Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article provides a sketch of the historical antecedent to the 11th century theory of maqāṣid al-sharī‘a (the purposes of the law). I examine the role of human benefit (maṣlaḥa) within the classical Shafi‘i school, focusing on the 10th and 11th centuries. I show that Shafi‘i law gave consideration of benefit a central role in the interpretation of scripture. This is attested to in both texts of legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) and substantive law (furū‘ al-fiqh). Importantly, I also explain how Shafi‘is subjected theirclaims about benefit to contestation and debate, acknowledging the limits to humans’ ability to apprehend God’s law. In presenting this classical model of benefit in the Shafi‘i school, the essay offers an alternative for reformists who invoke the maqāṣid al-sharī‘a today—an alternative that has a deep pedigree within the Islamic tradition and promotes the democratization of debate over the benefits of the law.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".