Dichotomy of Idealism and Realism: Islamic Legal Tradition between Modern and Postmodern Discourses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article introduces four major approaches and stages for the study of the history of Islamic law namely, (1) premodern Islamic legal tradition, (2) modern shari‘ah-inspired legal tradition, (3) modern academic discourses, and (4) postmodern academic discourses. Focusing on modern and postmodern Islamic legal discourses the article argues that in Orientalist discourse Islamic legal history has been cast in a dichotomy of idealism and realism with regard to both positive law (fiqh or Islamic law) and legal theory (usul al-fiqh). Reviewing the main points of this dichotomy, it is argued that Islamic law and legal theory have always been located in the real world and in specific social contexts. It is further argued that legal theory was always used in the development of positive law and therefore conceived prior to the development of positive law. However, it has been established through credible research that legal theory did not come in codified or single book form until after the positive law was developed. Arguments in the article are supported by discussion of five major points of contention in the dichotomy of idealism and realism viz. (a) foreign elements in Islamic law; (b) the right to legislate and double administration of justice; (c) siyasah shar‘iyyah; (d) codification; and (e) Islamic legal theory and its relevance to positive law.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".