The Deconstruction of Dafther Jailani: Muslim and Buddhist Contests of Original History in Sri Lanka
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although quests for religious origins have been theoretically deconstructed by scholars, discourse about religion in much of the public sphere remains enamored with originality, especially to bolster claims among groups competing over shared spaces. At the Sri Lankan Sufi shrine of Dafther Jailani in Kuragala, an obsession with origins has dramatically reorganized the space, used to justify the physical deconstruction of Muslim pilgrim buildings by the Sri Lankan military. Dafther Jailani also faces other threats from arbiters of originality, including orthodox Sunni Muslims who claim to be stewards of authentic Islam, alongside the Buddhist nationalists who seek to make Kuragala a protected archeological site synonymous with non-Muslim space. Both Buddhists and Muslims have mixed mythical narratives and empirical evidence to advance their claims, and even artifacts from human prehistory at Kuragala are appropriated to provide a new secular excuse for extremist Buddhists to enact an absence of Muslims. Such debates over origins are shown to be a zero-sum game, as one group must lose for another to gain. Yet these gains are ultimately hollow, as mutually valued spaces are emptied of living history to better resemble an ideal past. To combat such erasures, historians of religion must strike a balance between the empirical and ethical, critiquing not only factual errors in these arguments, but also correct information being used incorrectly, to argue in the normative terms of the religious actors themselves that there is much lost and little gained in primordial preoccupations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.058 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".