Talk:The Nabataean Agriculture

Some comments and suggestions
First of all, I must say that I am thoroughly impressed by the quality and depth of this article. It is the best article on this kind of subject that I've ever come across, not just here on Wikipedia, but in any encyclopedic source whatsoever. All the comments and suggestions for improvement below should be read with this in mind.


 * Ibn Wahshiyya was not from Kufa itself, but from Qussīn, near Kufa (the references can be copied from Ibn Wahshiyya).
 * ✅ --Cerebellum (talk) 11:23, 6 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Our article Occult mainly deals with 'occultism', which actually is a nineteenth-century phenomenon that mainly evolved as a reaction against secularism and modern science (see especially Hanegraaff, Wouter J. 2012. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The term "occult sciences", on the other hand, is already attested in medieval Arabic and Latin sources, and originally appears to have referred to sciences dealing with 'hidden causes' (such as, e.g., alchemy, which deals with the invisible elementary ingredients of things, or astrology, which deals with the unseen movements in celestial mechanics and the imperceptible workings of subtle starlight on terrestrial phenomena). However, the medieval concept of "occult sciences" has not yet been the object of a dedicated study, and until then it is perhaps better to avoid its use entirely. What I tend to do is to name the specific sciences involved in each case, even if that is not always so much clearer (what is alchemy, really? or worse, what is magic? future research will hopefully be able to subject these blanket categories to some serious revision). In any case, what should absolutely be avoided is the substantivized adjective "the occult", which appears to be a late twentieth century innovation (see Occult). Also note that we have an article called Occultism (Islam), which is quite defective, but still better than Occult for medieval use.
 * ✅ --Cerebellum (talk) 11:23, 6 February 2021 (UTC)


 * The English word "Arab" refers to ethnic Arabs only. When referring to people writing in Arabic, "Arabic writers" (who may be Persians, Berbers, Turks, etc.) should be used.
 * ✅ --Cerebellum (talk) 11:23, 6 February 2021 (UTC)


 * The following may be just a personal preference, but when dealing with historical topics, I think it's better to link to the article 'history of x' rather than to the article 'x' (e.g., botany rather than botany).
 * ✅ --Cerebellum (talk) 11:23, 6 February 2021 (UTC)


 * I know that this is discussed at the end of the article (where "Orientalist controversy" is perhaps a bit too loaded an expression for what was just a regular scholarly debate), but it may be useful to already note in the section on 'Composition' that only Arabic copies of the work survive, and that throughout the twentieth century, most scholars regarded the work as a pseudo-translation (i.e., originally written in Arabic, and only falsely claiming to be a translation from an ancient work), with many scholars even doubting Ibn Wahshiyya's historical existence, supposing that the Nabataean Agriculture was written by Abu Talib al-Zayyat. I'm not sure about the position taken by Toufic Fahd (the major authority on Ibn Wahshiyya in the eighties and nineties), but I believe that it was only Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila who first extensively argued that the work was an authentic translation from a Syriac original (a view that can probably be trusted, but which still needs confirmation from future experts, and should perhaps never be stated as an indisputable fact, especially since no traces of such an original exist). Some more information about these earlier views can be found in Hämeen-Anttila's introduction to his 2006 book (The Last Pagans of Iraq: Ibn Wahshiyya And His Nabatean Agriculture, pp. 3-9).
 * ✅, although the composition section is not very good, I need to rewrite it. --Cerebellum (talk) 11:23, 6 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Personally, I find Hämeen-Anttila's use of the word "nationalism" misleading and ahistorical. It is true that, just like modern nationalists, the shu'ubiyya movement was struggling to preserve the use of native languages and cultures. However, the struggle of the shu'ubiyya movement was not at all linked to any geographical region supposed to be politically controlled by, and to serve as a 'home' for, a particular culture (a 'nation'), which is an utterly modern concept that simply did not exist before the nineteenth century. In any case, although Persians were certainly an important part of the shu'ubiyya movement, it was not at all limited to them, and so Ibn Wahshiyya's extolling of Mesopotamian culture was not analogous to, but rather part of the shu'ubiyya movement (see Hämeen-Anttila 2006, pp. 33-45).
 * ✅ --Cerebellum (talk) 11:23, 6 February 2021 (UTC)


 * I know that you copied this from the old Ibn Wahshiyya article, but the word "superstition" is inherently pejorative, and so not really appropriate, unless it is explicitly used by the relevant sources (which it of course isn't). Perhaps "and its associated lore"?
 * ✅ --Cerebellum (talk) 11:23, 6 February 2021 (UTC)


 * When mentioning Sabians (in two places in the article) it should always be made very clear (unfortunately, our article on the subject does not) that this is a Qur'anic label of which it is unknown (and probably unknowable) to whom it originally referred, and that it has historically been claimed and used by a great variety of completely unrelated religious groups. In Qur'an 2:62 (perhaps also in 5:69 and 22:17, but this is not clear) the Jews, the Christians and the Ṣābiʼūn are implied to belong to the ahl al-kitāb or the "people of the book" (i.e., those religious groups to whom God has revealed a Scripture), of whom the Qur'an elsewhere says that they should be treated with a certain degree of tolerance at the hands of Muslims (see dhimma). Now in the first two centuries of Islam, this did not really come into play, since the Muslims were a very small minority in all of the territories they conquered, which made tolerance of other religions, 'people of the book' or not, a bare practical necessity. Throughout the Umayyad period (661–750), it was more or less an official policy to keep it that way (since non-Muslims could be more heavily taxed, see jizya). However, with the advent of the Abbasids in 750, it was made much easier for non-Muslims to convert, and as a result, rates of Islamization slowly started to rise. It is in this context that, at a certain point in the ninth century, it became a necessity for some non-Muslim religious groups, especially those geographically close to the center of power in Baghdad, to be able to demonstrate that they belonged to the 'people of the book', and so were deserving of tolerance. Though some perhaps claimed to be Jews or Christians, this would be quite risky, since there were enough Jews and Christians around that could point out the falsity of their claim. The label of Ṣābiʼūn, on the other hand, was more or less free for the taking (we have an abundance of sources dating from the ninth century, but none of them seems to know to whom the label originally referred, and it appears that this knowledge was already lost at the time). The two major groups that we can more or less identify as having claimed the label of Ṣābiʼūn are the Mandaeans (a Jewish-Christian Baptist sect which still exists in the marshlands of Southern Iraq) on the one hand, and the much more obscure Sabians of Harran (a city in Upper Mesopotamia, today in Turkey) on the other. These two are completely unrelated (whereas Mandaeism, much like Manichaeism and Islam itself, originally was one of the many Jewish-Christian sects that emerged in late antiquity, the Harranian religion seems to have been a late survival of Hellenistic polytheism), but in fact the term was soon used generally to refer to any established religious group which wasn't Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. It is in this latter sense that Ibn Wahshiyya is probably using the term (in the few places where he actually does use it): to refer to unspecified Iraqi pagans (by the way, the word 'pagan' originally refers to the religion of peasants, which is quite appropriate here, since Ibn Wahshiyya is talking about religious groups in the Iraqi countryside). All of this merely to say that the Mesopotamian paganism described by Ibn Wahshiyya was not "a branch of the Sabian religion" (which, if it ever existed, is utterly unknown, and certainly had no known branches), and that it is very misleading to state that it was related both to the Harrian religion and to Mandaeism, which it was only to the extent that all religions of the period were interrelated (containing Abrahamic, Hellenic, Manichaean, etc., elements; this also holds for Islam itself). [Most of the above is based on Van Bladel, Kevin 2009. The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 64-118 (the best recent treatment of the term 'Sabian') and (for Ibn Wahshiyya) on Hämeen-Anttila 2006, pp. 46-52; cf. pp. 20 n. 42, 37 n. 91.]
 * For now, removed the term "Sabian". Maybe later I'll reintroduce it and mention the Mandaeans and Harranians for context, but as I read in another article: "There is no possibility and no need to enter here into the nebulous traditions about the Sabians." --Cerebellum (talk) 11:23, 6 February 2021 (UTC)


 * The rest of the section on 'Religion and philosophy' seems OK, although I believe that both Hämeen-Anttila's and Fahd's knowledge of ancient and late antique philosophy is seriously lacking, and that their analysis of Ibn Wahshiyya's philosophical views should therefore be approached with much caution.
 * The Ghayat al-hakim (Picatrix) is now widely considered to be written by Maslama al-Qurṭubī (died 964, the references can be copied from Ibn Wahshiyya; our article on the Ghayat al-hakim still needs to be updated). Note that the Ghayat al-hakim is normally described as a work on 'magic' which, though certainly vague, is still more specific than Western esotericism.
 * ✅ --Cerebellum (talk) 12:11, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

I hope this helps. Any questions are always welcome.

Sincerely, Apaugasma (talk&#124;contribs) 21:47, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you so much :) Really appreciate the encouragement and feedback, I'll incorporate these suggestions in the coming weeks. --Cerebellum (talk) 08:27, 25 January 2021 (UTC)