Talk:Hanif/Archive 1

untitled comments
This is just a start on a good article. I'm still reading Hawting's book, and I have a lot of other books and articles to chase down. Help with documenting various POVs would be useful.

The article as it stood previously merely gave a generic Muslim POV and didn't go into any of the difficulties or controversies. Zora 05:39, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Moving para from first section to Muslim views
AE, we can't leave the paras you added up on top, as if everyone accepted the Muslim account as factual, because the hanifiyya are a much disputed topic. There are academic views all over the map, from accepting the Muslim account to rejecting it totally as a later fabrication. I moved your paras down into the Muslim section.

I'm still reading the Hawting book. He has a huge bibliography, which I need to pillage for references. He's one of the extreme sceptics. I'm not sure that I trust him, but his book is very recent, so he's a good link to other material.

We need some scholarly Muslim sources as well, if you can find them. Zora 23:12, 13 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Yes that is fine I moved it down before and somehow moved it back. Good luck reading that book, it will definitely give a very different story. I will try to find some sources too. -- a.n.o.n.y.m  t 23:13, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Jimmy Wales has said of this: "I can NOT emphasize this enough. There seems to be a terrible bias among some editors that some sort of random speculative 'I heard it somewhere' pseudo information is to be tagged with a 'needs a cite' tag. Wrong. It should be removed, aggressively, unless it can be sourced. This is true of all information, but it is particularly true of negative information about living persons."

Weird transliteration
Man i hate the weird transliterations! I dont care what the origlinal arabic looks like, i want to read the text in english! Can we remove it? --Striver 12:12, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Further to the above: What's with the boxes?
How difficult can it be to get all diacritical symbols into Unicode? I'm fed up of finding foreign words transliterated with a big stupid box Ƽ in the middle of them. And it always seems to be something very simple, like an apostrophe or glottal stop. Surely it can't always be the fault of my browser. Nuttyskin 07:24, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Etymology
Can we please not remove cite tags atm, the article has just become active again, so give the editors some time to look around. There appearst to be more than one singular view on the etymology on the subject. Also please try to ensure that your edits do not disturb the integrity of the structure of the sentence that has been used to cite work so that it no longer accurately represents the source.--Tigeroo 10:16, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
 * it is perfectly reasonable to ask editors to look around first and insert claims later.Hnf appears to be a perfectly regular root, this is undisputed. I presume the uncertainty surrounds the semantic process, i.e. how did it come to have this specialized meaning, as opposed to its generic meaning of "bend, incline, decline". Lane says "hence hanifiyyah", implying that the semantics are a "turning away from" idolatry. dab (&#5839;) 12:23, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I guess I worded myself badly initially. Can you please elaborate on the source or reformat it into the standard wiki form so that I or someone else can look it up in the standard format? I am not able to understand (so Lane 1893) to see how it agrees or deviates from peters positon, thats all I meant by sticking the citation tag after the parenthesis and attribute them appropriately. The part I guess I was not clear, I was referring more to Islami deleting uncited sentences, and was just asking people to refrain from doing so or asking before they do it to allow other others a change to verify or disown it instead.--Tigeroo 14:58, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Contradiction
This line:
 * ''Ḥanīf (Arabic حنيف, plural ḥunafā' حنفاء) is an Arabic term that refers to monotheists of a non-Abrahamic religion.[1] More specifically in Islamic thought it refers to the Arabs during the (pre-Islamic) time of Jāhiliyya or "Ignorance", who were seen to have rejected Shirk and retained some or all of the true tenets of the monotheist religion of Ibrahim (Abraham)[1] that was held to have been preceded Judaism and Christianity.[2]

Contradicts itself. --Striver 17:54, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Ps, look at this:
 * '' Before the advent of Islam, most Arabs worshipped a variety of male and female deities. Only a minority, who were neither Christians nor Jews, were monotheists (hanif).

--Striver 21:00, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
 * would you have the kindness of pointing out how exactly this is supposed to be self-contradictory? dab (&#5839;) 21:09, 26 November 2006 (UTC)


 * 1) "monotheists of a non-Abrahamic religion" = NOT from Abraham.
 * 2) "who were seen to have rejected Shirk and retained some or all of the true tenets of the monotheist religion of Ibrahim (Abraham) " = FROM Abraham

Can't have both. --Striver 22:49, 28 November 2006 (UTC)


 * My bad. I used non-Abrahamic to replace paraphrase the reference to non-Christian, non-Jews.--Tigeroo 11:36, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
 * It's Cool :)--Striver 12:20, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

this isn't a contradiction, Striver. Hanif are people within a non-Abrahamic religion who, nevertheless observe tenets of Abrahamic religion. Case in point, Abraham himself wasn't a member of any 'Abrahamic religion' because those didn't exist. That didn't stop him from holding certain 'tenets'. Similarly, pre-Islamic Arabs that 'turned away' from shirk were not adherents of any Abrahamic faith, yet they observerd elements of Abrahamic faiths (as it were 'naturally', without ever having been told about Abrahamic religions). That's not a contradiction, that's the entire point of the term. dab (&#5839;) 12:41, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

That is not what i have been tought. I have learnt that they are the followers of the ways of Abraham. --Striver 16:04, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
 * then you should say "this isn't what I've been taught", and not "this is a contradiction". dab (&#5839;) 16:54, 29 November 2006 (UTC)


 * well, given the definition i had then (and now), it is a contradiction. But i understand that it is not one given your definition. The article needs to represent both views and explain the differences. --Striver 17:12, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
 * no indeed, it needs to give only sourced definitions. I might be wrong, I'm not an Islamic scholar. What I have cited so far is Lane's "to turn away from idolatry". Beyond that, we don't have any sourced definitions. dab (&#5839;) 18:06, 29 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Actually, the two works cited in the intro are rather specific on what the concept of the Hanif was. In that it was socially used specifically to point towards a monotheistic beleif that was distinct and seperate from Judaism and Christianity, and that it was specifically applied to Abraham to distinguish and provide his mode of belief from that practiced by Arab Jews and Christians. One of the books is linked to an online copy in google books if you would like read up. Can you please add Lane's work to the bibliography/ references because the way it stands now it's annoyingly hard to find which work of Lane, or what Lane's full name even is to look up and verify the citation.--Tigeroo 20:43, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Lane is just the standard dictionary of the classical Arabic language, not a "book" on the topic in the more narrow sense. dab (𒁳) 09:59, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I would never have guessed it was a dictionary. Would you be kind enough to edit the reference so that other readers may be able to refer to it as appropiate for further informations?--Tigeroo 19:03, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Deleting Abu Bakr r.a. and Ali r.a. from the list of hunafa
I'm deleting Abu Bakr r.a. and Ali r.a. from the list of hunafa. There is more than enough evidence that Abu Bakr r.a. was not a hanif, and Ali r.a. was 10 years old when the Prophet's s.a.w.s. mission started: he did not have the maturity to be considered a hanif because he was not responsible for himself yet based on the definition of responsibility in Islamic thought. Had he been baligh, he would have been considered a hanif. Umar99 17:38, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Correcting Abd-Allah ibn Jahsh
Removed false reference to Abd-Allah ibn Jahsh R.A. supposedly becoming a Christian convert, added actual details of his life and death as a Muslim and provided neutral source from the online Free Dictionary. The reference is in the full reference list, but can't get it to display with the reference number. Mothra 05:19, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Corrected, it should have been ubayd.--Tigeroo (talk) 05:00, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

virtuous paganism?
About the "See Also" section: I am absolute in curiosity about how virtuous pagan have anything to do with a pure monotheistic ideology. I can see it as a contrast to Hanif, but not as a similarity as the "See Also" section is to represent. RekonDog (talk) 04:05, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

You are right. Alexis Ivanov (talk) 04:59, 21 June 2015 (UTC)