Prohibiting the Pilgrimage: Politics and Fiction in Mālikī Fatwās
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study inventories and analyzes Mālikī legal opinions ( fatwā s) discouraging or prohibiting the pilgrimage to Mecca (the ḥajj ) for Muslims in the Islamic West (al-Andalus, North Africa, and West Africa) from the eleventh through nineteenth centuries. This distinctively Mālikī discourse initially may have reflected the risks of long-distance travel from the western periphery to the central Islamic lands. From the twelfth century, most of these texts reflect a ruler’s unstated desire to keep his subjects and their resources at home. Jurists produced fatwā s that justified in religious legal terms a regional dispensation from, or even prohibition of, the ḥajj ; that masked the political motives for doing so; and that the lay public could grasp readily. The crafting of such complex opinions is explored, including the use of two “fictional” elements: dissemblance, or a discrepancy between the jurists’ actual and stated rationales, and the use of imaginative stories as illustrative aids.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".