Recognition of Non-Islamic Justice in the Works of Two Classical Islamic Political Thinkers: al-Ṭurṭūshī and Ibn Khaldūn
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The present paper examines the place of non-Islamic justice in two medieval Islamic political texts, Abū Bakr al-Ṭurṭūshī’s (d. 1126) Lamp of Kings (Sirāj al-Mulūk) and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn Khaldūn’s (d. 1406) Prolegomena (Muqaddima). By attempting to derive the principles of political justice through reason, and by repudiating claims that normative political values are solely derived from revelation, both thinkers commit to thoroughgoing recognition of non-Islamic forms of justice. As they formulate a pessimistic account of human nature, both contend that the principal objective of political justice is deterrence of innate human lawlessness. And since humans are deemed feeble and corruptible, they may settle for practical political solutions, even if outside the tradition of scripture and revelation. In the final analysis, this rationalist account is juxtaposed to the political aims of certain strands of modern traditionalism, where the role of reason is greatly minimized, if not completely subordinated to revelation. For fundamentalist revivalists, the categories of Islamic and non-Islamic societies intimate a striking opposition between just and unjust societies. While al-Ṭurṭūshī and Ibn Khaldūn also maintain a qualitative difference between Islamic and non-Islamic polities, their conclusions are markedly different from those of the modern traditionalists. The notion of justice they advance, which rests on a pessimistic thesis, results in a more intent recognition of non-Islamic political institutions and laws, irrespective of their creedal origins.
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".