Early Orientalism: Imagined Islam and the Notion of Sublime Power * By IVAN KALMAR.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The author, born 1948 in Prague from a German Jewish mother and Czech Jewish father, with his inquisitive mind and broad education is fully at home in several cultures. At 17 he emigrated to the United States but moved on to Toronto, avoiding the draft. His English now is exquisite. At Toronto University he teaches anthropology. After The Trotzkys, Freuds and Woody Allens: Portrait of a Culture (1993), this is the author’s second major, highly intellectual publication: an agnostic Jew’s skilled defence of Islam. The book focuses on the period from the Renaissance (pre-imperialist orientalism) to the (imperialist) Enlightenment, quoting authors from Nikolaus von Cues, Martin Luther, and Georg W. F. Hegel to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Carl Schmitt, and Talal Asad. Kalmar wonders why East and West are perceived by many as radically antipodal, in spite of so many similarities. The twain that shall never meet? As if tyranny was an Eastern style of government only, and as if the Western God existed (and was good) while Allah, the ‘Oriental fantasy’ of God, King, and Father, was heartless, like his sultans and emirs on earth. (Kalmar is, however, aware that attacking Muslims frequently was a roundabout Protestant way of criticizing Catholics.)
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".