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 :Great. Note that the version in the sandbox is an old version (you've made edits to the article after I copy/pasted it). [[User:Sahabah|--Sahabah]] ([[User talk:Sahabah|talk]]) 03:59, 1 April 2013 (PDT)
 ::Should I move it to the mainspace now?[[User:Sahabah|--Sahabah]] ([[User talk:Sahabah|talk]]) 06:45, 2 April 2013 (PDT)
+:::It's up to you, depending on whether you think it looks finished or requires more corrections. I'm afraid I'm the kind of person who is forever nit-picking my own work and will always be finding something that I want to change unless you stop me.
+:::You asked several questions that I tried to answer, but they were lost in cyberspace. Let's try again, in no particular order.
+:::(1) I don't think there is any reason to write an author-name on an encyclopaedia-type article like this one. It will deter other people from making additions. And you know the drill. If someone has a genuine reason for thinking I'm wrong, they should be allowed to contribute. If they just want to jump up and down and complain that Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Saad, Tabari and Bukhari don't show enough respect to the Holy Prophet, you already have a mechanism to stop that kind of non-correction.
+:::(2) For now I'll keep my username as the anonymous 1234567. I think I've mentioned that "Petra MacDonald" is a translation of "Asma bint Marwan" (''petra'' and ''marwan'' both mean "stone", and ''donald'' and ''asma'' both mean "supreme one") but there's no need to invoke Asma's fate upon myself unnecessarily!
+:::(3) I notice you have a preference for standard American spelling. I've made no attempt to pretend I can write in American when I can't. But if you'd prefer to change every instance of "favour" to "favor" and "realise" to "realize", and add American currency equivalents to my pounds sterling, that's up to you.
+:::(4) Tomorrow I'll be seeing my Arab friends and I hope to ask them a couple of translation questions. If they can clear up my issues, I should be able to submit an op-ed essay about the ages of Muhammad's wives. By my calculation, the mean age of a bride of Muhammad was 24, which is not exactly "elderly", even by medieval Arab standards. I will be submitting this as "Petra MacDonald" to emphasise that it's only my opinion. I'm afraid it's ditchwater-dull: "X died in DATE at the age of Y, therefore was born in DATE, and must have been married at age Z..." But some people out there will find it a useful reference, and others will like (or dislike) the conclusion.
+:::(5) You began to ask about how I would define a "primary source". As I understand it, a primary source is an eyewitness account or an actual monument left over from the event. So the Qur'an is the only true primary source for the life of Muhammad. If we could find the original text of the Compact of Medina or of his Delegation Letters, these would also be primary sources. The hadith collections, no matter how high-quality and reliable, are only secondary sources. Ibn Ishaq, of course, is a hadith-collection arranged in a particular way, chronologically rather than thematically. I would concede that a copyist such as Ibn Hisham, Tabari or Al-Hakim is also a secondary source provided we are quite certain he is making an accurate copy of Ibn Ishaq and not altering the words.
+:::As to Ibn Kathir, how to classify him depends on what you want to know. If your question is "How did fourteenth-century Muslim scholars think about Islam?" then Ibn Kathir is a primary source. If your question is "How should we understand the Qur'an?" then Ibn Kathir's tafsir is secondary. If your question is "How should we understand the events described in the hadiths?" then Ibn Kathir is tertiary. For example, his engaging little piece on the wives of Muhammad is tertiary. Really, I would put much of Ibn Kathir's work on a par with that of someone like Sir William Muir. Both were interpreting the secondary sources centuries after the events in the light of their own biases; both had access to a massive amount of information not available to you or me, arranged it logically and did the best they could with what they had. But of course the results were very different. In similar vein, Tabari fluctuates between secondary (when he has a word-for-word quote from a seconary source) and tertiary (when he comments on what he has quoted).
+:::Hence you'll notice that I've cited a lot of rubbish from the internet. I think these quotes are valid primary sources on "how 21st-century Islamo-apologists think about the life of Muhammad." But they are not valid sources of actual information about Muhammad - they are quaternary at best.
+:::(6) Do you want me to tidy up the list of "Wives of Muhammad"? After exhaustively trawling both Ibn Saad and Tabari, I'm fairly confident that I know the names of all the wives known to history (which, of course, is not necessarily the same as all the wives there ever were). I make it that Muhammad slept with 17 different women and had some kind of legal contract or engagement with 13 others. I have the names of 5 women whom he desired but who refused him, and 5 more whose offers he refused. A few other names popularly found on lists of Muhammad's wives are either alternative names for one of the above or mistakes based on misreadings of the texts (I'm fairly certain that he never married Hind bint Utba or Umm Haram, and that there was only one Maymuna, not two). I would suggest making a list of all those who could reasonably be deemed "wives", and a second list of "see also", then linking each name to the wiki-article that will give her biography.
+:::(7) I'm currently working on an article about Aisha. That will be far less trouble than the one about Khadija because the sources are so much more accessible.
+:::(8) And eventually I'll write an article to show that none of Muhammad's wives was a poor widow in desperate need of shelter, but not this week.[[User:1234567|1234567]] ([[User talk:1234567|talk]]) 18:31, 4 April 2013 (PDT)