Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thoughtful, engaging, and well presented, Simon Cottee's in-depth analysis of contemporary ex-Muslims is a fantastic read. It is an astute and timely exploration of an ever-increasingly important social phenomenon: the rejection of religion. The book's three greatest strengths are: (1) the author allows the apostates to speak for themselves, so we get to read—often in their own words—about their personal struggles, family ordeals, existential angst, life experiences, values, opinions, worldviews, etc., (2) the author provides on-going, in-depth, nuanced, and insightful analysis of the process of exiting Islam, so that the personal stories of apostasy are well examined, couched in appropriate scholarly context, and made sociologically relevant, and finally (3) the focus is on contemporary men and women living in the West (primarily Britain and Canada) who have rejected Islam—a fascinating, under-studied population, to be sure. Cottee's goal is not to debunk Islam. He has no stake in a theological, cultural, or even political critique. Rather, his interests are purely social scientific: how does it happen that some men and women lose their faith in Islam? What is that process like? And in what ways is apostasy unique for individuals born and raised Muslim in the Western world? Hint: they face a double burden, being “marginalized not only from their families and the wider community of Muslim believers but also from a predominantly white and non-believing secular world which shows little interest in, still less understanding of, their situation” (xiv).
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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| 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".