WikiIslam:Scope and Article Relevance: Difference between revisions

Instead, it categorizes the beliefs and practice of every recognizable group of people who have called themselves Muslim, including those 7th-century persons whose movement would one day evolve into what is now called “Islam.”  

For WikiIslam, “religion” means the set of metaphysical beliefs about the supposed supernatural nature of the universe that humans live in as well as the nature of the supernatural beings which supposedly create, order, inhabit, control and influence it, and their supposed wishes for mankind.

As an extension of this definition, discussion of religious philosophy may be included in the Wiki.

There are, broadly speaking, two approaches to the history and development of Islam: that of various Islamic authorities, with their so-called “traditional narrative”, and that of many modern historians, whose approach can be described as both “critical” and “integrative”.

The modern, historical-critical approach consists of these documents and also non-Arabic, non-Islamic primary sources, including archaeological evidence, which provide further information on the formative years of Islamic history. These sources are by and large much closer in time to the events they describe than the Islamic sources, but occasionally fragmentary. WikiIslam deals with both, seeing them both as vital to an accurate understanding the nature of Islam and its history.

WikiIslam deals with the history of Islam only as it relates to the beliefs of Muslims and their development.