Talk:Six Kalimas

Vowelling
Do we really need to include the vowelling? It makes the Arabic script a bit messy and cluttered.

Yeah, because it helps people who aren't necessarily experts at reading arabic script...

Speaking of vowelling, I would like the kalima-e-tayyabah to have vowels just like the rest in this article. It doesn't make sense to leave one of them out. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.22.244.136 (talk) 14:50, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

Referencing
The introductory paragraph is profoundly simplistic. The Six Kalimas (or Six "Words") are recorded in various books of knowledge can you name one of these books at least? I regularly read Islamic books in both Arabic and English and have yet to have even heard of this. and are recited (and remembered) by Muslims across the globe I am assuming these "Muslims across the globe are a particular sect, perhaps mystical. These kalimas were compiled together for people to memorize and learn the basic fundamentals of Islam.Who compiled them together? And as they are prayers or adhkar how does one learn the basic fundamentals of Islam from them? They are not found altogether complete in any one hadith or narration from the Islamic prophet Muhammad. What are those hadith they are found in? Supertouch (talk) 14:19, 9 March 2008 (UTC) The contents of this article are un-referenced, no citations, and actually unheard of. I beleive this article should be removed. The very term of Kalimas (set aside that they are six, or being recited and remembered) is not known or being used by Muslims at large. However, some of the Arabic text referenced in the article is actually very important in Islam, but under other terms that are known and respected by Muslims, like Shahada, and Azkar; not Kalima or Kalimas. --A abdel sattar (talk) 21:18, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

First Kalima
I always thought that the last part of the first Kalima was "Mohammad ur rasul-allah" "not wa Mohammadan rasulul-llah" Puck42 (talk) 14:39, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I hope I didn't do this wrong - I'm not a muslim, so I'm sort of guessing - but I noticed an error in the syntax of the first kalima preventing the romanization from displaying correctly. I wasn't sure how to restore it, and I also noticed that the text didn't match the text from the article about the Shahada.  I'm guessing there might be some difference of opinion as to which version is correct, أشهد أن] لا إله إلاَّ الله و [أشهد أن ] محمد رسول الله ] (from Six Kalimas) or أشهد أن لا إله إلاَّ الله و أشهد أن محمد رسول الله, and maybe that was where the error crept in, but I'm really not knowledgeable at all and couldn't find it in the history.  Under the assumption that the Shahada version might be watched more closely and therefore more "correct," I've pasted the version of the first kalima from there.  I hope this was the correct thing to do, please fix it if I've gotten it wrong :) stephan.com (talk) 04:23, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

The Kalimah vs 5 Kalimas
There should be a seperate page for just the Kalimah. The idea of the 6 kalimas is practically unknown outside of the Indian subcontinent, it is something specific to a portion of the Muslim community and in all honesty, means absolutely nothing to the rest. The Kalimah however is THE symbol of Islam, and as such it deserves its own page, so 'kalimah' should not redirect to this page any longer.Musa abu A&#39;isha (talk) 11:15, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Second Kalima
the second kalima (arabic script) is incomplete

urdu
it seems it was an urdu speaker who made this article. Urdu is not the language of islam, arabic is the language of islam.

please remove urdu sentences and replace them with arabic ones.

thank u —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.129.51.169 (talk) 21:42, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

5 or 6?
The article name says 6 Kalimas, but the article says there are 5 Kalimas. This is the most egregious problem here. Aside from problem stated above. This article needs to be rewritten so a non muslim can understand it, and how it fits into islam. This article gives very little context, and reads more like a page from a religious instruction manual.66.80.6.163 (talk) 20:12, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

The Fifth Kalima Istighfar is not a Kalima it is a Taubah (Prayer Seeking Repentance from Allah) The Sixth Kalima Raddil Kufr is the actual Fifth Kalima. [Who has the authority to edit the main page to reflect this?]

112.135.147.242 (talk) 04:07, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Why hasn't this article been deleted?
In addition to all the problems mentioned above (applicability of the concept of "kalima" to Islam in general, the use of Urdu terms, no references to any hadith, no explanantion of "books of knowledge", etc, etc), none of the references which link to dawateislami.net (currently ref's 1, 3, 5, and 6) ever actually completely load. There were numerous errors in presentation of original Arabic text, transliteration of the text, and translation of the texts, which I've done my best to repair. Some errors were minor and others were major. It's my view that this article is really irreparable and should be scrapped. How does one go about officially proposing deletion?--Akhooha (talk) 20:29, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

It's apparently a topic of "Islam in Pakistan", so why not just portray it as such? Seriously, what is so difficult about writing an objective and informative article? Five minutes googling establishes that this is simply a thing in Pakistani madrasas. I have not been able to pinpoint when the concept first arose, but my earliest sources date to the 1990s. So, apparently, Pakistani madrasas began to teach six chosen passages from hadiths as "the six kalimas" some 30 years ago or so. Why not simply state that and move on? Ideally, people who are familiar with this topic could also go out of their way and cleanly cite each of the six passages to some hadith.

I also found one 1912 source which uses "the six kalimas" as a term for the six articles of faith in Islam. This may somehow point to the origin of the term, or the number six, but a single 1912 hit probably doesn't call for disambiguation. --dab (𒁳) 11:34, 12 July 2014 (UTC)

trying to source this
...because clearly nobody else is going to.

I think I figured out that it is difficult to find references on the "six kalimas" because there used to be five. "five kalimas" are mentioned in this 1894 source, so it seems reasnoable to assume that the first five became standard at some point in the 19th century. The addition of the sixth seems to be comparatively recent, certainly post-1945. The best lead seems to be Darul Uloom Deoband, which is recorded as teaching the "six kalimas" by the 2000s. The school was founded 1866, and they might have introduced this notion of "six kalimas" at any time after that, but maybe their canon didn't become mainstream until recently. Of course, when we read about "five kalimas" or "six kalimas", we have no way of knowing that these are always the same texts, as "kalima" simple means "word" or "utterance" or something.

long story short, the first reference to "six kalimas" I found so far dates to the 1990s, which seems to be about the time when they became mainstream in Pakistan, but reference to "five kalimas" can be found in the 1890s. --dab (𒁳) 17:46, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

The "five kalimas" search string seems to be the key here, it leads you to forums where Muslims begin calling each other names over disagreeing whether there are five or six. Then on an "islamic help line" there was one guy who was asked were there five or six and answered that there was only one kalima (the shahada) and didn't know what the question was about, clearly because he was not from South Asia. The five vs. six question seems to have arisen after 1945 in Indian vs. Pakistani tradition, apparently there are now (still) five in India but six in Pakistan. This is based on trawling internet forums, so I cannot make a referenced addition to the article. this guy, bless him, actually tells us he consulted "books", but doesn't feel it is necessary to identify these books, so while I am sure he had printed references, we don't know what they were.

So, according to these "books", the Indian book had five and the Pakistani six, but the one "left out" in the Indian one wasn't the sixth but the fifth, so it would seem the recent addition is Kalimah Istighfar. I imagine it is a reflection of the youth bulge that Islamic questions seem to be almost exclusively discussed by teenagers in informal forum discussions under handles such as "Solider-Of-Islam". But even an Islamic Academy will only dump a dubious transliteration of the text and not bother with anything resembling references. This makes it almost impossible to write articles about these topics. Even academic sources (Riaz 2008) are reduced to reporting oral communications, which makes the topic of Islam more or less a question of ethnographic field work. --dab (𒁳) 18:00, 22 July 2014 (UTC)