Is God Obliged to Answer Prayers of Petition (<i>Du'a</i>)? The Response of Classical Sufis and Qur'anic Exegetes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The following article sets out to explore classical responses within the tradition of Qur’anic exegesis and Sufism to the theological problem of how it is that God responds to all prayers of petition. The basis of this problem rests on two Qur’anic verses in which such a guarantee is explicitly made. In Q 2:186, the Qur’an has God declare, “I answer the call [da‘wa] of the suppliant [da‘i] when he calls upon Me [da‘ani].” And in Q 40:60, the Qur’an has God state, “Call upon Me [ud‘uni], and I will answer.” The article presents an overview of the various strategies through which Muslim thinkers sought to resolve the underlying problem. In the process of exploring this question the article also demonstrates, by drawing on a wide range of classical texts, the interdependence of the Islamic subtraditions of Qur’anic commentary and Sufi thought, particularly in the latter’s more “practical” dimensions.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| 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".