This study aims to visualize the network of scholars during the period of Islamic reform thought and to decipher its trends. The Islamic religion, which emerged in the 7th century with the Prophet Muhammad, quickly and immediately established the holy book, the Qur'an. The hadith, a collection of sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was collected around the 9th century and became a book. Today’s Islamic jurisprudence is established by Islamic reform thought that spread from the Arabian Peninsula to various regions after the 17th century. The coexistence or conflict between the laws of a state or international law and Islamic law is one of the challenges of modern society, and it is important to clarify historically why Islamic jurisprudence in its present form was formed.
Islamic reform thought began to take shape around the 17th century in the holy cities of Makkah and Madinah on the Arabian Peninsula. The Ottoman and Mughal governments provided money and an academic environment in these holy cities, and Muslims from all over the world came to study in them. John Voll has shown that hadith scholarship and mysticism were the two main fields of study in the two holy cities during the formative period of Islamic reformism. He pointed out the influence of the Malik school of jurisprudence followed by North African scholars as the reason why mysticism was rejected and hadith studies were emphasized. Azyumardi Azra then showed a general picture of the master-disciple relationship during the formative period of Islamic reform thought, focusing on scholars from Southeast Asia who visited both holy cities, utilizing biographical materials. The present author visualized the diagram made by Azra so that the hubs of the master-disciple relationship network would be obvious, and also visualized the bias of the information toward those from Southeast Asia. A scholar located in the center of the network does not always play a central role in reality. In some cases, the master-disciple relationship of a scholar has been examined in detail, it may have a greater number of edges in the network. Attention should also be given to the influence of the place and date in which the sources were written.
For example, biographies that are contemporary sources for the formative period of Islamic reform thought include Khulāṣat al-athār by al-Muḥibbī (1651-1699), a biography of scholars who died in the 17th century; Silk al-durar by al-Murādī (d. 1791) for scholars who died in the 18th century. This study would like to examine how much bias exists among the scholars included in these biographies, depending on the origin and position of the authors, and whether this bias can be corrected by comparing multiple biographies. In the biography of al-Muḥibbī, the description of scholars from Damascus is the largest, accounting for 10% of the total, even though previous studies have pointed out the great influence of the Malik School of Law from North Africa. As for the legal school, the number of Shafi'i Law School shares the largest (45%), and the Malik School shares only 10%. Al-Murādī's biography confirms that the relative importance of the North African origin appears to be declining, as well. A lthough the two biographies confirm that the hub of the network is located in two holy cities, Makkah and Madinah, it can be inferred that there was a transition in the nature of the network in the approximately 100 years between the two biographies. The diversity of scholars' origins, and the shift in the relative number, may provide clues for considering the formation of Islamic reformist thought. It also needs to reconsider the role of scholars from Damascus and Shafi'i jurists, whose roles. The importance of traditional and famous cities such as Damascus is so obvious that we may have been too attached to the idea that the changes of this period came from new locations.
Finally, to facilitate research on Arabic biographies in the future, the application of NER (Named Entity Recognition) will be examined. To collect the place of origin in the names of scholars, both the human eye method and the NER method are adopted. By improving the accuracy of NER, a quick overview of information on other biographies from the same period will be accomplished. Even from the names of scholars listed in the index or assigned headings in the text, information on their place of origin and legal school can be obtained. The more information on scholars collected, the more biographical material can be overviewed in a short time, and it is expected that we will be able to clarify scholars featured in many biographies, their narrative overlaps, and the transmission paths of their traditions.