Unearthing and representing women scholars through Tabaqãt works
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis brings a corrective to the secondary literature that addresses women's participation in the Islamic intellectual tradition in premodern Islamic societies.While some studies have discounted the role of women in Islamic intellectual production, other studies have affirmed that large numbers of women obtained advanced training in religious sciences in the premodern era, especially in adth studies.This latter observation has depended predominately or entirely on positivist readings of abaqt sources (biographical dictionaries) as historical data. 1 They have noted particular chronological trends in the levels of women's educational participation.Specifically, they have described women's education to be limited from roughly the mid eighth to eleventh centuries and flourishing from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries.I investigate this characterization of a chronological fluctuation against the backdrop of the abaqt source(s) consulted.To do this, I consider the existing scholarship on the abaqt form, and draw attention to the evolving nature of this source, providing context for changes in its intention, content and form.I highlight how these textual evolutions impacted women's representations within them.By connecting the observed trends in women's educational opportunities to observed trends in the written record that depicts them, I draw attention the limitations of positivist readings of abaqt sources for the retelling of women's lives.Chronological shift in levels of Muslim women's religious education, as depicted in the secondary literature, reflect changes in the primary sources employed by these studies rather than women's lived realities.Faced with the inadequacy of positivist readings of biographical materials for the history of women in Islamic intellectual thought, I offer instead other critical ways of reading these dictionaries through the lens of their evolution and transformation.I locate points of silence, where women are conspicuously absent, and provide novel avenues for reconstructing women's histories at these moments of silence.By highlighting the textual basis for women's shifting representations in abaqt sources, I raise queries about the historiography of the study of women in premodern Muslim societies at large.I end with a discussion of the importance of fully incorporating women's history into the greater project of modern historical writing.source of guidance, support, and friendship.Thank you for your patience, time, and valuable feedback.
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.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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