Is Historicism a Viable Strategy for Islamic Law Reform? The Case of 'Never Shall a Folk Prosper Who Have Appointed a Woman to Rule Them'
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract There are at least two kinds of historicism that are relevant to Islamic legal reform, one rooted in a progressive theory of history, the other rooted in history as a source for textual interpretation. The latter has the potential to garner greater support for progressive legal change insofar as it falls squarely within the well-known jurisprudential concept known as takhsis al-'āmm (specification of the general term). In this article, I explore this reform strategy by analyzing a well-known Prophetic hadīth that is traditionally understood as excluding women from holding political office. By exploring literary history, Islamic legal hermeneutics, and substantive Islamic law, I demonstrate that, in this particular case, substantial egalitarian reform can be justified without fundamental changes to traditional Islamic theological doctrines. While no one rhetorical strategy offers a “magic bullet” for creating a more gender-egalitarian version of Islamic law, progressive Muslim reformers in my view should first exhaust possibilities for reform implicit in traditional methods before introducing arguments outside of that tradition—arguments which, by their nature, raise controversial theological questions that may be more intractable than the legal rules that are the object of the desired reform.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".