‘The holy opacity of the organization of the pilgrimage’: comparing the state’s management of the hajj in contemporary Senegal and Cameroon
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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.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 it