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Simon Ockley again

My Arab friends have given me some help about Simon Ockley's translation of the paedophilia text. Simon Ockley was translating this text. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=xLJEAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en. You can scroll forward to page 23, where you will recognise the words Mohamet, Abu Bakr, Aisha. There is no serious doubt that Ockley has made an accurate translation of Maracci's Latin. You will see that the Arab scholar was called Abdulrahman al-Hamdani. My friends say that the title of his book is Al-Shabayat. They cannot read Latin and I did not tell them what it was about. I just asked them about the sentence of Arabic. They said it means: "He reached out his blessed arm and grabbed her by the clothes." They were very surprised by this odd sentence. I had to explain to them that it was probably a quote from the book, and the story was about Muhammad and Aisha. So I think we can fairly say that Maracci did have access to a real book and that he made a fair translation of the story. Now we must try to find out who the scholar was and when he lived. Perhaps then we can establish the reliability of his narrative. But there is something about it that rings horribly true. I don't think a Muslim hagiographer would have invented this story.1234567 (talk) 05:01, 13 April 2013 (PDT)

Interesting! Thanks for keeping us posted. --Sahabah (talk) 11:10, 13 April 2013 (PDT)

Al-Uzza & Friends

Any examples of that artwork on a temporary upload or external link? Thanks for adding that image. --Axius (talk) 09:10, 21 April 2013 (PDT)

Okay, that wasn't a no, meaning you would consider it. But wouldn't neo-Pagan (i.e. contemporary pagan) artwork be the same as you considering graffiti artwork if it was of a pagan goddess? Unlike the other image provided by 1234567, it wouldn't have any historical connection to the subject. It would just be for "illustrative" purposes (something the new policies say no to).--Sahabah (talk) 09:18, 21 April 2013 (PDT)

I was just wondering what it looks like. --Axius (talk) 09:25, 21 April 2013 (PDT)

A google search brought up this - everything both ancient and modern. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=Al-Uzza+Al-Lat+Manat&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=K2N0UcPHLdCYiAeh8oDwAQ&ved=0CDoQsAQ&biw=1366&bih=621

Yes, I see what you mean about neo-Pagan artwork being a modern reconstruction that would probably have only tenuous links to the original paganism. (Pace those modern pantheists who think otherwise; but neo-Pagans do not sacrifice their infants to Molech!) The spirit of the reconstruction is not too difficult to hit off in the case of the Arabian trinity, since Al-Uzza is Minerva/Athena and Al-Lat is Ceres/Demeter. Manat has no obvious European parallel (the Graiai? Nemesis?), which explains something about the differences between the two cultures; but she is nevertheless a recognisable "type".1234567 (talk) 15:12, 21 April 2013 (PDT)

Thanks for the link and info. That is definitely way above my level of expertise/knowledge in that area, but it sounds really interesting. --Axius (talk) 10:54, 27 April 2013 (PDT)

Yes, very interesting, but somewhat academic. If Ancient Semitic paganism were still being practised today, we would have to start a WikiSemitism site and write about all the evils of human sacrifice, ritual prostitution and violent raiding. But this isn't the case. The few Neo-Pagans I've met have been very gentle people who try to disbelieve the dark history of the ancient religions and focus on back-to-nature pantheism, healthy eating and meditation. There is no real connection between their beliefs (as shown in the pretty artwork) and the original religions that indirectly inspired them.

By contrast, the problem with Islam is that there are Muslims alive today who try to be exactly like Muhammad.1234567 (talk) 02:07, 29 April 2013 (PDT)

New articles based on your talk page comments

hi 1234567, you had left these two talk page comments: (1) Talk:Polygamy_in_Islam#Muhammad_married_poor_widows_to_save_them_from_destitution and (2) Talk:Polygamy_in_Islam#Muhammad_committed_polygamy_out_of_political_necessity. These two items could be polished and sourced and moved into a new article for example Charity and Political Necessity of Muhammad's Marriages and there can be a combined conclusion like we have here. This new article can then be linked from Polygamy in Islam in the section Muhammad and Polygamy.

Your first edit was a comment here: Talk:Unjust Treatment of Wives (Qur'an 4:129) and maybe that can be used in some way as well in that article Unjust Treatment of Wives (Qur'an 4:129).

Your knowledge of Muhammad and women in his life and your strong interest in this topic is great and I'm glad you decided to come here share and create what you have.

A few other things, if you like:

• You can create Sandbox links in your user space and use them for as scratchpads for any purpose, e.g. Sandbox 1, Sandbox 2, Sandbox 3 etc, as many as you like. These can be linked on your user page like User:Sahabah has it
• Old comments on your talk page can be moved into archives: User talk:1234567/Archive
• Its easy to rename a user (if you'd like to use Petra or anything else, for example), or keep it as it is.

--Axius (talk) 10:49, 27 April 2013 (PDT)

Thanks for the reminder. I am in fact feeling the need of sandboxes.

I was planning to write an article about how none of Muhammad's wives was a destitute widow, a kind of companion piece to the one about how none of them was elderly. While I would also like to write one about how none of the marriages was politically necessary, that one will be more difficult to hit off correctly. It would involve speculation about what would have happened if he had not acted, e.g., if Khadija had lived another 15 years and therefore he had never married any of the others. And of course we never know what would have happened. However, it's pretty obvious to me that if Muhammad had never married any of these other women, the big difference to the progress of Islam would have been close to zero.

I'm currently working on the biographical essay about Aisha. As a biography, it really ought to include some paragraphs about her long widowhood, but I don't have good resources for that at present. I shall probably submit it with only a brief overview of her later life, but add more about this in future, when I have bought a few more books. The stunning thing about Aisha is how she didn't seem to believe in Islam at all, yet she was nevertheless its foremost proponent.

After that, we have a choice. I could just work through all the wives in chronological order (Sawda, then Hafsa, then Zaynab ... etc.). Or I could follow your original brief, which was a request for controversy, and deal with the major scandals first. The existing article about Safiya needs to be tidied, and there are some great little tidbits that are not commonly known (were you aware that the murdered poet Kaab ibn Al-Ashraf was her cousin, almost certainly a person to whom she was close?). And I notice that so far you don't have any single article about Zaynab bint Jahsh. Again, the story as it's usually told is different from what the sources say: Zayd actually had three other wives beside Zaynab, and he was (at least) her second husband.

As for the unjust treatment of wives, I think the story about food distribution belongs in the article about Zaynab. For each wife, I shall be writing about how she got along with her co-wives. So any story that involves interactions between two or more of the wives will be included on the page of the wife whom Muhammad married latest. E.g., I have written about how Aisha (second wife) was jealous of the other women but not included specifics about those women. Aisha's general relationship with Sawda (third wife - at least according to Aisha) will be in the article about Sawda, but the incident in which Aisha and Hafsa (fourth wife) colluded to tease Sawda will be under Hafsa. Mariya (thirteenth wife) will not be mentioned until she gets her own article, even though it was an episode in which all the previous wives were involved.1234567 (talk) 16:00, 28 April 2013 (PDT)

hi 1234567, I'm resetting the indent for my convenience.

I had given you the wrong links for your Sandboxes. I made the right links on your user page now: User:1234567. What you were working on is Sandbox 1: User:1234567/Sandbox 1

I feel you enjoy researching and writing about these topics and that's what we want in our editors. Your recent writeup is full of facts as is usually the case and but we have two concerns again with your writing which must be addressed before you do any additional work. The first is serious and needs to be discussed.

Wikipedia has this as a core policy: Verifiability. I'm going to repeat the "nutshell" of their policy page:

Readers must be able to check that Wikipedia articles are not just made up. This means that all quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation.

For example in your recent writeup:

Muhammad told the household of Abu Bakr, without mentioning his reason, “Take good care of Aisha and watch over her for me.” The family therefore gave Aisha a “special position.” A few days later, Aisha became upset with her mother and complained to her father. Abu Bakr was angry with both of them, and Umm Ruman vented her annoyance on Aisha. Aisha hid behind the front door to sob and was in this state of distress when Muhammad, arriving for his daily visit, asked what was wrong. She blurted out everything

I bolded three words here (vented, sob, blurted). The tone of these words is dramatic/emotional and not suitable for this site. We like writing articles in a style which would be found in a research paper. I want you to understand why we want to write things in a serious/journalistic style. Even though it may read boring it looks better and is more reliable/factual.

Here's the problem. A visitor comes on this site and reads "Abu Bakr was angry and Umm Ruman vented". He's going to ask "Who is the author who made this claim? How do I know this is true?". Unless an editor is Bukhari himself, they cannot make such a claim. So we only report what we find in a verifiable manner. We cannot give the impression of any original research (our own conclusions). We are all anonymous people on the internet so we cannot attempt to tell the reader what we think (no one cares about that and no wants to know). We can only tell people what we know for sure. This is like you reading a news article about the history of Aisha. You would want to know the facts and the facts only.

This is crucial to understand. Here's another example from the new writeup:

She was slim and light-framed[31] with a fair, rosy complexion and perhaps also red hair[32] that she wore plaited.[33] Time would show that she was confident, spirited, strong-willed and highly intelligent – she had indeed “some of the qualities of Khadijah”.

The bolded line would not be acceptable. Its giving the impression of assumptions again. I remember I had brought something like this up before as well (link) and I'm a little sad that I'm having to address this again. You have access to great sources and you have a strong interest in these topics and I want your work to be produced in the best way possible. If people see statements like these, this will severely negate all the positives (the references and facts). Mixing facts with opinions also makes it hard for the reader to distinguish between the two. (1) What actually happened. (2) What the author thinks may have happened. Even if what you wrote may be true, we cannot give the impression that the author is making the claim.

Leave out anything that you cannot directly attribute to a source. Make everything easily verifiable. That does mean leaving out speculations. If you have any speculation that is about something very important (Khadija living 15 more years), you can say it like "One may conclude that ...". Here its clear that this is an opinion of the author.

The second concern is making multiple references. Please do not combine references into a single reference. It makes it harder for anyone to verify the information.

To make things easy for you for both these issues, you can just mention the most important parts of a story so you'll have to use less references and do less work. I know you want people to know as much as possible so thats your choice, but in any case we need all opinions to left out, everything to be easily verifiable and no combined references should be used. If there is something that you think might be challenged by Muslims, it is also good to write the relevant part of that quote in the references with italics/quotation marks or provide the entire quote (whatever you think is appropriate). For example <ref>''"... Abu Bakar was very upset with Muhammad ..."'' (Bukhari 123:123)</ref> Even in essays these two issues must not be present.

One problem is that we don't have time to continuously review and fix the content, so this must change going forward and we need you to understand our approach so any additional work is done according to the guidelines. If these things are not fixed/changed at this time when the material is being compiled, it will be almost impossible to fix it later when there's limited access to the sources.

I think you will understand if you imagine that you are writing a research paper with a serious tone where everything must be referenced. This is actually very simple to do: As you go along, only report what you see (in a chronological order when possible), reference everything and don't create any opinions or give the impression that an opinion has been created. This is all you need to do.

As for whether you should do the controversial articles first or go in chrono-order, that's up to you how you want to do that. If we had a preference, of course we would like the controversial content first.

Sahabah may have additional thoughts. Let me know if you see any problems or difficulties with what I'm suggesting. --Axius (talk) 18:21, 29 April 2013 (PDT)

I don't have much to add except maybe clarify a few of Axius' points, or at least what I think he meant (Axius will no doubt correct me if I'm wrong).

About Axius' point concerning assumptions; in essence we're an encyclopedic counter-apologetics site, so things like this are great (minus the use of the word "absurd"):

However, this is not:

And, yes, the use of dramatic/emotional language detracts a lot of the page's impact and makes it harder for an anonymous reader to take seriously. So basically, it shouldn't read like a novel. I know 1234567 is concerned about holding peoples interest, but the 'dry' or 'boring' articles really are what readers are looking for and is certainly what we want. Of course, when I say 'dry' or 'boring', I mean a to-the-point article written in a scholarly, professional tone. I know we must seem like crazy control freaks, and I apologize for that. But people will use any little excuse they can find to dismiss work critical of Islam. Your articles really are great and it would be a shame for them to be dismissed over such easily rectified points. --Sahabah (talk) 19:40, 29 April 2013 (PDT)

Okay, what you need to understand is that the article is currently in a very rough state, based on old work that was intended for a more narrative style. I have had to break off my research to earn money for a few days. So I have a skeleton article (information in roughly the right order) but also a lot of references not properly tied to the article and a lot of statements not properly tied to references. You can see this from the number of empty reference boxes. Many of the statements reflect the sort of information that, based on my preliminary reading of the sources, I expect to find, but there just hasn't been time for a sentence-by-sentence breakdown of how I know what I know. Isn't that what sandboxes are for?

And, yes, I do sometimes find that when I do the breakdown, I have drawn an unwarranted conclusion. It turns out to be based on something I read in a secondary source that wasn't properly linked to a real primary source; or when events are laid out in strict chronological order, it turns out that there is a confusion (mine or someone else's) of cause and effect; or the same minor character has been running through several narratives and reveals himself as a much more major player than anyone realised.

In the case of the story of Muhammad interfering with Abu Bakr's family, what will be needed will be to tie it more closely to the language of the original hadith, which (in my translation) is: "He found Aisha hiding behind the door of the house of Abu Bakr, weeping with great distress. He questioned her and she complained about her mother and said that she was after her." So perhaps she didn't "blurt" but only "told" her complaint; but it was definitely not in neutral tone. The original hadith is told from Muhammad's PoV, with flashback layered upon flashback, whereas I am writing to recast everything from Aisha's PoV. The annoying lack of specific detail (what actually happened in this situation?) is a feature of the original, which may be why this story is often omitted from the standard biographies of Aisha. I think it is interesting, however, to examine her relationship with the parents who soon afterwards handed her over to the paedophile.1234567 (talk)