Islamic legal theory and practice in the North American context: an epistemological and methodological analysis of the Fiqh council of North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The thesis explores the formation of the first official Islamic jurisprudential body in North America—the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA)—as it attempts to respond to the needs of Muslim minorities. The research examines whether the FCNA's legal methodology (minhaj) takes into consideration the development and use of Islamic legal theory, or whether the legal body employs contemporary legal approaches in navigating the intricacies of legal rulings (fatawa). The FCNA and its fatawa, in accommodating legal change, presents a unique object of analysis in order to contextualize the dynamics related to Islamic legal theory and practice in the North America context. The thesis intertwines two academic disciplines: legal institutional history and legal theory history. The theoretical legal background and foundation of the thesis is established in the introductory stages including the parameters of Islamic legal theory. Part I discusses the FCNA as a legal institution, its Fiqh Councilors, and its legal methodology, including the realization of fiqh of minorities (fiqh al-aqalliyyat). Part II engages in a circumspect examination of the fatawa, the FCNA's epistemological and methodological legal foundation, and a critical analysis as well as an evaluation of the status of the FCNA and its fatawa. The FCNA's historical and legal experience illuminates the evolution, history, and path of Islamic legal theory and practice in North America. The thesis concludes that the FCNA, a pioneering institution in North America, engages Islamic legal theory, while at times challenging the existing legal paradigm by way of contemporary legal approaches, in order to address the needs and concerns of Muslim minorities. From Islam's rich legal heritage, the Fiqh Councilors of the Fiqh Council of North America have shaped a contemporary legal body to meet the demands of its context, one that will continue to evolve in the years ahead.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".