Islamic Law, Secularism, and the Modern State: Recasting a Scholarly Debate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak fell to popular revolt in 2011, elation soon gave way to apprehension over the question of what new legal and political order would replace the old.The position of religion in the new constitution became a prominent wedge issue and a salient focal point for debate and political mobilization.Despite the myriad economic, social, environmental, and governance issues that begged for attention, controversy around religion increasingly dominated Egypt's political transition.Rachel Scott's Recasting Islamic Law: Religion and the Nation State in Egyptian Constitution Making provides an expert analysis of this period with particular attention to the 2012 Constitution, which was drafted during the brief tenure of Mohamed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government, and the 2014 Constitution, which was drafted following Morsi's ouster by the Egyptian military.Scott situates these constitution-writing episodes within the broader scope of state management of religion throughout twentieth-and twenty-first-century Egypt.Her grasp of the issues and institutions at play is impressive.But more than this, Recasting Islamic Law is deeply theorized.It contributes to understanding the nexus of law, religion, and politics in contemporary Egypt and beyond.It also intervenes thoughtfully in long-standing debates in Islamic legal studies.This review essay highlights some of the broader insights for socio-legal scholars working at the intersection of law, religion, and politics.The essay also covers the interventions that Scott makes in debates in Islamic legal studies, although these contributions will receive a less thorough treatment given the general socio-legal readership of Law & Social Inquiry.These twin tasks are no easy feat, given the sheer complexity of the period under study, the rich detail of Scott's analysis, and the space limitations of a review essay.It is a worthy challenge, however, not only because of the size and symbolic importance of Egypt in regional politics but also because the issues, tensions, and paradoxes explored in the book resonate to varying degrees with developments in many other countries.
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 | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| 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".