‘The holy opacity of the organization of the pilgrimage’: comparing the state’s management of the hajj in contemporary Senegal and Cameroon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The logistics needed to bring Muslims to Mecca is mediated by the modern state, which has become an unescapable political actor in making possible this sacred duty. The literature has not fully explored how states have performed their role in the organization of the hajj in the contemporary era. This article compares the political organization of the hajj in Senegal and Cameroon since the early 1990s. Whereas the former has followed a more democratic trajectory, the latter is an electoral autocracy. We argue that the two states differ along three dimensions: first, whereas the state of Senegal deepened the institutionalization of the organization of the hajj, the Cameroonian state has intervened largely through informal practices. Second, the Senegalese state increasingly desecuritized the organization of the hajj, treating non-state actors as legitimate partners. By contrast, its Cameroonian counterpart has securitized non-state actors, seeing them as suspicious entities. Finally, Senegal legitimizes its role in the organization of the hajj by defining itself a provider of a public service and a partner of large Sufi brotherhoods, in contrast to Cameroon where the state stages the personal favours generously provided by the President to the pilgrims, in exchange for their loyalty.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".