Raphael Susewind

It's almost a year since I began working on a namematching algorithm to approximate Muslim population share in Lucknow's mohallas by exploiting the religious connotations of names on the electoral rolls of these areas. This has worked out quite well, and since led to a number of follow-up analyses, several conference papers, new collaborations, an article under review, two more in the pipeline - and last but not least the publication of a large dataset on religion and politics in Uttar Pradesh (featured in my second last post).

One thing kept worrying me, though: the scope of the algorithm varied quite a bit. Across UP's assembly constituencies, for instance, it sometimes managed to categorize 95% of the electorate - and sometimes only 70%. While accuracy of those names which were identified seemed alright, missings of up to a third were worrysome. Overwhelmingly, they however occured because names in the electoral rolls were simply not covered by indiachildnames.com. There is little I could do about that, I thought.

Whenever I discuss my name-matching algorithm and derivative work, one question comes up: how well does it work outside UP, at other times, for other groups of people? And: what if your test corpus of names (Haj pilgrims and SC students) were non-representative of wider names (a concern particularly strong with the SC list)? Unfortunately, I have no hard and fast answer to these questions; they bother me, too.

But now, I have fresh some indicators at least - drawn from work-in-progress by Francesca Jensenius and a team around Christophe Jaffrelot spearheaded by Gilles Verniers. They try to look into social profiles of MLAs in India since independence - and as a prerequisite came up with a list of the names of all contestants in all elections in all states. Unlike the SC names, this corpus is arguably more elite, and it moves beyond UP, thus nicely complementing my own. On the downside, this list neither includes gender nor fathers' names, and first names are frequently abbreviated - much less material for my algorithm to work with. Most importantly, I only have the bare names from them, not the manual classification (which, as I understand, is still work in progress - once this is done, I could calculate actual sensitivity, specificity, PPV and NPV).

First an apology to my readers: this "weekly blog" turned monthly ever since I started writing up this paper, that one, a resubmit and my PhD in general. Add to this Easter holidays and incessant networking now that I am back in Europe - you get the picture. More: I am afraid this state of affairs is likely to continue for a while. But one particular project reached a milestone worth reporting: sharing my dataset on religion and politics in Uttar Pradesh - under an open license.

Last week, I finally got around to digitize the old map of Lucknow's Shia and Sunni population, which an enthusiastic Census officer produced in 1961, and which I managed to acquire in full copy three days before I left India last December.1 Geocoding the scan and counting all the little dots (which represent 200 Shia or Sunni households) resulted in the following map of Shia population:

• 1. Census of India. (1961). Moharram in two cities (Lucknow and Delhi). In: Census monograph series, part VII-B: Fairs and festivals.

This past weekend, my wife and I participated in a conference on Islamic feminism - a theoretical and political interest of ours, reinvigorated during our year in Lucknow (see here for part of why). Midway through the first discussion, she leaned over and whispered: this (she meant incredibly stupid statements about the essence of man- and womanhood, about the "weaker sex" etc) is precisely what Sigmund Freud wrote, too (she truly is a psychotherapist in the making). Not much later, somebody complained that Muslim societies consider the family the most important social unit - and I had to think of conservative parties across Europe and the German principle of subsidiarity.

Our associations hint at a widespread problem in the discourse on women and Islam: what makes a deplorable patriarchic practice an Islamic one? The fact alone that it is justified with recourse to Quran, Sunna and Hadith? Or the mere fact that it occurs (more frequently, perhaps) in societies with many Muslim citizens? Would this not leave the definition of Islam to patriarchs, precisely something which we (and other Islamic feminists) should challenge? After all, patriarchs will take whatever source to justify themselves, if need be the local fast food menu card ("Chow mein causes rape")...