God’s name is not a game : performative apologetics in Sufi dhikr performance in Senegal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines debates surrounding the proper performance of communal dhikr, or reciting God’s name, within the Fayḍa Tijāniyya Sufi community in Senegal. The controversial practice of yëngu (‘moving oneself’), or dancing and drumming during dhikr, has become popular among some Fayḍa youth. Although some Fayḍa leaders condemn yëngu for allegedly mixing God’s sacred name with the profane, yëngu practitioners remain integral to the Fayḍa community. Academic discussions of controversies over Islamic practice have often framed disagreements in terms of competing interpretations of Islamic law (sharī‘a). This article examines several other methods of religious convincing that yëngu proponents invoke, such as mystical experiences and truths that transcend law. Perhaps more than any explicit argument, yëngu’s continuation within the community depends on ‘performative apologetics,’ or demonstrations of exemplary knowledge, piety, and devotion through which one incorporates a potentially controversial practice into one’s self-presentation as a pious Muslim.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".