From Imminent Threat to Metaphor: Gog and Magog in Modern Sunnī Sources
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Gog and Magog are portrayed in the Quran as two malevolent forces that once wreaked havoc on earth and will reappear near the end of time. Hadiths elaborate their natures and actions and served as the principal source for premodern Muslim treatment of the two. In the modern period, Gog and Magog have, besides remaining objects of Quran exegesis, received considerable attention from apocalyptic writers. This article contributes to current scholarship on the modern Muslim discourse on Gog and Magog by examining the views of some notable Sunnī Quran commentators, which have thus far been almost entirely neglected. I show that they adopt either a literal interpretation, whereby Gog and Magog are understood as certain humans, or a metaphorical interpretation, whereby they are conceived as symbols of various phenomena. I also survey, in contrast to most previous researchers, the ideas of several non-Arab writers, especially the Trinidadian Imran Nazar Hosein (b. 1942), author of several apocalyptic works, including a book on Gog and Magog and their dominance in today’s world. My discussion highlights the remarkable diversity of perspectives among Muslim scholars as well as the tendency to demythologize Gog and Magog by either avoiding hadiths or understanding them in light of contemporary circumstances.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".