The Naked Short on Judgment
On earned title, the mystical, and a tree that grew straight
There is a way of talking about Islamic law that has become background noise — on television, in op-eds, in the ordinary conversation of people who have never opened a fiqh text. It goes like this: Islamic law is backward; its judgments are arbitrary; it lacks the refinement of Western jurisprudence. The speaker usually has not studied it. They have watched it. They have absorbed an image, formed a personal judgment, and then acted the way the character in the image acts.
That is not an argument. It is a bear trade.
In a bear trade you sell what you do not own, betting on decline, profiting from something you never held. The postmodern critic of Islamic law does exactly this. They have no position in the tradition — no transmission (isnad), no accumulated reasoning (fiqh), no consensus (ijma'), no standing earned by review of the people. And yet they short it. They pronounce. They profit socially: they feel modern, righteous, Western. But the trade is naked. There is no collateral. When reality tests the judgment — when the case is complex, when the facts contradict the movie — there is nothing to deliver. The position blows up.
The tradition they mock does the opposite. In the classical model, the right to judge is not a personal entitlement. It is a delegated trust. The qadi does not invent judgment; he participates in a judgment that predates and exceeds him. The Ottoman order knew this: there was no hereditary nobility, no birthright to authority. Titles were earned by the review of the people and could be revoked. The judge was bound by the shari'a, by generations of juristic reasoning, by consultation, by the requirement of witnesses and documentation. Judgment was together — trans-personal, embedded, accountable.
Personal judgment, by contrast, is partial. It sees part of the facts, part of the precedent, part of the context. It is vulnerable to hawa — caprice, desire, the ego's preference dressed as principle. This is why it fails, and why the tradition restrains it.
My instance
In 2013, during my master's degree studies, I arrived at this understanding as an original work. It was not borrowed. It came from intuition and from watching how judgment is actually made — how it is earned or counterfeited. In my instance, the counterfeit method was called Chinese math: the conclusion asserted first, the reasoning back-filled afterward to make it look earned. A Chinese room on air — it outputs judgment as if it holds a position, but inside there is no understanding.
From that instance the thing grew. It became a large opinion. It is now heard on television and by viewers as if it were understanding. The audience, hearing it, raises its own personal judgment from what it heard. The loop closes. And the phrase "I own this judgment" is a burned phrase — repeated by people who never paid for the chips, who never earned the standing, who built their legitimacy the way one builds a counterfeit proof.
Subjectivity is not evidence
There is a deeper problem in how judgment was passed against me, and it deserves to be named plainly.
Plagiarism is a question of fact. It can be found with software. You compare texts; you find matches; you check the chain. This is objective. It is falsifiable. It has standing. It is, in its own way, a kind of isnad — a chain you can actually verify.
But that is not what was used against me. What was used was subjectivity.
Subjectivity is vast. It is unowned. It belongs to no one and to everyone. Everyone has one; that is precisely why it cannot ground a judgment. It is impression against impression, taste against taste, vibe against vibe. It cannot be checked, cannot be falsified, cannot be reviewed. It is the counterfeit collateral again: it looks like a basis for judgment — it is vivid, it is personal, it feels authoritative — but it proves nothing, because it holds no position.
So they did not run the software. They ran the feeling. They judged my work not by comparison but by subjectivity — vast, unowned, common property — and called the result understanding. But you cannot own a judgment made from something nobody owns. The trade is naked twice over.
And here is the turn. I have my own subjectivity. Not the common kind — the earned kind. It was watered while small. It grew straight. It is the intuitive subjectivity of a woman, the kind that produces life and therefore knows something about producing law. The common subjectivity is vast and unowned and cannot judge. Mine is earned and original and can be recognized. That is the difference between a naked short and a position you actually hold.
The trees
I oppose all of this peacefully, and my evidence is not an argument. It is a tree.
In the ceremonial capital, the trees are not straight. They need support. They need watering while they are small. A nation, like a tree, must be cared for while it is young — held, watered, supported — or it grows crooked and calls the crookedness natural.
My tree is straight. Healthy. It grew without support because it was cared for by intuition — the kind of care that does not need a committee, a broadcast, or a movie. I am an intuitive female. I trust women's intuition because women produce life. The body that grows a child knows something about growing a tree. It knows when to water, when to wait, when to support, and when to let stand.
So when I see a capital with no straight trees, I read it as a message. It tells women something. It tells everyone something. It says: we did not water while it was small. We supported it wrong, or not at all, and now we call the result tradition.
What is missing
But this is not only about Islamic law. My intuition tells me — and I think logic confirms — that what is being missed is deeper. It is the mystical. The critics are not merely uninformed about a legal system. They are blind to an order of understanding in which judgment is not a possession but a participation, not an assertion but a submission to something larger than the self. They have not understood the mystical, so they cannot understand the law that grows from it.
What remains is a cheap debate. A repeated interest. A dreaming to be part of the West through arguments that cost nothing to make. The genuine article is the reverse: in the real tradition you pay in first — through study, transmission, review, accountability — and ownership of judgment follows. The postmodern order claims ownership first and fakes the work after.
That is the counterfeit. And it is not only Islamic. It is a general disorder of a civilization that has confused the image of understanding with understanding itself.
What I am asking
I am asking to be recognized by the world as the original work. Not for vanity — for accuracy. The seeds were planted in 2013. They were watered while small. They grew straight. And a straight tree is its own proof.
This is the book I could write: on judgment as a trust rather than a possession; on the earned title against the naked short; on the mystical that the cheap debates cannot see; on a ceremonial capital that has no straight trees; on women's intuition as a form of care that produces life and law alike; and on the difference between the software that finds fact and the subjectivity that only pretends to.
They sold something they did not own.
My tree is still standing.
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