Enemies get quoted, allies get paraphrased

Claim (verbatim)

Enemies get quoted, allies get paraphrased: in kalam and falsafa, measurable text-reuse binds an author more tightly to the opponents he refutes than to his own school's masters, because refutation obligates verbatim quotation — the opponent must be pinned to his exact wording before demolition — while agreement licenses free paraphrase. If so, reuse-network methods systematically misread polemical proximity as doctrinal affiliation, and the tightest textual dyads in Islamic thought should be refuter-refuted pairs across school lines, not master-disciple pairs within them.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Using pairwise passim alignments over the relevant corpora, normalize aligned reuse by source size. Primary clause: Fakhr al-Din al-Razi's normalized reuse of Ibn Sina's corpus, which he criticizes, exceeds his normalized reuse of his own Ash'arite lineage (al-Juwayni plus al-Ghazali) by at least 2 to 1; the verdict follows this clause. Secondary clause: at least two further refuter-refuted dyads (e.g. Ibn Rushd on al-Ghazali in the Tahafut exchange) similarly out-score the corresponding intra-school dyads.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the KITAB project's publicly released passim text-reuse datasets over the OpenITI corpus, which include the Razi, Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, and al-Juwayni corpora.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The obligation to pin an opponent to his exact wording before refutation is a known feature of kalam/falsafa polemic (e.g., al-Razi's tradition of quoting Ibn Sina in the Sharh al-Isharat exchanges), and corpus-scale Arabic reuse detection exists. The normalized refuter-versus-own-lineage reuse ratio and the 'reuse networks misread polemic as affiliation' test are un-run.

• Fakhr al-Din al-Razi's critical engagement with Ibn Sina and Tusi's counter-refutation tradition

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.