<i>God’s Other Book: The Qurʾān between History and Ideology</i> , By Mohammad Salama
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How best to approach sacred texts is a question that has long concerned scholars, ranging from diachronic approaches that search for origins and fragment scripture into small segments, and synchronic approaches that examine the text as-is and look for meaning. In God’s Other Book: The Qur’ān between History and Ideology, Mohammad Salama critiques Western scholarship’s preoccupation with the genesis of the Qur’an and its relationship to the Bible while insufficiently engaging with the text’s immediate context as discerned in pre-Islamic poetry. In some ways, Salama’s work recalls a similar debate in a cognate discipline—biblical studies—in which scholars also pushed back against the Documentary Hypothesis, a highly influential late nineteenth theory that approaches the Torah (first five books of the Bible, Pentateuch) as a collation of four source documents and that seeks to identify its compositional units, as opposed to viewing it as written by a single author, the prophet Moses. Although this theory continues to hold traction in more nuanced and revised forms, in the 1980s and 1990s, biblical scholars who were unsatisfied with it attempted to shift the focus to the Bible’s literary craftsmanship and poetic turn of phrase, thereby introducing a new paradigm. Although there are broad parallels (and significant differences) to developments in biblical scholarship, Salama’s emphasis is on the Arabicity of the Qur’an and the existence of a corpus of intertexts that are closer to the Qur’an linguistically, temporally, and geographically than the Bible, and that, accordingly, deserve more attention.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
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".