When Interpretation Hardens: Epistemic Authority, Asymmetric Revisability, and Conflict in Muslim Knowledge Regimes

This article develops a sociology-of-knowledge account ofhow human religious interpretation can become unusu-ally resistant to correction and, under specific politicalconditions, contribute to conflict persistence. It beginsfrom a distinction that is doctrinally elementary butsociologically consequential: revelation, human interpre-tation, and institutional authority are not equivalentforms of knowledge. Yet these layers may become so-cially compressed as interpretive judgments are certifiedby institutions, accumulate symbolic and epistemic au-thority, and become increasingly costly to question. Icall this process epistemic hardening. The concept doesnot designate religious authority, orthodoxy, taqlid, doc-trinal certainty, or sacred commitment as such. Itsobject is narrower: the declining social revisability ofhuman interpretive claims. The article’s primary rela-tional contribution is asymmetric revisability: the direc-tionally unequal practical capacity to question, correct,reinterpret, classify, or demand justification. Advancedhardening can sediment such asymmetry into durableinterpretive stratification and can, under some condi-tions, shift legitimate moral delegation toward protectedmoral displacement. In conflict settings, these processescan contribute to conflict closure: a reduced capacity totransform disagreement through correction, translation,and mutually intelligible contestation. The argumentextends Galtung’s account of cultural violence while dis-tinguishing hardening from the established literature onsacred-value intractability: the sacredness of a value isanalytically different from the institutional protectionof one human interpretation of that value. Drawing onthe sociology of knowledge, sociology of interpretation,boundary-work, symbolic power, epistemic injustice, re-ligious authority, Islamic legal history, and scholarshipon the politics of religious knowledge, the article treatsThailand as a critical case because Muslim authorityoperates there without an Islamic state and amid over-lapping minority, state, educational, and transnationalstructures. It concludes by identifying falsifiable proposi-tions, empirical indicators, and a de-hardening researchagenda. It also proposes faqr, understood narrowly as adiscipline of human insufficiency before God, as one pos-sible internal Islamic resource for preserving authoritywithout converting human interpretation into epistemicclosure.