narratives of injustice. By tracing the development of this spectacle in the courtroom and beyond, I show how the dueling binaries of liberal rights versus Islamic law, individual rights versus collective rights, and secularism versus religion were contingent on institutional design and political agency, rather than irreconcilable tensions between liberal rights and the Islamic legal tradition in some intrinsic sense. More broadly, the research contributes to our understanding of how popular legal consciousness is shaped by legal mobilization and countermobilization beyond the court of law.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".