Talk:Muhammad ibn al-Qasim

Splitting proposal

I propose that sections Early Muslim Presence in Sindh, Umayyad interest in Sindh, The campaign and Military and political strategy be split into a separate page called Arab conquest of Sind. These sections represent historical information that go beyond Muhammad bin Qasim's biography, dealing with Umayyad political strategies, Al-Hajjaj's management of the invasion etc. which deserve to be in a proper historical article on the subject. Once split, the material relevant to Qasim's biography can be summarised here. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 08:51, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Comments

Please indicate your agreement/disagreement here. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 08:57, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

• Yes, it would be to split the article into two parts. It is also fine to merge the two articles about the same person. Dr. Hamza Ebrahim (talk) 13:41, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

• Support I agree with the proposal in general. Obviously Muhammad ibn Qasim is most famous for the conquest of Sind so it’s not surprising it should take up the majority of space, but I see that a lot of this article does not deal directly with Muhammad’s specific role, but rather about the conquest in general. All relevant information about Muhammad should be retained, and some of the background and strategy information should also be kept for necessary context. Once this is done, I think a major rewrite and/or expansion is in order. The article on Qutayba ibn Muslim, the Muslim conqueror of Transoxiana, would serve as a good model. —Al Ameer (talk) 18:54, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

Discussion

Please use this space for any threaded discussion. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 08:57, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

I will explore this a bit more in the coming days. The article needs to be revamped and this might be a good start. I just want to point out two things from now though. 1) There is another article about the same person Muhammad ibn al-Qasim al-Thaqafi (created in 2016) and obviously the two articles need to be merged. 2) there is an article about Arab Sind. The latter is very well-sourced and objectively written. Its purpose appears to be about the administrative province of Sind and a list of its governors, rather than the Arab conquest, but it contains very clear and useful information about the conquest of Sind. —Al Ameer (talk) 13:17, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

@Kautilya3: Since nobody else has voiced opposition and this thread has been open since June, should we proceed here? And if so, would you do the honors? Otherwise, I'll go ahead as soon as I find time (assuming this will be more than a cut/paste job). Al Ameer (talk) 22:39, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, I was just thinking about it this week. Let me take a crack at it during the weekend and, if I can't make time, I will let you go ahead with it. Cheers, Kautilya3 (talk) 23:07, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Bin vs Ibn

Not sure why the article uses the colloquial Arabic word for "son of" bin instead of the proper ibn. All of our articles on medieval Islamic figures like the subject of this article use ibn. Unless anyone could indicate that "bin" is the more common form used for this person, I'll proceed to change it to "ibn". --Al Ameer (talk) 21:28, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

That is the WP:COMMONNAME. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 22:54, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Not sure about that. There seems to be a wide array of similar transcriptions, i.e. Muhammad ibn (or b., which is an abbreviation of "ibn") al-Qasim, Muhammad ibn Qasim, Muhammad bin Qasim, Muhammad Qasim, etc. based on the sources currently used in the article. Has this been discussed before? WP:COMMONNAME suggests that we use "the name that is most commonly used (as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable English-language sources)"? I don't believe the case for "bin" in this regard is stronger than "ibn". There's certainly not "a significant majority of independent, reliable English sources" that prefer "bin". As the sources for this article use both versions, as well as the simple "b." (which is the scholarly abbreviation for "ibn") or none at all, we should go with the generally more common and more proper "ibn", which is used for all articles on medieval Islamic figures, certainly on all the Umayyad-era figures. It will not change the amount of letters in the current title. I don't think this is a controversial proposal. --Al Ameer (talk) 18:23, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

Try googling for "Muhammad bin Qasim" and "Muhammad ibn Qasim", and see what happens. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 20:50, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

"Muhammad bin Qasim" returns 349,000, "Muhammad ibn al-Qasim" (the most proper and best title for this article) returns 118,000 and my proposed title "Muhammad ibn Qasim" returns 49,000 results (I'm fine with either of the latter two names, for the record). There's a few issues with this and it's not as simple as boiling it down to such a generic Google search. The main issue is that the web search returns tens of thousands of unreliable sources when the preference is for reliable English-language sources. Also, there are many people in history or even in our own times who have the same name and use either spelling and all of those people are also lumped in the respective searches. Further, the many modern-day places or institutions called after "Muhammad bin Qasim" in Pakistan or elsewhere, and possibly the many wiki-mirror sites of this article or any other Wikipedia articles that use our current spelling "Muhammad bin Qasim" probably inflate the "bin Qasim" number. Thus, I don't think such a web count should be the determining factor for whether we use the modern colloquial version of "bin" over the proper "ibn" for our article on the man himself (as opposed to our articles on the modern institutions or places named after him). The web search simply doesn't give us a decent gauge of what reliable and/or academic English-language sources prefer. The WP:COMMONNAME guideline states:

In determining which of several alternative names is most frequently used, it is useful to observe the usage of major international organizations, major English-language media outlets, quality encyclopedias, geographic name servers, major scientific bodies, and notable scientific journals. A search engine may help to collect this data; when using a search engine, restrict the results to pages written in English, and exclude the word "Wikipedia". When using Google, generally a search of Google Books and News Archive should be defaulted to before a web search, as they concentrate reliable sources (exclude works from Books, LLC when searching Google Books[7]). Search engine results are subject to certain biases and technical limitations

--Al Ameer (talk) 22:52, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

You are welcome to do more specialised searches and present the data. But what you can't do is to argue on the basis of what you regard as "proper Arabic". -- Kautilya3 (talk) 23:32, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

I could certainly argue (not dictate) on that basis, considering it is also used by numerous reliable sources; but Commonname has precedence over other considerations. I will survey a healthy number of reliable sources, to which all interested editors are welcome obviously to contribute. In case one version is not clearly favored over the other, then other factors should be considered and/or a formal move request opened. —Al Ameer (talk) 00:20, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

Requested move 4 July 2022

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 04:27, 23 July 2022 (UTC)

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• Muhammad ibn Qasim → Muhammad ibn al-Qasim
• Muhammad ibn al-Qasim → Muhammad ibn al-Qasim (disambiguation)

– Many of the sources used in this article (Baloch 1953, Friedmann 1993, Asani 2006) have "ibn al-Qasim" (with definite article al-, precise transliteration may differ but we use WP:MOSAR), which also seems to be his original name in Arabic. Gabrieli 1965 uses "ibn Qasim" (without the definite article al-) in the title but then goes on to also call him "ibn al-Qasim" on the first page. Muhammad ibn al-Qasim is currently a DAB page but given that our Umayyad general is the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC it should occupy the page with the bare name. If editors feel that the other Muhammad ibn al-Qasims listed at the DAB page are notable enough, an alternative would be to move this page to Muhammad ibn al-Qasim al-Thaqafi instead (his nisba al-Thaqafi provides natural disambiguation; it's the solution also preferred by ar-wiki). ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 23:34, 4 July 2022 (UTC) — Relisting. >>> Extorc.talk 11:33, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

• Support because the current setup is untenable. Usually when I see al- dropped, I assume we are dealing with Persian. But I see no reason to do so in this case. Srnec (talk) 14:03, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

  It's not unheard of for "al-" to be dropped in modern transcriptions of historical names. For example, the sons of Ali ibn Abi Talib were called al-Hasan and al-Husayn, yet we have Hasan ibn Ali and Husayn ibn Ali. This is because the modern variants of these names are Hasan rather than al-Hasan, Husayn rather than al-Husayn, Qasim rather than al-Qasim, etc. It creates a bit of a difficult situation for us when sources retroactively apply the modern form on historical variants: with Hasan and Husayn they do it commonly enough for us to be clear, but in this case it's only some sources doing it (probably also because it's part of the patronym here). My impression is that most sources in the article use "al-Qasim", whence the RM, but it would be good if others would take a look at sources not used in the article. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 14:28, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

  Good point. Hadn't thought of that. It's always good to know why there is variation when choosing between variants. Srnec (talk) 15:40, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

• Support I brought up a related proposal previously when the article used "bin" instead of "ibn", see discussion above. The majority of scholarly sources about the subject abbreviate "ibn" as "b.". Per our MoS, we spell out "ibn". As far as the article "al-", it appears most scholarly sources use this form, per the below survey (excuse any repetition from Apagasuma's statement).

For "b. al-Qasim" or "ibn al-Qasim"

• Asani (2006) "Muhammad ibn al-Qasim" entry
• Baloch (1953) Muhammad ibn al-Qasim
• Blankinship (1994) The End of the Jihad State
• Chowdhry (1972) Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf
• Crone (1980) Slaves on Horses
• Hawting (2000) The First Dynasty of Islam (only one mention of the subject)
• Kennedy (2001) The Armies of the Caliph
• The edited History of al-Tabari volumes
• The Encyclopedia of Islam (2nd ed)

For "b. Qasim" or "ibn Qasim"

• Gibb (1923) The Arab Conquests in Central Asia (only one mention of the subject)
• Hoyland (2015) In God's Path: The Arab Conquests
• Kennedy (2007) The Great Arab Conquests
• Wellhausen (1927) The Arab Kingdom and Its Fall"

For both:

• Gabrieli (1965) Muhammad ibn Qasim ath-Thaqafi and the Arab Conquest of Sind (this is one of the main modern sources for the subject and frustratingly, "ibn Qasim" is used in the title and several times in the article text, and "ibn al-Qasim" is also used throughout the text. He needed a better copyeditor it seems.)

For just "al-Qasim" [no b. or ibn]

• Wink (1996) Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Al Ameer son (talk • contribs) 14:48, July 11, 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

History

How was muhammad bin qasim gifted and special? 103.162.137.81 (talk) 17:26, 20 September 2022 (UTC)