Talk:Islam/Archive 1

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

I might be wrong about this but I don't think that "Allah" is "the name of God". Its just a translation of "God". --Phil Lord

Allah is indeed the name of God in Islam and it is the most precious name for it is not a descriptive name like other Ninety-nine names of Allah, but the name of God's own presence. So, the name Allah is accepted to comprise the meanings of all other names of the God, as well. All the names including Allah are referred to as "Asma ul husna" (beautiful names) and Allah is regarded as greatest of these names ErdemTuzun.

I have been told that "Allah" is no more than a translation. --Alireza Hashemi

The portion recently added under "this concise statement has wider implications" ... I haven't seen those six anywhere in my travels, and a quick Google search was unable to turn up a source. Does anybody have a source for those six? Apart from that, I think it's misleading to put that whole section under the Five Pillars of Islam, since they really have nothing to do with it. Should they be moved elsewhere? Or if a source cannot be found, deleted? --Dlugar

I think I got it for a handout I gave a class off a handout from a college course. #1 is the most obvious one (the unity/unicity/tawhid business), but I'll delete them since I certainly can't provide a solid reference.

Oh, and Phil Lord, go see the extensive talk on this subject at Allah.

Could it perhaps be appropriate to merge in History of Islam under Islam/History?

well, it would be a subpage and some people (e.g., Larry) don't like that. The "History of..." Category is kinda grating, but it seems to be working. Remember, you can always insert a cross reference --MichaelTinkler

Ah, well. Probably not the correct /Talk to wage a religious war about subpages :-) Last i checked my encyclopedia at home i found nothing under the heading "History of...". Opinions will, as ever, differ i guess. --Anders Törlind

It was based on the Britannica Macropaedia, which has all sorts of entries under Nomen, history of.

Should the list of 'death threats' at the end of the entry be moved to the entry on fatwa?

Any religious decision proclaimed by an Islamic religious cleric is a fatwa; A fatwa doesn't actually have to be anything bad or dangerous. Unfortunately, the only fatwas that most non-Muslim hear about are those relating to death sentences. Fatwas on whether or not a certain meat is halal, or whether or not a certain type of dress is in accord with Islamic standards, doesn't seem to make the news. The purpose for adding the info on the death threats is that they now are a mainstream feature of worldwide Islam. In England and in other European countries it was not hard to find demonstrations of hundreds, if not thousands, of Muslims, demanding the death of author Salmon Rushdie. In Muslim countries, one found many, many such large demonstrations. Yet it was almost impossible to find an Imam who would publicly condemn these actions. All Imams either offered agreement with the fatwa, or an apologetic why they could not publicly renounce it. This issue is a mainstream and widespread feature of modern day Islam, and many in the Muslim community are in fact quite proud of this. An extensive Islamic literature exists on why these death sentences against heretics is a good idea.

this whole entry needs to be refactored, and several things here should be moved entirely to new entries (fatwa should be defined and discussed briefly, but mainly moved).

"The vast bulk of the world's Muslims live in the Middle East and north Africa and the Indonesian islands". Is this counting Bangladesh and Pakistan as the Middle East? There are also more Muslims in India than in Pakistan. They don't count? -- corvus13

Then add 'em, corvus. Welcome to wikipedia, by the way. Does 'South Asia' sound like the right way to designate the lot of 'em? This article is an awful mess and needs lots of help! --MichaelTinkler
Thanks, Michael. Since Islam is a hot topic, I didn't want to step on anybody's toes. That last paragraph has a lot of value judgements in it, too. "South Asia" sounds good to me, too. I'll make that change, but I don't want to touch the last para.

Oh, THAT paragraph. Yes, it's inflammatory. Go ahead, move it to fatwa where it belongs. There was a whole list of fatwas on the Islam page. I moved them to fatwa and haven't heard any screams. 'Islamism' exists as a page, and that's where this should be, too, I think, since (despite the claim) this is not about normative Islam but about current Islam. I am not a presentist, so just because something is current and widespread NOW I don't accept it as normative. And Islamism is a 20th C. phenomenon.

The opening sentence could easily be understood to mean that Muslims don't worship God but some other deity called Allah.

Islam is the religion of the group of people who worship Allah (the name for God in the Arabic language) and follow the word of the prophet Muhammad . . .

Unless the Muslim usage of "Allah" is an essential part of Islam (not merely the Arabic word for God), I suggest rewriting the sentence. Otherwise, Judaism would have to be:

. . . the religion of the group of people who worship Jehovah and follow Moses, etc.

Ed Poor

The Muslim usage of "Allah" is indeed an essential part of Islam (for instance in their creed, and in daily speech, for instance the polular expression "inshallah"), although in communication to western people the name "God" is often used. I think the opening sentence is ok. I would not change it. --TK

The current article claims that, in Saudi Arabia, that mainstream Muslim clerics claims that it's OK for men to murder their wives if suspected of infidelity. Is this a) true, and b) representative of Islam's treatment of women in general? If not, such an inflammatory reference should be removed. --Robert Merkel

Check out websites and newspapers for yourself. There is quite a lot of information on this topic readilly available - and there are many Muslims in the West who publicly write on this issue. While you and I may consider it "imflammatory" against Islam, the Wahhabi school of Islam in Saudi Arabia considers it the will of Allah. (This is the same school of thought that created the Taliban.) Western Chrisitans, Jews and Muslims think that this practice is so evil that it makes these particular Muslims look bad. But the Muslims who do hold this way claim that the rest of the world is a bunch of decandent and immoral atheists. Now, I personally think that they are wrong, wrong, wrong. But that's the way it is. And no, I don't expect people to take my word for it. I encourage people working on this entry to do some reading on the topic.[[RK]]

I don't doubt it for a second. But then I have a much darker view of human nature than you do. Besides, of the 100 million women with clitoridectomies, most of them are in Islamic countries. You could read what deMause says on the topic of course if you were interested in the subject. You'd read about extensive pederasty and sexual abuse of children (mostly incestuous).


From the article:
A Christian is not considered to be a kâfir

untrue, numerous places in the Quran they are condemned and rebuked. --Anon

Actually, you have it incorrect. The practice of worshipping Jesus and the trinity is rebuked by God's words in the Qur'an, but the Qur'an has some pretty nice words to say about Christians, calling them the closest friends to Muslims. They aren't "kafir" but more "People of the Book" meaning they are to be respected and treated fairly, Muslim or not.mr100percent

Sorry, I couldn't bear to just destroy this wonderful piece of vandalism that was on the subject page:

this site is prejudice and hates all people

I'll leave you to marvel at the profound contradictions inherent in that statement. Excellent. - Khendon 14:42 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

According to Islam, the religion was founded when Allah sent an angel to the Prophet Muhammad.

I think that "According to Islam", it might not be the best way to put it, to say that Islam was "founded": "declared", "revealed", "dictated" maybe would be closer to their idea of where Islam came from. Mkmcconn

'revealed' is more culturally undersatnding, 'declared' more neutral. But would we say that Jesus 'declared' a faith or 'revealed' it? Have to use the same terms I think.

Muslims belive Islam to be continuation of the prophetic mision which started by Adam and was continued by 124000 thousand other prophets including Ibraham, Moses, Jesus, Nowa and Muhammad. and that it was comleted by Muhammad to guide humans towards god.Newpen

This article has serious detail problems. For one thing the spelling "Moslem" is not acceptable to most Muslims as they consider that it smacks of colonialism and English accents. Same with "Mohammed".

Unfortunately, this article probably must occasionally use these spellings, even if they are not considered proper. This is three reasons. (A) It is a fact that these spellings have nothing to do with colonialism. Many people simply are used to these spellings, and continue to use them today. (B) People doing an Internet search for articles often use those spellings. If they did not exist at least once in this article, then many people would never find this article. and (C) Muslims Arabs have (unfortunately) never developed a standard system of transliteration. This causes many problems in many areas, especially in English-language searching on computers for information. Variant spellings are, for the near-future at least, an unpleasant fact of life. The same is true for many other languages as well. RK

Second to say "A Muslim believes in..." and then list the various elements in the faith is just wrong. According to Muslims, a Muslim is anyone who can say sincerely out loud "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet". That doesn't imply belief necessarily in all aspects of dictations of angels, more general concepts of angels, or even the Qur'an. Some Muslims think Muhammad got a message that was impossible to translate and the Qur'an itself is just an approximation - is that popular? No. Are you still a Muslim if you believe it? Yes, according to all Muslims except perhaps the dead Ayatollah Khomeini (who put a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for similar suggestions).

I disagree, because there are literally millions of Muslims alive today who strongly disagree with you. However, please do not misunderstand. I am not saying that you are definately wrong. Rather, I am pointing out the (inconvenient) fact that there exists many points of view in the Muslim community. The view that you express above may well indeed be a valid point of view in the eyes of some Muslims, yet it is not a valid point of view in the eyes of many other Muslims! Of course, this difference of opinion should be incorporated into the article itself. I thank you for raising this important issue. RK

Third, it gives a really limited Western-oriented view of what Islam is. There are already good articles on many of the key concepts of Islam, e.g. this text snipped from Arabic should probably be integrated, if not in a separate 'Islamic concepts in Arabic' article of its own:

Concepts that derive from both Islam and Arab tradition, which are expressed as words in the Arabic language, include:
adab,adl, al-urf, akhra, alim,caliph, fana, fatwa, fiqh, hadith, hafiz, haram, hijra, hima, hajj, hudud, ihram, ijma, ijtihad, ilm, imam, imamah, isnad, isra, istislah, jamia, jihad,kaffir, kalam, khalifa, kufr]], madrasa, mahdi, masum, miraj, purda, qiyas, salat, shaikh, shariah, shawm, shia, shura, sufi, sunnah, sunni, tafsir, tajwid, taqlid, tasawwuf, tarkib, tariqa, tartil, tawheed, ulama, umma, wahdat al-wajud, warraqeen and zakat

(all of which merit their own articles here in the wikipedia, as they cannot be directly translated into English without some loss of meaning).

The only purpose of writing an English language encyclopedia is too explain just such concepts in English. We cannot accept the point of view that you make above, for it would mean the very end of Wikipedia on all Islamic, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist topics! RK

Some English words or phrases would translate very poorly into Arabic for cultural reasons, for instance the English word "crusade" would most likely be interpreted as meaning "genocide", and "infinite justice" would most likely be interpreted as meaning "divine judgement". Probably it is best to avoid these terms for anything one intends to translate into Arabic, or knows will be translated.

As this last example demonstrates, the wages of not "getting" this can well be going into Iraq alone.  ;-) Let's not contribute to a bogus Western view of Islam. LEt's try to say what Islam thinks Islam is, and then let's get into Western views in their own article.

I strongly disagree. There is nothing "bogus" or dishonest about this article's description of Islam. Please stop being so elitist. The article already does explain what Islam teaches, and it is not giving us Christianity's, or Atheism's, version of Islam. It is merely trying to give an objective view of Islam, as opposed to pro-Islamic proselytizing. A pro-Muslim point of view would violate this encyclopedia NPOV (neutral point of view) policy. Can this article stand improvement? Yes. Can you help a lot? Yes. Can you add more information? Yes, please do! But let us not be dismissive. We can be most productive by pointing out specific paragraphs that we believe should be rewritten, and then we make specific edits to improve the article, one section at a time. RK

Also, compare Islamic philosophy with early Muslim philosophy and tell us which one you'd give to a beginner or someone interested in the history as opposed to in Aristotle! We need a way to deal with intro or historical treatments versus specialist treatments, and to distinguish philosophy from theology. (all of which merit their own articles here in the wikipedia, as they cannot be directly translated into English without some loss of meaning).

You write "it gives a really limited Western-oriented view of what Islam is" and "all of which merit their own articles here in the wikipedia, as they cannot be directly translated into English without some loss of meaning"

If I understand you correctly (and that is not necessarilly so!) I might have some problems with this position. If I understand this correctly, it would mean the end of all Wikipedia topics on Islamic, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist topics! All these faiths have non-Christian, non-English theological concepts. RK
Please allow me to give a real-life example of what I think the issue is. I have met many Orthodox Jews who claim that all English language descriptions of Judaism are biased, and only give a biased Western view of what "true Judaism" really is. These people hold that English translations will never suffice for the Hebrew original, and that English speaking Jews and gentiles can never truly understand these concepts. However, I also have met many Orthodox Jews who totally disagree; they point out that any concept can be explained in any language; if someone holds that the concept cannot be explained, it only means that they are a poor writer with a limited imagination. The fact of the matter is that some of the world's most sophisticated Jewish theological texts were written originally in Arabic! How could this be if the original claim were true? To give another example, consider German philosophy. I have known some philosophers who hold that the clearest and best expositions of Wittgenstein's writings have, ironically, been in English! I hope this makes my point clear: This article can explain anything we want it to, as long as we recruit good writers, and as long as we ourselves strive to acheive clarity, in a neutral point of view fashion. RK
Of course, this might not have been your point at all, in which ignore all this. I do agree that we need to create many more specialized articles on sub-topics.  :) RK

---

RK, I am sure we are not talking about the same thing at all. My points:

Thank you for clarifying; I now see that I misunderstood the thrust of your points. RK
  • No Muslim calls himself or herself a "Moslem" in the English language. The term merits a redirect, as "Peking" would redirect now to Beijing.
  • The definition of how to become a Muslim is itself part of Islam, and is just as I said above, "There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet". You might be exposing yourself to being killed by zealots if you thereafter dispute the Qur'an, but that does not mean that you are not a Muslim. It means you are a dead Muslim maybe, but still a Muslim. Exactly what Rushdie would've been.
I am in agreement with you. This should be incorporated into the article. RK
  • Specific theological ideas from Hindu, Buddhist, Christian or Jewish faith can and must be discussed separately from their modern English dictionary closest- equivalent words. Examples: karma, dharma, sanctuary, messiah. Doing that for haram to distinguish it from zoning law is the same idea, as is distinguishing hima from wilderness reserve or the modern conservation movement. So your statement above is flat wrong - we MUST explain these ideas in articles in English with FOREIGN WORDS AS TITLES. Then an explanation of the modern secular concept would link to the historical and religious precedents in all those various faiths.
You misunderstand. I am in agreement with you on this issue. I originally thought that you were implying that one couldn't explain these concepts in English; I now see that this was not your point. RK
  • There is no conflict between reporting what Islam actually reports about Islam, what Muslims say about Islam, and reporting what others say about Islam. Just don't confuse the three.
Again, I am in agreement with you. RK

--- The last edit seems to contain interesting additions but also some cuts. I have to go to sleep, I don't feel to edit.

RK, considering the fuss you made when someone arbitrarily deleted your content on jewish history timeline, perhaps you could be less hasty to delete other people's content on this article? Martin

Martin, you are very confused. I never had a problem when people edited the Jewish history timeline entry. I only had a problem when it was totally vandalized. Further, I also am not deleting all the new content. In fact, if you check out this article you will see that I also added back in some of the new material, and I was very happy to have others also add back in some of this new material. Have could you not have noticed this? RK

You keep complaining about actions I am not taking, and beliefs that I do not have. However, there is a problem on this entry because someone anonymously keeps adding pro-Islamic apologetics that violate Wikipedia's NPOV policy. Just as we remove such apologetics on the Christianity and Judaism entries, we do the same here. Further, this person obviously does not respect the beliefs of certain Muslim groups, and keeps trying to censor valid Muslim points of view, because it makes him (or her) feel uncomfortable. That is not appropriate. You must be committed to NPOV if you work on this project. RK

It's a matter of perspective, RK. Danny moved your material on Jewish history timelinebecause he felt that your material was violating NPOV. You complained heavily about this move, calling it vandalism. You deleted some material here because you felt that that material was violating NPOV. I see a parallel in your actions here and Danny's actions at Jewish history timeline.
I hope you can understand my perspective, even if you do not agree with it. Martin
Danny made what I see as off claims; he attacked the Biblical material. Well, there isn't any. His later critiques do not mention a problem with NPOV. Rather, he mostly complained that the article was missing many important facts. So I agreed with him, and asked him to add these points; curiously, Danny refused to do so. Danny also questioned certain dates, so I agreed with him, and told that I am fine with him making such changes. Sadly, he still refuses to make any changes or edits at all. He is acting like a troll. This is the opposite of how you work: When you disagree with someone, you don't delete the entire article, and you put your mouth where your money is. You actually take the time to work on articles and make edits and additions. That's fine by me! RK

On the specific point of Martin's recent changes, I find myself fully in agreement with them. RK

Am I misunderstanding this or does this article indeed imply that the visit of angel Gabriel is part of the "historical origins" of Islam? If nobody objects I will rephrase it in a more NPOV.

I changed

In 610, Mohammad (now aged 40) he was sitting in a cave in the hills outside Mecca mediating, and the angel Gabriel gave him a message from Allah.

to the somewhat more neutral:

In 610, Mohammad (now aged 40) reported that while he was sitting in a cave in the hills outside Mecca mediating, the angel Gabriel gave him a message from Allah.

In genearal I think that this paragraph needs some serious editing in oredr to be NPOV. I'll maybe undertake it when I find the time.

I dispute this statement :"In theory, Islamic law allows each spouse to divorce at will, by saying "I divorce you" three times in public. ..." I have read that this is not so. Only Muslim men may divorce women in this way. From what I have read Muslim women are forbidden from divorcing Muslim men in this way. Can someone comment? RK -- RK, in response to your last comment, you're mistaken. Islamic law allows a male or female to divorce the other. However, the way you phrase it makes it seem as if a man can divorce a woman instantly, when in actuality divorce takes close to three months, as there are steps of separation and reconciliation before an offical divorce. There are specific differences between male and female-initiated divorce, but it the process is generally the same for both parties. mr100percent

What's is the relationship between the Yazidi reilgion and Islam. Is it of descendancy like the Druze from Islam or is it just an influence like Islam on Iconoclast Christianism. (Actually, probably there have been several periods of influence accross religions, but I'd like a quick summary :) ) -- Error 03:59 18 May 2003 (UTC)

It is actually rather difficult to find good, conclusive information on the Yazidi. To the best of my understanding, Islam has been a major influence on them, but the Yazidi did not really evolve out of Islam in the way that the Druzes did. --Michael Voytinsky