Towards a Uyghur Theodicy?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores the new strands of an emerging theodicy among Uyghurs living in diaspora. This study is based on material collected from recorded discussions generated during online introductory classes on the Qur’an, and from interviews with Uyghur Imams residing in Canada and Turkey. The ongoing persecution of Muslims in the Uyghur Homeland by the Chinese government (recently recognized as a “genocide” by the governments of eight countries) has led many Uyghurs to attempt to explain these atrocities through an Islamic religious lens. Similar strategies have been noted in the Jewish theodicy that emerged in the wake of the Holocaust—where the suffering of victims of genocide were interpreted as either a divine test or punishment. Using to these new examples of theodical thinking found among Uyghurs living in the diaspora, we have crafted a typology of four different approaches to the problem of evil and suffering. These include the gnostic argument, the mythic argument, the apocalyptic argument, and the mystery argument. Special attention will be given to the mystery argument because it appears to be an incipient pastoral theodicy that poses a challenge to the test-or-punishment paradigm by valorizing political activism and emphasizes the intergenerational transmission of Uyghur identity. Affinities between Uyghur theodicy and certain Jewish Holocaust theodicies are explored, with a focus on covenantal paradigmatic thinking, the political quietism of Hasidic Hungarian borderland Grand Rabbis in the early 1940s, and the dynamic “broken theodicy” of Rabbi Kalonimus Kalman Shapiro.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
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 teacher head, 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".