Bibliographic record
Abstract
What does it mean to be a Shiʿi Muslim? What is the civilizational legacy of a faith practiced by over 150 million people across the world? In this course, we explore the vibrant history, thought, and institutions of the Shi'i interpretation of Islam. We will study the early Shiʿi milieu, Zaidi, Ismaʿili and Twelver schools of interpretation, and the development of Shiʿism from early to modern times. The course is structured as an adventure. Each module is called a “Caravan Journey” and units within the modules are “Serais.” In the Muslim world, Serais were bustling stopping places that supported the flow of information, commerce, and people across trade routes through much of Asia, North Africa, and Southeast Europe. Writing about his experience at one such Caravanserai in China (known as a funduq), the famous Muslim traveler Ibn Battutah observed: “China is the safest and best country for the traveller. A man travels for nine months alone with great wealth and has nothing to fear. What is responsible for this is that in every post station in their country is a funduq which has a director living there with a company of horse and foot…. He sends someone with the travellers to conduct them to the next post station and he brings back a certificate from the director of the funduq confirming that they have all arrived. If he does not do this he is answerable for them. This is the procedure in every post station in their country from Sin al-Sin to Khan Baliq. In them is everything the traveller needs by way of provisions, especially hens and geese” (Gibb and Beckingham 1994, 893-894). Similarly, at each of our Serais, we provide our student travelers with all they need by way of provisions, though perhaps no hens or geese. With the guides and guidebooks we make available to them, we enable them to cross all their Serais to then board the next Caravan, safe and sound, certificates in hand. Caravan Journeys include readings and multimedia, pedagogical activities, and assessments. They provide rich, engaging, student-centered experiences for learners. Over forty outstanding content and education specialists, artists, musicians, filmmakers, and expert consultants have assisted me to develop these materials. To the extent possible, the journey represents the dynamic pluralism of Shiʿi, showcasing diversity in terms of region, history, schools of interpretation, and gender. It incorporates both primary and secondary sources and goes beyond texts to incorporate video, sound, and images. Many living artists and musicians have contributed to the project. The Caravan Journeys in this course on Shiʿi Islam include: 1. Studying Shiʿism 2. Spiritual Ethos 3. Early Shiʿism 4. History 5. People of the House 6. ʿAlid Devotion Beyond Shiʿism 7. Devotional Traditions 8. Art and Architecture 9. Leadership: Modern Times 10. Civic Engagement 11. Rituals 12. Revelation: Outer Form and Inner Meaning 13. Apologetics and Polemics 14. Wisdom and Walayah
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.097 | 0.044 |
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".