Commemoration and devotion in the resurgence of contemporary Sufi communities in their homeland and western settings: descendants and followers of a medieval Sufi Saint in Syria and Cambridge, Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the resurgence of contemporary Sufi communities in Islamic and Western settings. Focusing on the descendants and followers of Shaykh ʿAqīl al-Manbijī, a medieval spiritual master and saint (d. 1155) in their Syrian homeland and Cambridge, Ontario, the examination offers insights into the confluence of three dimensions. The first refers to the hagiographical and historical traditions that perpetuate the memory and legacy of the long-gone shaykh and nourish the sacrality of his shrine. The second highlights the significance of the rituals performed by communities of the shaykh’s descendants and their followers in Syria to revitalise the spiritual tradition that centres on him and evoke a sense of collective identity. The third dimension, spatiality, fleshes out the role of the devotional spaces as arenas for commemorating the venerated shaykh and manifesting the beliefs and traditions that hold the homeland communities together. The form and location of the mosque established by his descendants in Cambridge and its use as a public devotional space and an Islamic learning centre allow us to see how the saint’s memory is inscribed, his spiritual tradition perpetuated and disseminated as an integral part of Islamic religiosity in a Western environment.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".