Sufism as Medium and Method of Translation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the height of the Mughal Empire in pre-colonial South Asia (16th–17th century CE), Muslim nobles facilitated the translation of numerous Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language. While this “translation movement” (Ernst, 2003: 173) had long been attributed to the reputedly liberal, tolerant, and enlightened personal inclinations of the Mughal emperors, scholars in recent decades have begun to re-evaluate the phenomenon, arguing instead that practical socio-political considerations and quotidian cultural processes best explain the nature of the translation movement. What such analyses lack, however, is a sustained consideration of how the Islamic – and, in particular, Sufi – worldview(s) of the nobles in question shaped the inner workings of, and motivations behind, the movement. In this essay, I take up one such translation from the Mughal period – Mir Findiriski’s Muntakhab-i Jug Basisht, a translation of the Sanskrit Laghu-Yoga-Vasistha – examining not only its content in relation to the Sanskrit original, but also the manner in which Sufi thought and metaphysics informed the very process of translation itself.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it