The Ethical Obligations of the Muqallid Between Autonomy and Trust (Istafti Qalbaka Wa in Aftâka Al-Nasu Wa Aftûka)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Managing one’s faith is a complicated process. In this draft chapter, which will be published in forthcoming a Festschrift in honor of Professor Bernard Weiss, Professor Mohammad Fadel surveys the various arguments on how Muslims who lack the capacity to engage in independent ethical inquiry (ijtihad) are to resolve ethical dilemmas that arise as a result of the recognition of moral pluralism within Islamic ethics. This paper discusses the different approaches to this question taken by two different groups of Sunni Muslim theologians. The first, known as takhyir, holds that a non-specialist Muslim, a muqallid, is free to choose among any of the positions advanced by a qualified mujtahid. The second, known as tarjih, holds that a muqallid is obliged to weigh the merits of the competing opinions, not based on their substance, but rather on the personal qualities of the mujtahids who hold the competing opinions. Both positions, however, require non-specialists to identify trustworthy authorities so that they can discharge their ethical obligations by aligning themselves with the opinions (taqlid) of reliable scholars. The paper concludes by questioning whether the purely epistemological approach adopted by traditional Muslim theologians in answering this question is capable of providing a satisfactory answer to the problem of ethical obligation in Islamic moral theory that arises out of Islamic commitments to moral pluralism, and instead suggests that the mujtahid-muqallid relationship is more akin to a trust relationship than one based on intellectual deference.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".