Does the Miracle Still Work? Formations of Islamic Tradition in ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jazaʾiri's Defence of Reason in the Nineteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article aims at a better understanding of the nature and function of arguments for the possibility of miracles in nineteenth-century Islamic discourse. The starting point is Emir ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jazaʾiri's (1808–1883) book Sharp Scissors to Cut the Tongue of the One Who is Degrading the Religion of Islam by Defamation and Heresy (1849) written during imprisonment in France. Through a close reading of his argumentation for Muhammad's status as a prophet I argue that his use of tradition does not simply consist in invoking a given past—here a variety of Islamic theologians and philosophers from the tenth to the seventeenth centuries—as authoritative; rather, he refers his contemporary readers to a specific history of judgments, claiming that these judgments are both capable and in need of being re-enacted in the reader's own present situation. By relating the epistemological tradition expressed by Jazaʾiri to his situational context, this article demonstrates that whereas miracles are, according to Jazaʾiri, supposed (and in fact able) to establish the prophetic status of Muhammad, the facticity of these miracles itself appears to be established best if they (or more precisely, their testimonials) are appropriated as a means to participate in a particular discursive tradition.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".