MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4414525265 · doi:10.1111/plar.70026

Canadian Sharia: A Semi‐Autonomous Social Field

2025· article· en· W4414525265 on OpenAlexaffabout
Katherine Lemons, Rehan Sayeed, Halima Bensaid

Bibliographic record

VenuePoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicIslamic Studies and History
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAdjudicationEthnographyMulticulturalismPerspective (graphical)Pluralism (philosophy)Legal pluralismReligious diversity

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

ABSTRACT Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted in a “sharia court” ( dar ul‐iftaa ) in Canada, we argue these religiously binding legal institutions supplement provincial courts by providing a necessary service to pious Muslim women: religiously authorized divorce. Drawing on and developing Sally Falk Moore's concept of the semi‐autonomous social field, we suggest that dar ul‐iftaas in Canada are shaped by three significant forces: a particular variant of Hanafi divorce law, women's need for religious divorce, and the broader Canadian legal landscape. Attending to practices of adjudication in dar ul‐iftaas therefore provides a new perspective on contemporary practices of legal pluralism and on the place of religious law in a multicultural state.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.076
Threshold uncertainty score0.552

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0030.005
Science and technology studies0.0230.013
Scholarly communication0.0050.001
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.344
Teacher spread0.325 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venuePoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology ReviewSame topicIslamic Studies and HistoryFrench-language works237,207