Talk:Basmala

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[edit] Bismillah vs. Basmala

A one-line summary of my position from this discussion is "Basmala is not an 'alternative pronunciation' of Bismillah, nor was it ever intended to be such, but is rather the name of the entire phrase whose first word is Bismillah". AnonMoos 01:25, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] 2006 discussion

Well, i find spelling it Basmala just as offensive when ignorant people spell Qur'an: Koran, and i think we should go with what linguisticly sounds correct, which is Bismillah. - cronodevir
Not sure what you mean -- Arabs themselves invented the word Basmala, just as they invented Takbir. Basmala has a completely different spelling in Arabic than Bismillah: بسملة vs. بسم الله . I fail to see the analogy with Qur'an vs. Koran. P.S. It's "linguisticly correct" to capitalize the first person singular pronoun in English spelling. AnonMoos 07:34, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
I don't know what you mean by "invented" basmala. "In the name of God" is written down in Arabic as بسم الله and pronounced as bimillah, not basmala, this the first time I have ever heard the word basmala in either Arabic or English. What is بسملة mean? It is بسم الله (bism "in the name of") Allah.
This article's name should be changed to Bismillah which is the correct and is the common English spelling. --Inahet 21:09, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
First off, I bet that بسملة is indeed in your Arabic dictionary, if you chanced to look there -- it's certainly in my Arabic dictionary.
Secondly, بسم الله and بسملة are two separate things -- بسم الله is the first two words of the phrase "Bismillah ar-raħman ar-raħim", while بسملة is an Arabic word which is the NAME OF THE WHOLE PHRASE "Bismillah ar-raħman ar-raħim" (all four words of it as a unit).
Third, بسملة was indeed "invented" by taking the first four consonants of the phrase "Bismillah ar-raħman ar-raħim" as a Quadriliteral root -- in exactly the same way as the Arabic word "Hamdala" was formed by taking the first four consonants of the phrase Hamdulillah as a quadriliteral root (as is already clearly explained on the Basmala article page).
Fourth, you would probably have saved everybody some effort all around if you had just read some of the past discussions on this topic (including the archive clearly linked above), as well as read the article page itself with attention to detail. AnonMoos 23:29, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Oh, I didn't know I have already troubled everybody! Can you lose the condescending tone? Anyway, this is the first time I heard the term basmala, and I have read some Islamic books and I never came across this term. Anyhow, I guess I should have read a little more in to it, and I will cancel the request to move the page, although I don't see that it has caused any problems as you make you out to be. --Inahet 23:36, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
I don't know that it's causing major problems, but it's a little annoying when new people come along and raise issues which have already been discussed in detail before. Such as that Basmala is not an alternative pronunciation or spelling of Bismillah, nor was it ever intended to be such, but is rather the name of the entire phrase whose first word (or words) is Bismillah -- so that Basmala is not an incorrect spelling of Bismillah, nor is it in competition with Bismillah is any way. Check out some of the foreign-language interwiki links on the article page.... AnonMoos 23:41, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
I checked 3 different dictionaries including this one and I checked the Arabic Wikipedia, but there were no results for بسملة. How do you explain that? --Inahet 18:09, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
I really can't attest to the quality of a random on-line resource, but I know it's in BOTH of the physical paper Arabic-English dictionaries that I own, including the Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, which is pretty much the authoritative modern English-Arabic dictionary. Furthermore, it is mentioned in the Arabic Wikipedia -- but as a redlink (requested article) from ar:سورة التوبة (Sura 9), rather than being its own article yet. Arabic wikipedia doesn't appear to have an article on either Bismillah or Basmala (Arabic wikipedia's coverage is quite spotty -- it didn't even have an article on the flag of Syria until I created a small starter stub on the subject). AnonMoos 03:06, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
[1] You removed the link to the archive. I thought it was strange you did, but I AGF. Look through the history next time before pointing fingers. --Inahet 17:34, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
You're half right -- you completely garbled my previous comments of "01:25, 28 September 2005" above (moving words around to random locations -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3ABasmala&diff=79526011&oldid=79525741 ), and in attempting to undo your garbling, I inadvertently deleted the archive link. AnonMoos 21:54, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
So basically you screwed up even more, I don't think that is how you fix mistakes, sir. Anyway, no biggie, I didn't know I did that, thanks for pointing that out. --Inahet 03:52, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
No, I committed a simple error while trying to repair the effects of your strange and bizarre garbling. 09:01, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] New sub-discussion

Ok, so I read through this page, and I checked the archived page, however I have been unable to see where those in favor of "basmala" provided an origin for their word. It seems like someone baisically made up this word, and by saying that it refers to the whole phrase and not the first word(bismillah) tried to justify it. Can you please give an link or something to the definition or origin of the word "basmala" other than your own. If you can't I vote that the title should be changed to "Bismillah" as it is an actual word, it refers to the first word, and more importantly when muslims say "bismillah", other muslims around them actually know what that person is referrring to. So yeah, either give a concrete reason for having this word as the title, or change it to bismillah, because your reasons thus far have not been good enough. --Mistarojaz 14:44, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Dude, I have provided a reference (repeatedly) -- to the relevant dictionary entry in the Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic. If you're unable to use an Arabic-English dictionary, then it's unlikely that you'll be able to make a very constructive or fruitful contribution to this particular topic at this time. The word "Basmala" was coined (in exactly and precisely the same manner as the word Hamdala(h) discussed on the Hamdulillah page) in order to have a single convenient term to refer to the WHOLE PHRASE بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم , and NOT just the single word بسم الله . As for the rest, I've already said several times that "Basmala is not an 'alternative pronunciation' of Bismillah, nor was it ever intended to be such, but is rather the name of the entire phrase whose first word is Bismillah". AnonMoos 16:24, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Google test of validity/ popular term

Googling basmala yields about 20,300 results vs. the 544,000 results for Bismillah (as of Sept. 18, 2005). The article must be re-named Bismillah. Once I get a handle of WP editing, I will do the said without asking, in line with the be bold way of WP. TheProphetess 18:23, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

When you feel it is correct read Wikipedia:Requested moves and do what it says, there will be a vote on this. I personally don't know and will have to read about it. Google tests are not always the most sound. For instance Bismillah would be used more under both arguments but that does not make it correct. Since the phrase is "Bismillah Ar-Rahman..." when the phrase is used Bismallah would show up. However, when there is discussion of the phrase Basmala would show up according to An-Moos (I forget his username). I have seen both ways and I will have to read more to figure out which I believe to be correct. gren グレン 20:51, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
Your googlestats really don't mean too much until you first understand the most basic and essential point: Namely, that Basmala is NOT an "alternative pronunciation" to the SINGLE WORD Bismillah, but is instead a collective NAME of the WHOLE PHRASE bismillaah ir-raHman ir-raHiim. Anyway, the 35,000 hits for Google search basmala OR basmalah OR basmalat is actually quite a bit more than would be found for many other words of Islamic technical terminology. AnonMoos 03:20, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
Ah, the apology trap! I am not ready yet. The article, rather than this talk page, is what's really worth my time. TheProphetess 12:52, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
I ain't asking for any apology -- I'm basically telling you to refrain from taking drastic actions until you start to understand the main issue involved. AnonMoos 18:58, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Calligraphy

 

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I've just done the donkey work of copying the two PNGs on the w:de article over to commons. They can now be used in this article, if anyone would care to place one or both. –Hajor 22:58, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. (Though the second one seems kind of ugly from my purely subjective and idiosyncratic personal aesthetic point of view...) AnonMoos 03:11, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
 :). I can't wait until I get a handle of the frequent wiki operations, and bring over some more images. Thanks. TheProphetess 12:31, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
Great. You should probably check out Wikipedia:Uploading images and Wikipedia:Picture tutorial. But please also take a glance at Wikipedia:Image use policy first. While neither of these two pics is particularly spectacular (and yes, the second one is decidedly funky), they are policy-compliant. –Hajor 13:07, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
What happened to them? Was there a copyright tag problem? The image also disappeared from German wikipedia, so it seems it's gone. Will remove image link from page. AnonMoos 17:39, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
Don't know why they're not displaying; they're both still there on commons: commons:Image:Basmala.png & commons:Image:Basmala kufi.png. And they were tagged as both GFDL and cc.by.sa, so there shouldn't be any © issues. –Hajor 18:07, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
Until they're actually diplaying again, I'll leave the code commented out... AnonMoos 20:58, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
Here]'s the answer, I think. Just too big; they need to be resized. –Hajor 21:08, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
Ok, no problem -- I'll do a resizing for Basmala.png shortly... AnonMoos 22:41, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

Hello all, I recently put up the picture of the pear shaped bismillah and found out it dominated the page, so resize as you wish and leave any messages on this page.--Maliki 786 22:19, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm having problems making out the text in the "leaves", and also I can't figure out what the letters sad-dal at the top of the pear mean... But thanks. AnonMoos 04:09, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
P.S. The colorful borders were pretty, but not very useful for the purposes of Wikipedia, so I losslessly cropped and grayscaled the image. AnonMoos 04:22, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
Right leave: "Qāla allāh ta'ālā" ("The sublime God said"). Left: "Wa innahu min Sulaymān" ("And it is from Salomo" as the Basmala first apears in a letter from Salomo in the Qur'an). Below the pear: "katabahu al-shaykh Azīz al-Rufā'ī 1343" ("Shaykh Aziz al-Rufai wrote it 1924/1925"). The "sad-dal" is simply a wasla (you actually see s-l-ta marbuta) on top of the alif of Allah ;-) Aziz Efendi died 1934 so the image is in the public domain (did anyone of you think about that?) --89.51.56.136 (probably de:Benutzer:Baba66) 06:59, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Thanks... AnonMoos 08:10, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for putting it on the talkpage--Maliki 786 01:18, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Significance of Bismillah"

The sentence in "Significance of Bismillah" could be the beginning of a great article section, but as it stands it's rather enigmatic and unsatisfactory. What tasks? What is "Tauz", how is it spelled in Arabic script, and is there any explanation of it elsewhere on Wikipedia? Etc. etc. AnonMoos 17:47, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

Commented this section out, because it was really a marker for future expansion, rather than adding anything very meaningful to the page in its current form. AnonMoos 13:29, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Just now figured out that "Tauz" was supposed to mean Ta'awwudh... AnonMoos 00:04, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

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