Talk:Mubarak Al-Sabah

Expansion of Mubarak article from stub status
Here is my reasoning of the expansion of Mubarak the Great and how it went about:

When writing this Wikipedia article on Mubarak the Great, especially midway through the process, I found it a challenge to digest and arrange all the details of Mubarak’s rise and reign. I decided to aim for a balance of breadth (covering his entire life) and depth into key events. It was easy for me to get lost in all the detail and interpretations that scholars and people of the time thought of Mubarak. Thus it was important for me to find not only what they said about him, but what events they generally focused on. After doing my literature review I had a very good sense on what the key moments of Mubarak’s life. The subheadings were created on the structure and focus previous scholars placed on his life. Material on Mubarak’s early life up to his reign proved very scant, so I included all I could about it. Information about any wives, family life, personal hobbies, and what some may think as “trivialities” were almost nonexistent in the readings; the major focus, as all the literature I read about him centered on his political and personal gains as a major player in the theater of the Persian Gulf. With nothing else to work with that is how the biography had to be written.

In terms of selecting sources, from the nineteen books and articles I found I settled on two texts that served as the foundation of my narrative: Frederick Anscombe’s The Ottoman Gulf and B.J. Slot’s Mubarak Al-Sabah: Founder of Modern Kuwait 1896-1915. While Anscombe’s was the better written, Slot provided much more nuanced detail on Mubarak’s life and took a historiographical approach. His approach proved useful when tracing a line of historical interpretation. Slot cites Anscombe’s book more than any other in his narrative. Slot also used a lot of primary material that I looked through previously, such as Robin Bidwell’s The Affairs of Kuwait, which not only helped with contextualizing, but also made my task a little more convenient. Another reason why I chose these two is that they are the most “up to date” books and both exhausted previous narratives on Mubarak; most notably both negatively respond to Salwa Alghanim’s The Reign of Mubarak Al-Sabah, which I found less useful then I imagined. I am sure that Anscombe and Slot did color my opinion of Alghanim’s book a little, but I did read Alghanim’s book before the other two.

I tried to incorporate primary source material, such quotes from letters and telegraphs, to provide more context, and narrative “flavor” to the article. Bidwell’s book and Briton Cooper Busch’s Britain and the Status of Kuwayt 1896-1899 had a lot of interesting quotes. However, due to page constraint and the brevity of this project I could not incorporate as much as I wanted from those sources directly. I resorted to write more about the event itself than what all the historical actors had to say about it, unless what they said really helped to show the significance of the event.

As a whole this Mubarak article is a step up from the scant two paragraphs that were on Wikipedia. I checked out the Wiki written in Arabic about him. Although I can’t read a single word of Arabic, there was substantially more about him then the English Wiki. If Mubarak is considered “Great” then why was there little on him that is easily accessible online? Through my research I learned why Mubarak was considered great; his intelligence and cunning created modern Kuwait, which continues to be one of most significant and important states of the Persian Gulf.

CielErrant (talk) 22:28, 21 December 2009 (UTC)