Of Wine, Sex, and Other Abominations: The Meanings of Antinomianism in Early Islamic Iraq
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Accusations of sexual perversion, of defying both the statutes of man and the laws of the almighty, have since Antiquity been a staple of heresiographic discourse. They had pride of place in Muslim heresiology as well, which charged many a heretical sect with engaging in group sex, incest, wine-drinking, as well as the shunning of the obligatory rituals such as prayer and pilgrimage. One group has fared particularly badly at the hands of Muslim heresiographers – the so-called Shiʿi ‘extremists’ (Ghulāt), who lived in Iraq in the eighth and ninth centuries. Scholarship has mostly taken a simplistic approach to accounts about their alleged antinomianism, by either rejecting them as hostile propaganda or, more frequently, by accepting them wholesale as accurate. Meanwhile the historical, polemical contexts in which such accusations were made have been ignored. This article evaluates within a broad historical context two bodies of evidence: the heresiographical accusations on the one hand, and the Ghulāt’s own writings on the other. My contention is that while the most hair-raising accusations are nothing by hostile polemics, others do reflect the Ghulāt’s actual beliefs and practices. I conclude by examining the cultural meanings which antinomianism had among the Ghulāt – namely, as boundary markers and tools for identity construction.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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 it