Mapping the Intellectual, Conceptual, and Latent Semantic Structures of Islamic Legal Philosophy (2004–2026)

An Integrated Biblioshiny Saas nd LDA Topic Modeling Study

Abstract

Global scholarship on Islamic legal philosophy has expanded rapidly over the past two decades, yet its intellectual foundations, conceptual architecture, and latent semantic themes remain fragmented across classical jurisprudence and applied socio-legal domains. This study maps the global research landscape of Islamic legal philosophy from 2004 to 2026 by integrating the Biblioshiny Search-Appraisal-Analysis-Synthesis (SAAS) science mapping workflow with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling. A corpus of 175 English-language peer-reviewed articles and reviews (containing 7,815 cited references across 100 journals) was retrieved from the Scopus database and subjected to rigorous transliteration normalization. Results reveal a compound annual growth rate of 19.46%, surging between 2021 and 2026, with Indonesia (58.3%) and Malaysia (10.8%) leading global production and Samarah serving as the primary Bradford core outlet. Reference spectroscopy (RPYS) and co-word clustering demonstrate a paradigm shift from classical uṣūl al-fiqh formalism toward systemic maqāṣid al-sharī‘ah. Furthermore, Gibbs-sampled LDA topic modeling identifies six coherent latent domains: epistemological hermeneutics (24.0%), meta-ethics and human rights (17.7%), sustainable Islamic economics (17.1%), family law and local customs (16.0%), digital and AI governance (13.1%), and substantive penal justice (12.0%). Integrating teleological legal theory with algorithmic and ecological governance constitutes the field’s foremost frontier.