Critical Edition, Translation, and Analysis of Shams al-Din al-Samarqandıī’s al-Risāla al-Sharīfa [fī al-Kalām]
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Shams al-Dīn Muhammad b. Ashraf al-Husaynī al-Samarqandī was an important Turkish Islamic scholar who lived in Turkistan at the end of the 7th/13th century and the first quarter of the 8th/14th century, passing away on 22 Shawwal 722 (November 3, 1322). His works proved his expertise in the rational and natural sciences, to which he made significant contributions. Biographical books provide limited information about Samarqandī’s life and make no mention of his treatise on theology (kalām). After examining the language, content, and copies of the relevant manuscripts, however, he is concluded to have written a treatise on theology. We analyze the content of the treatise in question here and put forward Samarqandī’s theological views in the context of his treatise. We have access to three copies of the treatise in question. Based on various presumptions, we have taken the copy in Suleymaniye Library registered under Laleli 2432, which we think was dictated by al-Samarqandī, as the basis of our analysis. We have indicated the differences this manuscript has with the one in Suleymaniye Library registered under Cārullah 1247 and the other copies in Suleymaniye Library registered under Ayasofya 4800 in the footnotes. To preserve the technical terms of the treatise, we have translated it as faithfully as possible and paid attention to expressing the issues in understandable [English]. In his treatise, al-Samarqandī analyzes the views of the Ahl al-Sunna regarding whether God has the same or different attributes as His essence, the identity of the names (ism) and the named (musammā), and the existence of the atom (al-jawhar al-fard). By analyzing these issues, al-Samarqandī reduces the disagreements about the relationship between essence and attribute and between the names and the named to a literal dispute. In addition, he acknowledges the existence of the atom in the context of theoretical physics and in accordance with the general theological understanding and presents his original evidence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.050 | 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 teacher head, 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".