Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE SHIA REVIVAL How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future Vali Nasr New York: WW Norton and Co, 2006. 287pp. US$25.95 cl°th (0393062112).In their efforts to explain the politics and conflicts of the Middle East, both scholars and journalists often make use of mutually antagonistic categories-revolutionary regimes versus conservative regimes, Nasserists versus Baathists, secularists versus Islamists, or moderates versus extremists. Other categories are frequently created by linking-in-opposition-any two of the major ethnic or national groupings of the region: Arabs, Israelis, Persians, Turks, and Kurds. In his latest book, Vali Nasr of the US Naval Postgraduate School argues that the time has come to view Middle Eastern developments through the prism of yet another pairing: Shia Muslims versus Sunni Muslims.The split between Shias and Sunnis dates back to the earliest days of Islam and has over the centuries been the source of much dispute, disagreement, and conflict. Throughout most of the Muslim world, the Shias constitute an often barely tolerated minority. Viewed either as heretics or social inferiors by Sunni majority populations, they have often been the object of discrimination, if not outright persecution. In only three countries do Shias constitute a majority (Bahrain, Iraq, and Iran) and even there they have, in recent years, suffered at the hands of regimes controlled by Sunni minorities or by secularists such as the late Shah of Iran.In the last 25 years or so, Shias throughout the Muslim world have become noticeably more active in asserting their rights and demanding an end to discrimination. Inspired in good part by the success of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its affirmation of Shia power, they have managed to make their case forcefully in countries as diverse as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon. Furthermore, their cause was given a second major impetus with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the subsequent accession to power of the Shia majority in Iraq.It is in Iraq, of course, that the contest between Shias and Sunnis is now playing itself out most spectacularly and violently. This has confounded some of the aims and ambitions of the Bush administration in launching the invasion of Iraq. As Nasr puts it: The United States hoped to usher in a new era in Middle Eastern history-to build a Middle East that would be democratic, secular and economically prosperous. …
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.008 |
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".