A Topic Modelling of Muslim Religious Reform in the Colonial Age: A Computational and Digital Study of _al-Manār_ (1898-1935)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present paper is a test case of how far computational sciences and Islamic and Arabic studies can be “partners” in answering cultural-religious and historical questions related to the Arab and Muslim world. The paper mainly discusses methods that could help us computationally track, quantify, and explain the development of religious concerns of reform as reflected in the well-known Muslim reformist journal _al-Manār_ (Lighthouse), published by the Muslim reformer Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (1865-1935) from 1898 until 1935 in Cairo. We employ quantitative and qualitative methods based on _al-Manār_-corpus by using morphological processing, topic modeling in order to examine the thematic co-occurrences of the topics and lexemes pertaining to Muslim thinking and societies in Riḍā’s time.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
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 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".