Talk:Sharif

Sheriff references
I see in early versions of this article, it was alleged that the arabic word and the english word were some way connected. That is no longer the case so is there any purpose for the statement regarding "sheriff" in this article? Pepsidrinka 06:00, 19 December 2005 (UTC)


 * To keep dimwits from inserting the "information" again. I restored the statement, as I really don't want to have to keep removing false etymologies. There are some criticisms or ideas that must be answered, even if they're totally dumb. Zora 08:46, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Personally, I think that is the right way to handle spurious connections (or those widely considered spurious). After all, an uninformed user might looking up the term in this encyclopedia precisely because they they found the term used in the spurious way and to fill the need to get accurate information. That is one of the most important uses of an encyclopedia, if you ask me. [PS: Hi, Zora!]

--iFaqeer (talk) 08:09, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree on mentioning the word sharif, but i looked up the link for sheriff and it says it comes from Shire-Reeve. If you look up Shire, it says it's possibly related to the Persian Shahr. Shah means king in Persian. So it's not impossible there may be some very remote link via the idea of nobility which is shared by both terms. (In modern Afghanistan the quarters of Kabul are called Shahr.)

There are some tenuous links between Arabic and Indo-European languages which one may notice in studying Arabic. Also, English words that are not similar to German or French may often be related to other languages not usually associated with English.

For example, the word "shire" is also thought to be related to the words "shear" or "share." (Cf. Shire "The word derives from the Old English, scir, and appears to be allied to shear,shore, "share"(cropper) as it is a division of the land." ("Shear" of course is related to German "Schere," scissors or shears, pronounced "share.")

The Arabic word for "share" is "sharika." So even if "sheriff" does not come straight from "sharif," there does seem to be some kind of distant "shared" root there. JPLeonard (talk) 01:55, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

IPA Pronunciation
While the multiple transliterations aid English pronunciation, an IPA guide in the first paragraph may prove helpful. Ohayrt (talk) 01:11, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Source for meaning of the term in South Asia
The text [in South Asia ... the term ashrāf designates not only Muslims of Arab descent (sayyids or purported descendants of Ali and Fatima,] and shaykhs, which include all those who claim descent from the Quraysh or from one of Muhammad's companions), but also Muslims of Pasthun (Pathans) or Turko-Mongol (Mughals) descent was removed from the article on the basis that a text supporting the claim could not be found in the source. As a courtesy, I give here a quote from the source which supports the article text:

By contrast, in South Asia, ashrāf has had a very different meaning. Here it has been used to designate a major social-status group within the overall Muslim community, namely all Muslims of foreign ancestry (as opposed to higher and lower indigenous Indian Muslim lineages, the aṭrāf or adjlāf and the ardhāl, respectively). Thus the ashrāf comprise sayyids (descendants of ʿAlī and Fāṭima) and shaykhs (descendants of Ḳuraysh or of Muḥammad’s Companions), as well as mughals and pat́hāns (two ethnic descent groups of “foreign” origin) ☿ Apaugasma  ( talk  ☉) 15:45, 3 July 2022 (UTC)