Chapter One. Situating the Study of Sufism in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter situates the fields of scholarship that inform my approach to the study of Sufism in Canada.First, I locate the study of Sufism in Canada within the field of Islam and Muslims in Canada.Any project that thinks and writes about Islam in Canada must start with an account of the first Muslims in Canada, who were enslaved or formerly enslaved Black peoples who had been forced from their African homeland by the transatlantic slave trade.Some of these first Black Muslims in Canada would likely have been the first Sufis.The following discussion is speculative and not the focus of this project; even so, it is vital to begin this account of Sufism and Islam in Canada by acknowledging this history, given that religious studies in Canada is too often framed as Eurocentric.Shifting the focus of the stories we tell is the first step in decolonizing the study of religion in Canada.I then examine how Islam and Muslims are viewed in Canada and locate the study of Sufism within these scholarly literatures (hint: it barely exists).I then explore other areas of study -diaspora, migration, and spirituality -as domains with which the field of Sufism intersects.These various discursive terrains will help locate this present case study, not only in the specific field of Sufism in Canada, which I think of as a subfield that crosses these various literatures, but also in popular spirituality, Islamic studies, and diaspora studies.This chapter then positions the study of Sufism in the global west, drawing from writings about Sufism in North America and western Europe.I examine how scholars have framed Sufism either capaciously or restrictively in their discourses and how this has informed approaches to categorizing various Sufi communities and their practices.Some of these frameworks resort to coded language to label contemporary Sufi communities.The scholarship on contemporary western Sufism overlaps with studies of Islam and Muslim societies and with non-Islamic traditions and popular spirituality.This scholarship ranges from Neoplatonic thought to perennialism and traditionalism, as forms of universalism, while conceptually restrictive studies of Sufism frame it only within Chapter One Situating the Study of Sufism in Canada
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.055 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
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".