Talk:Christopher Melchert

possibly notable?
The article was tagged for proposed deletion with the following rationale: "Seems to fail WP:PROF. Little claim of notability made in article. Citations are 18, 12, 11, 10, 4, 4, 3, 3, and 3, for an h-index of 4. CV-like page." on Oct 8, 2009.
 * I removed the prod. I found some more publications, including 2 reviews on one of his books. The citation count seems to be from Google Scholar, but citation count and reliance on h index is not appropriate in this field. Humanities, especially the history of religion, and even more the history of non European religions, is an area where the citation frequency is very low. GS only measure the material it c an crawl, which is a  small proportion of the literature in this  subject. The demonstration of notability here rests on the reviews of the book and the high number of papers, many in the best-known journals in the world for the subject.    DGG ( talk ) 21:33, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Problem
He's in the category "Non-Muslim Islamic scholar", which makes me wonder because he has a very Islamic-looking beard on the photos I've seen of him... But that's no the point. The article says that he has written "authoritatively" on the matter of women-imams. In such a context one will take the word "authoritatively" to mean "with religious authority". How can he have such authority if he's not even a Muslim? And even if he were, he seems to have only a Western education in Islam, which - rightly or not - doesn't give him any religious authority whatsoever in a Muslim's eyes. So, long story short: Either he's a Muslim who writes with religious authority (of what kind and source?). Or he's a Muslim who writes without such authority. Or he's a non-Muslim who writes, of course, without such authority. Or the word "authority" is mistaken and should be replaced with a more readily comprehensilbe term. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.206.144.228 (talk) 02:47, 11 September 2014 (UTC)