Talk:Mohammed Omar

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[edit] Title

Re: the recent edit removing information about the title Mullah Omar. I know nothing of Muslim history, but if he were claiming an ancient title, why not rewrite it but say so? If it is nonsense for him to do so, then the article should say so, but, knowing nothing about the religion, the title or the man, I can't see why this claim is unworthy of mention. What if a Spanish political leader suddenly started calling himself El Cid? For that matter, is it utterly meaningless that Martin Luther King was named after a great religious revolutionary? That fallen away Methodist, Ortolan88

amir al-mu'minin is the traditional title of the caliphs, the highest religious and political authorities in (sunni) Islam. parts of the information in the article was simply wrong, and the rest is highly dubious. If he called himself so, it should certainly be included as a fact in the article (for my part, I never heard about it), but not in this way. How would you think about a self-appointed pope? --Elian

Actually, in that general vicinity there have been religious/political leaders, who took similar titles. Shamil (1797-1871) of Chechnya/Dagestan (he fought the Russians in the Caucasus) had people say "Muhammad is the first prophet; Shamil is his second." It is not as uncommon as the article makes out. There is precedent. Danny

Hmm... "said to belong to the prophet Mohammed". Am I being picky or would "rumoured" be a better choice of word? Lezek

Unless they were written rumours, said seems perfectly accurate to me. -- Derek Ross

taken from the article: This intense piety manifested itself in the destruction of two large statues of Buddha which stood at the cliffs of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, which some had considered archaeological and historical treasures. Osama bin Ladin commended Omar for ordering this action.

The article doesn't get better if polemics and sarcasm from another POV are added. Surely these phrases can be formulated in a neutral way... --Elian

It's not sarcastic. His piety led him to order the destruction of what he considered idols. Feel free to rephase rather than delete. -- Someone else 03:19 Nov 3, 2002 (UTC)

http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1010/p1s4-wosc.html

the large portions of the biographical data seem to be taken from this public domain article - christian science monitor does not seem to be biased in favor of mullah omar (in fact, the article is pretty much advocating intervention in avganistan). thus, the portions of the articles are restored - it is not true that it was wrong data.

CSM is not in any way, whatsoever "public domain". --mav

whatever, the information is from that article - maybe it should be rephrased, if it is not public domain - but the source is found.

it's not a question if the information can be found somewhere, the information is misleading and the writer of the article had obviously no clue about Islam:

"Omar is the first Muslim since the Fourth Caliph, a nephew of Prophet Mohammed, to publicly accept the Amirul title, a ranking in Islam nearly second to the Prophet. His title, "Commander of the Faithful," has not been adopted by any Muslim anywhere for nearly 1000 years." "The title of commander of the faithful which is characteristic of the caliph was created in the period of the first four caliphs. [...] The caliphs inherited the title c.o.t.f from each other. It became a characteristic of the ruler of the Hijaz, Syria, and the Iraq...Abd ar-Rahmnan III adopted the ways of the caliphs... he had himself called Commander of the Faithful and assumed the surname (...) This custom, which he was the first to practice, was followed and became an established one" (Ibn Khaldoun, one of the most important arabic historians)

The title amir al-mu'minin was carried by the Fatimids, the spanish Umayads, the Almohads, and is carried until today by the Kings of Saudi Arabia and Morocco (Gerhard Endreß, Der Islam) Besides, it's not amirul, at least as much as in English you don't say "commanderofthe faithful". The article is rubbish. --Elian

This article should be renamed to "Mohammad Omar", since the naming convention apparently omits titles such as Mullar, King, Sir etc. Some say he isn't qualified to call himself Mullah in any case.

yes, it should. --Elian
moved -- Someone else

---

I am not sure the photo on the page is legit. Look at the photo at this link: http://www.rightword.net/Anuke/photos/mullah_omar.jpg and compare it to the one on the page. I think at the very least, the image has been edited. I am not sure the features shown actually belong with the background. Note especially the eyes, and how they appear different.

[edit] Major revision

An anon inserted some praise of Bin Laden, which I thought POV. In the course of excising it, I realized that the article was disorganized. I rewrote extensively, trying to make it flow better. I need to look at the links and see if they're OK. Lots of the info needs references. I believe that there is further info out there. I remember reading about Omar's wives, the mansion he was building outside Kandahar, and the general shock when he went into a local shrine and laid hands on a robe said to have belonged to the prophet Muhammad. He donned the robe and showed himself to the crowds. All this needs to be documented. Zora 05:04, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Plagiarism

Major fragments of this text are simply copied word for word from "Ghost Wars" by Steve Coll.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.6.219.210 (talk)

Could you specify which fragments exactly?--Konstable 06:56, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

--Specifically in the Overview section! "remarkably little is known..." is on page 287 of Ghost Wars. Elsewhere in the Wiki, fragments are taken word for word. Did Steve Coll help write this article?

I redid the overview, merging it with the initial section. Unsigned person, since you have Coll's book, maybe you could scan the history of this article to smoke out the originator of the plagiarism. Then we could fix the (rather serious) problem.

LDH 07:11, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hiding in Pakistan?

I am removing the line that claims Mullah Omar is hiding in Pakistan. There is no evidence to indicate that, and Mr Karzai's simply claiming as such does not merit it as fact.

[edit] Photo

FWIW the guy at lower right in this montage http://wincoast.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=12750&d=1169354044 is purportedly Mullah Omar. The photo is from the reasonably sane paper Ash-sharq al-Awsat. LDH 09:20, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Jihad Unspun

I deleted the ref to

http://www.jihadunspun.com/theplayers/mullahoverview.htm

because Jihad Unspun is a very untrusworthy commercial website. See e.g.

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Apr/08-205989.html

LDH 06:43, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

And you're going to call it "untrustworthy" because the US government says so and because it doesn't agree with their agenda? You might as well delete all website critizing ANYTHING since a lot of times, critical websites are deemed "untrustworthy" by other governments. Don't think I agree with the article or even the Jihad Unspun website, because I don't. But, to keep the article NPOV, I'm adding it back in. Armyrifle 14:43, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

I call Bev Giesbrecht (=Jihad Unspun) untrustworthy because she lies constantly. That's the only reason. LDH 15:16, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Images

IMO we should just dispose of these maybe-copyrighted maybe-unsound images. Instead of hosting them here, we could say in the ref's (press, official sites) "contains a photograph" or "purported photograph" or whatever.

LDH 19:59, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] his position

Is Amir al-Mu'minin different from kalif?Does he became kalif?YODAFON 02:48, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bin Laden years

I'm surprised there's no text about the relationship between Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden. In Lawrence Wright's book The Looming Tower there's lots of information about this, and the negotiations between Mullah Omar and Prince Turki of Saudi Arabia about getting the Taliban to expel bin Laden. --RenniePet 14:43, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. --BoogaLouie 17:17, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Inappropriate navbox

There is something very confusing about calling Omar the "successor" and "predecessor" to Rabbani, especially when the title at the top of the box is the "self-called Commander of the Faithful" that I doubt Rabbani claims. Also, it's by no means obvious that Omar's term in power ended in 2001, not if he's affecting politics in 2006 and pro-Taliban commanders are still loyal to him. 70.15.116.59 (talk) 22:06, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Childhood

The background information for Mullah Omar states that his father died before he was born and that the responsibility for fending for his family fell to him (Omar). This would not be possible since it would be at least a decade before he would be old enough to accomplish much in the area of fending for a family (newborns and toddlers can't do much about putting food on the table). Therefore, his family must have relied on some other support system. I suspect this reference to Omar taking the responsibility for fending for his family has a POV issue behind it, meant to make out Omar to be a respectable man of noble character at the expense of presenting accurate, reliable information about his background. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.18.245.17 (talk) 04:08, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Well the information comes from Ahmed Rashid and having read his book on the Taliban, I can testify Mr. Rashid cannot be accused of portraying the Taliban in a favorable light. --BoogaLouie (talk) 16:48, 26 December 2007 (UTC)