Talk:History of Islam/Archive 1

Sections 5-17 (except 12.1) are completely off topic. This article is titled "History of Islam". Islam as a religious belief has changed very little since its inception, and the mention of anything dated after the second Fitna is a dead giveaway that the writers of this article are idiots. -20721 —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 65.80.39.192 (talk • contribs) 7 Sept 2005.

I'm not sure where, but it seems like a history of Islam should mention the Qur'an and Haddith somewhere. Danny

The first sentence is not quite true. The Meccans were settled arabs. Also, the part on the Shiite-Sunnite controversions should be moved out of the article, but I don't know where. Lev 19:57, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Muhammad lists Muhammad's date of birth as circa 570, while this one lists it as 571. I know it's not a big difference (especially because of the "circa"), but I think we should choose one or the other. Kagredon 01:08, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Muhammad was born in the Year of the Elephant which most Muslims equate with the Western year 570 but some Muslims equate with 571. See Islamic calendar#Numbering the years. — Joe Kress 23:29, Oct 9, 2004 (UTC)

link to Islamism

How is a disputed article Islamism relevant to History of Islam page? OneGuy

I didn't even know it was disputed. Hadn't looked at it, was going totally by its topic. I don't think that the fact that it is currently disputed has any bearing on whether it's a relevant link: we wouldn't fail to link the word if it came up in a sentence, just because the article is currently a mess. I just went and looked for a more appropriate link for the matter, but Political Islam is just a redirect to Islamism. And looking at Islamism, the dispute is just about POV, not factual matters. It's certainly a closely related topic. Is there any objection to the link other than the current state of that article? -- Jmabel | Talk 23:12, Nov 10, 2004 (UTC)

How about Islam as a political movement? So there is a dispute going on (or was going on) between Islamism and that article. Both articles are dealing with the same subject and calling the other one POVOneGuy 04:32, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I was unaware of that article. Fine by me. I hope they link to each other... -- Jmabel | Talk 07:22, Nov 11, 2004 (UTC)

They don't link. Each claims the other is POV OneGuy 07:39, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Opps Islam as a political movement does link OneGuy 07:40, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Dynasties

OneGuy, I notice that in your recent and clearly mainly beneficial reworking of the list of Muslim dynasties the following were removed without comment:

• Banu Salih
• Almoravid

I'm guessing you had a good reason for this, you clearly know this topic better than I, but I'd appreciate knowing why these were removed: if nothing else, it will provide a basis on which people can revert re-addition of inappropriate material later. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:18, Nov 24, 2004 (UTC)

I added the second one. Regarding Kingdom of Nekor, the first paragraph says, " The Kingdom ... was founded by .. Salih I ibn Mansur al-Himyari in 710 AD, by (Abbasid) Caliphal grant."

There was no Abbasid Caliph in 710. Does that make any sense? OneGuy 00:01, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Certainly makes sense that there was no Abbasid Caliph in 710. Sounds like that article has a serious problem, no? -- Jmabel | Talk 02:30, Nov 25, 2004 (UTC)

Fair enough. I goofed. Most of Kingdom of Nekor I took directly from Ibn Khaldun, though, simply summarizing his material, and you're welcome to fact check it. - Mustafaa 02:48, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

So, Mustafaa, should Banu Salih be listed as a Muslim dynasty? -- Jmabel | Talk 02:55, Nov 25, 2004 (UTC)

I think so - a very minor one, doubtless, but certainly Muslim. - Mustafaa 03:30, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

recently anonymously deleted

The following was recently anonymously deleted.

In Lebanon open warfare erupted between, among many other religious factions, Sunni and Shi'a. In Iraq, the secular Sunni Baathist government oppressed the Shi'a majority. However with the fall of Saddam Hussein the Shi'a majority are now calling for more political power in the new Iraqi government. In Iran the religious Shi'a majority has made life difficult for Sufi, Sunni and other Muslims. In Saudi Arabia, the religious Sunni majority has made life difficult for Shi'a Muslims.

It seems entirely accurate to me. One could question whether it is appropriate material, but deletion of this without comment seems completely inappropriate. I leave it to someone else to decide whether to restore, just pointing it out. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:55, Nov 30, 2004 (UTC)

I agree that it is entirely accurate. However, I can also see the argument that its placement in the article is anachronistic. - Mustafaa 23:55, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Iran/Persia

In the historical context of this article, is it really appropriate to link "Persia" to Iran? -- Jmabel | Talk 06:28, Apr 16, 2005 (UTC)

Start of major revision

I spent time I should NOT have spent <g> redoing some of the earlier sections, which were rife with inaccuracy. I am not satisfied with the result, but it's better than the previous version. I removed a lot of extraneous detail, which is better covered in articles with a narrower focus. I have referenced those articles when I know that they exist. I need to work on the REST of the article, but it's late and I still have some work to do.

The article as it stands seems to be a political history of Islam, and completely ignores the religious, literary, economic, etc. etc. aspects. Those should at least be mentioned, if not put in first place.

I would like to turn the article into an outline, or pointer to more detailed articles. There is no way to treat such an enormous subject properly in one article. Zora 10:02, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

• A generally good set of edits, but one piece of "extraneous detail" that you have removed, which seems to me not to be extraneous detail at all, is the name of Muhammad's first wife, through whose wealth he became a wealthy man. All it takes is one word. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:48, May 8, 2005 (UTC)

But why? What does that one name add, aside from extra detail? It's available to anyone who looks at the Muhammad article, or even the Islam article. If we put in too much detail, the reader is going to get MEGO (my eyes glaze over). But if it's just one word ... I guess I won't fuss <g>. I put in some battle names, about which I had doubts. Zora 23:12, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

These days, "West" apparently = "good guys"

....as in "the virtuous, familiar home team that beat the Soviet Union and has now advanced to the finals against Islam."

I may be in the minority among Muslims who find this "West vs. East" phrasing to be distracting and misleading, but I know I'm not alone. Ingrid Mattson has spoken eloquently on the point. Geography has nothing to do with this. Sicily is in the "West" and was a Muslim culture for a time, Spain is in the "West" and was Muslim for even longer, Dearborn, Michigan is in the "West" and has had a thriving Muslim community for nearly a century.

If "West" is a marker for "people who think normally, like us," I think it's problematic here.

The phrase seems to me to be an example of systemic bias. Any objections to my editing it out and replacing it with something more specific (like "majority cultures in contemporary North America, Australia, and Europe" or some such)? BrandonYusufToropov 2 July 2005 09:26 (UTC)

Because West is shorthand for exactly what you want to say? Only one syllable instead of twenty-three? I agree that it's not the best phrase. I wrote a clothing article and ended up using International standard business attire which is clunky, but it seems wrong to say Western when Japanese businessmen wear suits like a uniform. Pomo folks use "hegemonic", but that puts my teeth on edge. How about defining "West" at the start of the article to mean "majority cultures ...." and adding "and outposts in capitals and commercial centers all over the world"?

Ages ago, when I did my anthropological fieldwork in Tonga, I woke up one morning to the sound of Vili splitting coconuts with an axe, so that he could dry the nuts in the sun and collect the dried meat as copra. My thoughts followed the chain: he's going to take the copra into Pangai, and sell it for cash, which he will use to buy imported flour, and pay school fees for his son. The son will get a Western-style education, which, if he's smart (he wasn't) could be used as a springboard to fame and affluence in the West. At which point that I realized that the apparently "authentic and unspoiled" village in which I was living, on the island of Kauvai in the Ha'apai archipelago, in the middle of the Pacific, was actually hooked into Wallerstein's "world system" and I would be NUTS to pretend that it was a uncorrupted remnant of a pre-Western past.

Now do you really want to replace "Western" in the previous para with 23 syllables? Zora 2 July 2005 11:05 (UTC)

Well, my proposal is a little cumbersome, I admit. But the point I'm getting at is this: It's an utterly artificial distinction. There are huge Muslim communities in France, UK, etc. When we use this "shorthand" I think we are buying into one side of an increasingly important argument, namely, whether Islam is fundamentally different and foreign to the values of the US and Europe. I firmly believe it is not. Even defining "West" up front as meaning "majority cultures ..." and then using "West" in the article seems to me to support the (prevalent and, in my view, delusional) belief that Islam had, and has, nothing to do with a) pluralism or b) the history of Europe.

The whole "tensions between East and West" thing feels much too close to the Cold War model to me. I'd rather the article pointed out that non-Muslims in areas where people speak European languages are very often uneasy about the intentions of the Muslims with whom they live as neighbors. If it takes a few extra syllables to get that idea across without perpetuating a false dichotomy, my sense is that it would be worth it, but I'm obviously eager to hear other people's thoughts on this as well.

I had a friend in college whose dad worked in the nuclear power industry. One day I said to her, "I suppose you're pro-nuke then, eh?" She gave me the dirtiest look -- and rightly so, becuase I had labeled her according to the dichotomy I had already established in my mind about what her father did for a living, a dichotomy that had nothing to do with her decisions, a dichotomy I had just used to saddle her with a pejorative. "I'm not pro-nuke," she said icily, "but I am an intelligent person who's quite capable of doing a little research and making up my own mind on issues like this." I've never forgotten that exchange, and it's certainly been on my mind a lot in the last few years. When we make a black/white assumption about the nature of a disagreement (West/East, anti-nuke/pro-nuke) and then pick our terminology based on our own assessment of what the disagreement is, we are, whether we realize it or not, making a political statement about the groups of people we label. When I hear how "the West" is having problems with Islam, I feel like I've just been exiled, on false pretenses, from my own history. BrandonYusufToropov 2 July 2005 15:54 (UTC)

I'm open to a change in terminology, but I'm afraid we'd end up either with something like your 23-syllable phrase, or a neologism, and we might not be able to convince other people to use them. Suggestions? Zora 2 July 2005 19:13 (UTC)

Sicily is in the "West" and was a Muslim culture for a time, Spain is in the "West" and was Muslim for even longer, Dearborn, Michigan is in the "West" and has had a thriving Muslim community for nearly a century. Sicily was occasionally raided by some Muslim pirates from North Africa. Spain was conquered and subjugated by the Moors, until they were defeated and expelled by the indegenous population. But your point about Dearborn, Michigan is interesting. Projected population trends in the Netherlands predict that Muslims will soon be the voting majority in that Western nation-state. --Zeno of Elea 19:42, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

"When I hear how "the West" is having problems with Islam, I feel like I've just been exiled, on false pretenses, from my own history." BrandonYusufToropov, that's because Islam is an Arab religion with its own history and has historically been at war with the West. Just because you happen to be a white convert to Islam and are feeling "exiled" from "your" history is not enough reason to not differentiate between Western civilization and Islamic civilization. --Zeno of Elea 19:51, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

"Western" in this sense is fundamentally ambiguous and the exact meaning depends on context. In an article primarily about, say, Buddhism, Islamic culture is as western as northern european culture. Because "western" can be contrasted with Islamic culture in some cases, and can include Islamic culture in other cases, we ought to avoid using the word in this article whenever we can possibly phrase things accurately and succinctly without it. --Eric Forste (talk) 20:30, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Islam is not the same as Western civilization from a Budhist perspective. Perhaps you have misunderstood the widely known specific usage of the phrase - it is explained in the article Western civilization. It does not literally mean "everything that's west of our present location." By your literally circular argument, Eastern civilization is Western civilization from a Western perspective. --Zeno of Elea 20:52, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

No one is saying that Islam is the same as Western civilization. It is however the case that Islam is historically understood as part of Western civilization, insofar as it is meaningful (and it is) to refer to the Western civilization that existed before 600 CE. Works that deal only with recent history will contrast Islam with the West, but this article is not titled Recent history of Islam or Modern history of Islam, it is History of Islam. --Eric Forste (talk) 22:20, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

It seems to me that The West is being used here in the way that, 300 years ago, someone might have used "Christendom", thus excluding, for example, Spain during its period of Muslim rule from the concept. -- Jmabel | Talk 17:55, July 31, 2005 (UTC)

Golden Age of Islamic Philosophy

Shouldn't their be something in this article about the medieval Aristoteleans, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd? --Christofurio 13:49, July 21, 2005 (UTC)

ethics of expansion

There's a lot here (correctly) about the Islamic expansion in the early centuries. But (especially perhaps given the current debates about jihad &c) should there not be something about the political/ethical ideas behind the expansion at the time? Mark O'Sullivan 19:58, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

Value of ON content and quality of reference

The content added from the ON reference remains in this article, but the reference has been removed. This action is disputed and a conversation is ongoing here. Uriah923 06:19, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

• Actually, I do not believe the content remains. I added the link (Will Waddell, A Concise History of Islam) because someone plagiarized the article. I found it by a Google search looking for the source of what I correctly suspected to be plagiarized material. It looked to be a decent article, so I added it to the external links (not the references) and removed the plagiarized material from the article. What is the problem someone has with the article? I'm not interested in being dragged into a general conversation about ON, only about this particular link, which is what should matter here. Or is the issue simply that ON is so problem-riddled that even an apparently decent article should not be trusted? Is this like dealing with a Larouchie site? Or what? -- Jmabel | Talk 17:03, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

• Yes, that's basically the problem. If you do follow Uriah's contributions, it becomes extraordinarily clear that he cares more about getting as many links to ON from Wikipedia as possible than improving Wikipedia quality. Despite being asked many many times to stop, he has continued trying to get links to ON. Even to the point of spreading the conversation like this to many talk pages to avoid the consensus against him. So yes, unfortunately the user has created a problem that means the links should be avoided (including removing the above link and pointing to the page history to avoid aiding their SEO). Ill gotten gains should not be allowed or we are just encouraging the exploitation of Wikipedia by SEO practitioners. The general opinion is that the link isn't of high enough quality to override that consensus and that the article would be better off with a five minute search for higher quality references. External links don't help much unless they are to the most prominent sites on a topic or as a weak form of reference. As I and others have said the latter could be done better with other sources. - Taxman ^Talk 17:38, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

• I hesitate to say anything because Taxman has threatened to block me for making the post on Jmabel's talk page, but the situation is so obviously biased that I can't refrain. It is hopefully inconsistent for Taxman to question the quality or usefulness of the article in question. It is of higher quality than most (if not all) of the external links currently in the article as evident by its content, references and presentation. Uriah923 19:36, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

• Well the consensus is that it is not of high enough quality to serve as a reference and due to the SEO and linkspam implications we should avoid it as an external link. Those two things are not contradictory. The reasons for your block are clear on your talk page and where the consensus was established. And yes you are flirting with violating Wikipedia policy again by continuing the discussion. Anyone can weigh in on the issue in the relavent place, and that is not here. - Taxman ^Talk 19:46, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

Mongol Invasion

A section about Mongol Invasion ( most importantly Hulagu Khan ) should be added here, as it proved to be a turning point for islamic culture , the start of its downfall .Farhansher 20:59, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

Definetly. The section should exist. -- Svest 21:12, 13 September 2005 (UTC)  ^{Wiki me up&#153;}

pov

I dont know whos pov, but this is pov:

"Nonetheless the new religion penetrated deeply, to the point where conversions were discouraged since they might have been motivated by avoiding taxes, rather than true belief, and choosing a religion should override such economic concerns."

Ask a Shia and he will say that it was since Umayyads didnt care about Islam, rather money, and therefore did not want converts, since that meant less taxes. --Striver 20:41, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

Thank you Zora! --Striver 01:24, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

nepotism

anon wrote in the article:

Whichever person wrote that Uthman (RA) favored his family over others, is not worth talking to. Uthman was a SAHABA. you can never degrade a sahaba. And by the way, Uthman did NOT favor his family, over others.

A good example of sunnis beliving in the uprightness of all Sahaba.--Striver 15:24, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

further elaboration

i would like further elaboration on scientific and technological developments of various muslim empires, perhaps this is in a seperate article, in which case ignore this request. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.36.18.146 (talk • contribs) 12 Dec 2005.

Centers of learning

This edit changed "Great centers of learning, conquered by Islamic armies, became Islamic centers of culture and science and produced notable scientists…" to "Arabs made many Islamic centers of culture and science and produced notable scientists…". My own guess (without expertise) is that it is a mix of the two. Certainly, North Africa had a long history of scholarship before it was Arab; in the late years of the Western Roman empire, the more intellectual side of the development of Christianity was largely (though by no means exclusively) on the south side of the Mediterranean. I'm not sure how much of that was intact when the Arabs got there.

Both sides here are making their claims without citation. I'd really like to see some citation on this. -- Jmabel | Talk 19:18, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

You are right Jmabel. But I think the sentence is talking about official centers of learning such as Qarawiyin and Al Azhar in North Africa. I believe that the second claim is more accurate. Cheers -- Svest 19:45, 12 December 2005 (UTC)  ^{Wiki me up&#153;}

Effect of Islam

A religion such as Islam has had a huge effect on world culture, but I have yet to find an article on Wikipedia that deals with that topic. I'm a new user and am not familiar with this sort of thing, but it would be very helpful if someone would write an article about the effect of Islam on other cultures outside the Middle East. - Eric W 22:02, 25 January 2006 (UTC) talk

Mameluk dynasty

When mentioning the Mameluk dynasty, does the article refer to the muslim dynasty in India or Baghdad? --TBC^{??? ??? ???} 12:22, 26 February 2006 (UTC)