“One cannot doubt the potential effect of these fatwas on modern Muslim society.” <sup>1</sup> Online Accusations of Disbelief and Apostasy: The Internet as an Arena for Sunni and Shia Muslim Conflicts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article focuses on a number of fatwas published on the Sunni website Islamqa that, among many things, present negative understandings of Shia Islam. Before discussing the content of the fatwas, I offer a brief reconsideration of the major lines of conflict that divide Sunni and Shia Muslims both in history and at the present day. I then argue that, although contemporary tensions and hatred between different Muslim individuals and groups can potentially be supported by stereotypical presentations of Shia Muslims on the Internet, in order for an individual or a group to turn to violence, a socio-political context is required that is conducive to violent interpretations of religious views. The fatwas considered here do not contain much that is new, and more or less repeat old theological positions. However, in the context of the current crises in Iraq and Syria, old tensions and conflicts between Sunni and Shia Muslims have gained momentum, making it obvious that theological differences are being used to dehumanize the Other and to legitimate violence against the religious Other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".