Knowledge, Culture, and Positionality: Analysis of Three Medieval Muslim Travel Accounts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study provides an analysis of al-rihla account of three Medieval Muslim travelers: Nasir Khasraw (1004-1077), Ibn Jubayr (1145-1217), and Ibn Battuta (1304-1378). The three travelers were selected from different eras, provinces, cultural backgrounds, and schools of Islamic thought and philosophy in Medieval Muslim society. This study intended to answer two questions: 1) what do the three travelers report about their al-rihla experiences? And 2) what factors influenced the three travelers’ experiences of al-rihla as Muslim travelers in search for knowledge? The Holistic Content analysis method in Narrative Analysis was selected to analyze the data. The data analysis resulted in six themes: 1) hajj, the Pilgrimage to Mecca was conducted as, a religious obligation, repentance for sins, and a physical and spiritual path in seeking God’s/Allah’s forgiveness; 2) the theme of seeking knowledge in Islam is strongly associated with hajj; 3) place is a significant theme; 4) emphasis on Islamic principles applied into practice; 5) pride in religious identity as a Muslim; 6) the peaceful co-existence of Muslims, Christians, and Jews was recounted in the three travel accounts. The study concludes that al-rihla accounts of the three Medieval travelers were strongly influenced by three major factors: beliefs about knowledge/seeking knowledge in Islam, culture and cultural identity, and issues of power and positionality. Key words: Al-rihla; Medieval Muslim Travelers (MMT); Hajj; Place and space; Positionality introduction
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".