On Democracy as a Shar’I Moral Presumption: Response to Khaled Abou El Fadl
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Khaled Abou El Fadl has done more in his Article than simply argue the possibility of democracy in the Muslim world.He reminds us that Islam is not a monolithic idea lacking varying contours, possibilities, and dispositions.Whether in talking about an Islamic legal system or an Islamic political system, the most frequent mistake is assuming that there is an ideal vision of such systems that precludes debate, difference, and the continued search for possibilities.Another common mistake is to presume that the limits of an "Islamic political system" are inherent in the existing practice of so-called Muslim States.To generalize from the mere examples of modern Muslim Nation-States is to take away the dynamism of an intellectual tradition that has generated debate and discourse extending well beyond the existence of Muslim Nation-States in the modern world.Abou El Fadl's argument suggests that when one discusses the relationship between Islam and democracy, one necessarily argues in the expansive arena of ideas.Moreover, by positing democratic institutions as possibilities within an Islamic context, Abou El Fadl makes room for dynamism, difference, and debate within the empirical context.Central to Abou El Fadl's argument is the need for Muslims to make a premoral commitment to democracy.Such a premoral commitment is not simply a function of political expediency or opportunism.Rather, as the Islamic tradition suggests, the human agent plays a significant role in the determination of that premoral commitment on the basis of a rational investigation into the various signs of God's creation.Whether one inquires into law or political science, Shari'ah's discourses empower the human agent to come to terms with the Divine Will in light of the totality of existence and creation.The resulting governmental structure may not necessarily be what God wills, but that is not what humanity is obligated to determine.We are charged with the search.And as Abou El Fadl rightly points out, the search for the harmony between Islam and democracy begins with a premoral commitment to democracy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".