AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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The Muwatta flips once
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
The Muwatta flips once. This connects recension competition with institutional canonization dynamics. Malik's Muwatta circulated in well over a dozen riwayat; today one, that of Yahya al-Laythi, simply is the Muwatta. The conjecture: recension shares do not drift smoothly toward a winner. They show punctuated equilibrium, long coexistence followed by a rapid flip when a teaching regime, here the Andalusi and Maghribi Maliki schools, institutionalizes one recension in its curriculum and mass-reproduces it, after which rivals persist only as antiquarian copies in the East. Canonization is an event in the copy record, not a trend, because madrasas replicate whichever exemplar the dominant lineage teaches from.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Among dated Muwatta manuscripts, the Laythi recension's share is below 60% for copies made before 500 AH but above 85% for copies made after 700 AH, the transition is concentrated within an interval of at most 150 years, and post-700 non-Laythi copies are disproportionately of eastern provenance. Primary clause: the post-700 AH Laythi share of at least 85% against the pre-500 AH share of at most 60%; the verdict follows it.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: FIHRIST and the Escorial-Derenbourg catalogue of Arabic manuscripts, the richest Andalusi-Maghribi collection, where Muwatta copies are catalogued with the riwaya identified.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture has been linked to the following subject pages on Inferpedia — an encyclopedia of the missing, now in limited preview.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries); 218-title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts/dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w03_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W03 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The Laythi recension's vulgate status via Andalusi/Maghribi institutionalization, against ~16 known recensions, is established (Fadel & Monette; Brockopp school), but the punctuated-equilibrium test on dated manuscript shares — coexistence below 60% pre-500 AH flipping above 85% post-700 within 150 years — is un-run.
Predictions
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