Talk:Nazim Al-Haqqani/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Naming convention in the article subject "Shaykh Nazim" vs "Haqqani" vs "Adil"

I'm intending to change the naming convention used in this article. The sources do not indicate that subject's surname is Haqqani. Rather, it is "Adil". "al Haqqani" appears an honorific he acquired at some point. The various academic secondary source material I have available, which I will be adding to the article, refers to him throughout as "Shaykh Nazim". As per the exception to WP:Honorific, he should be referred throughout the article as "Shaykh Nazim" like "Mother Theresa" or "Father Coughlin". i.e. He certainly appears to be much better known as "Shaykh Nazim" than "Haqqani" (I can find no source that uses this convention over "Shaykh Nazim", save WP) or "Adil" (his true surname). Bapehu (talk) 22:22, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

According to WP:HONORIFIC, the exception does depend on how sources refer to the subject. We still need to look more closely at that, though; do the sources refer to the subject as such or not? I would prefer to see that demonstrated before jumping to an exception rather than sticking with a general rule. MezzoMezzo (talk) 04:00, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

Böttcher, Annabelle (2006). "Religious Authority in Transnational Sufi Networks: Shaykh Nazim al-Qubrusi al-Haqqani al-Naqshbandi". In Krämer, Gudrun; Schmidte, Sabine (eds.). Speaking for Islam: Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies. Leiden: Brill. pp. 241–268. ISBN 900414949X. Retrieved November 24, 2014. refers to him consistently as "Shaykh Nazim. This is a strong source: Brill publisher, editor of the volume Gudrun Krämer is the co-editor of the the Encyclopaedia of Islam. The author draws broadly from the available primary sources, trying to resolve contradictory information across sources where it appears, and getting into the biography vs hagiography discussion. Bapehu (talk) 05:23, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

Well one source isn't enough, though discovering "enough" is probably easier than even reading individual sources. Just run searches for books and academic publishings for the various terms ("Shaykh Nazim," "Nazim al-Haqqani," "Nazim Adil," etc.) and see what comes up the most. It will likely take much less time than sifting through individual books. MezzoMezzo (talk) 06:21, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

I guess I'm still not sure what degree of detail is appropriate to demonstrate a point like this. Just looking at the number of results on Google Books for example for the various terms does not appear to be instructive: i.e. there is a problem with the methodology in that the number of results is the number of individual sources with at least one mention of the search term (e.g. "Shaykh Nazim" or "Nazim al-Haqqani"), not the total number number of uses of the term across all sources. Almost every relevant source uses "shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani" at least once, which is itself a positive hit for both of our proposed terms. Upon going into each of the sources, its clear that on subsequent mentions, "Shaykh Nazim" is the preferred usage. Nearly all the academic sources I can find use "Shaykh Nazim". I can only find a handful that use "al-Haqqani" on subsequent mentions. "Nazim al-Haqqani" is used on the initial mention and almost never without "shaykh". Bapehu (talk) 07:24, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

@Bapehu:, there are other ways to search most commonly found terms with specific engines and sources, but it's been at least a year since I have personally done that and I don't quite remember how. Perhaps it could be something both you and I need to figure out down the road for future use. Upon review, what you're saying now is reasonable, nobody has any reason to doubt it and I don't have a reason to dispute your claim. In a case like this, you're probably safe executing this proposed change from now without waiting since you have done your part here on talk. If nobody responded at all I would say wait another day or two, but discussion happened so you can probably edit now and if anyone wants to dispute the change later - highly unlikely but theoretically possible - then just deal with it then. It seems like a fair enough way to do it. MezzoMezzo (talk) 03:19, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

@MezzoMezzo: cool. Thanks for your help. In the meantime, I found the Google Ngram tool, which I think might be one of the tools you were referring to at https://books.google.com/ngrams/. This appears to be potentially a very useful tool because it has access to the total frequency of a given term within a corpus of a given language. However, its output doesn't make that pure frequency analysis available to the user, from what I can tell. Rather, given a search term of a given class, it outputs the percentage that term makes up in that classes. Classes are 1-word strings, 2-word strings, etc. So, if I understand correctly, comparing, e.g., "Shaykh Nazim" and "al-Haqqani" with this tool, might be misleading: i.e. the "Shaykh Nazim" graph will show the percentage of total two-word strings that are "Shaykh Nazim, while that for "al-Haqqani" would be the % of one-word strings it accounts for. The problem, to my mind, is that the sample size of one-word strings is necessarily twice that of two-word strings. Assuming, for example, that "Bart Simpson" appears an equal number of times in the corpus as "cartoon", the n-gram for Bart Simpson would be twice as high because the corpus must contain 1/2 the number of 2-word strings as it does one word strings. This tool would, however, be immediately useful for comparing frequency of equal-word-length strings (see https://books.google.com/ngrams/info).

Regardless, this tool has other great features. e.g. searching "Shaykh *" will give the top ten two word strings that start with "Shaykh". I imagine this has been discussed at length elsewhere on wikipedia. I'll see what I can find that has probably been laid out more succinctly and thoroughly on the subject. Bapehu (talk) 14:50, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

That seems like one of them, though for sure there are other similar tools. As you'll find over time here, different editors have different skills - whether it be search engines, markup language, writing good prose, doing hard research, etc. There are probably a handful that do it all but not most. A lot of editors save tools like that on their user pages so as to keep track of them. MezzoMezzo (talk) 03:38, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

Cleanup proposal

Issues: Lead includes information not in the body and doesn't follow WP:MoS. Although there is ample secondary sources from academic literature on this subject, they are not included. The article as a whole reads more like the ruins of edit battles between his followers and detractors (who have not been following WP guidelines and failed to source properly), and more experienced WP editors who step in and remove poorly sourced material. The end result is an article lacking cohesion with an unbalanced treatment of the subject: e.g. he was notable enough to be regularly counted among the 50 most influential Muslims in the world, but the article doesn't really tell us why. Bapehu (talk) 23:41, 24 November 2014 (UTC)

@Bapehu:, the real edit wars started after the subject's death; the page was "protected" for a period, meaning that only editors whose accounts were old could alter the article at all. Once things died down comparatively speaking, the protection was removed. I suppose that with you being someone approaching this article new, you notice the battle scars left from those conflicts.

There are several ways to perform a cleanup. One thing I was told on the talk page for either Sh. Azmi or perhaps the Barelvi page is that the lead should generally be edited last. The reason is that the lead is merely a summary of the most important parts of the body of the article. As the body changes, the lead will change; every time you make significant edits to even one section of the body, edits to the lead might be in order. A much simpler way would be to leave the lead alone entirely until you're sure the rest of the article is in good shape, and then basically rewrite the lead based on the new article.

Regarding cleanup, I do have some suggestions as a professional editor (outside Wikipedia, I mean). Do substantive changes first and worry about copyediting later. Correcting exact wordings, grammatical and spelling errors, minor stylistic changes and problems with proper citation information...all of these things are time consuming and will slow you down. They also aren't as critical as potential content issues. I'm not speaking about this article in particular, but in general fixing a mistake in the date of someone's birth comes first while four errors in spelling across several paragraphs comes later. To apply it to this case, you may want to focus on making the article more logically cohesive first and worry about the mechanics of how it was written later. MezzoMezzo (talk) 03:51, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

@MezzoMezzo:, Thanks. I appreciate the advice. I intend to work on it in the days ahead. Bapehu (talk) 04:18, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

New section: International mission

I've renamed "Travels abroad" as international mission. This tries to capture one of the main features of the subject discussed in the source material: his remarkable, for a sufi shaykh, trans-national appeal. He's from the Turkish speaking world. He then moves to Syria to live with his murshid, serving as his entree into the greater Arabic context. Upon his murshid's passing, he becomes the murshid of the sufi order and begins spending several months each year in London, England, which the sources describe as his key move to not just the English context but the greater European context, especially in Germany. From 1973, he is described as having two headquarters: London and Damascus (later Cyprus). See the Boettcher source. At present, the key London connection is absent from the wikipedia article and must be added. From 1990 on, he begins travelling more extensively in both the US and the greater Muslim world (e.g. Caucasus, Central Asia, South Africa).

The relevance of including detailed information about his travels is that he was building the sufi network. It is noteworthy because it is exceptional historically for Sufi shaykhs and because he was reconnecting with other branches of the historic Naqshbandi tariqa. This is all in Boettcher.

Boettcher also is also seems a very good source for biography where she draws broadly from the available primary sources, trying to resolve contradictory information across sources where it appears, and getting into the biography vs hagiography discussion. Bapehu (talk) 03:27, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

@Bapehu:, this is too much. When it comes to controversial topics - and Haqqani is controversial due to weird disputes within his group which pop up here every few months - it's better to only discuss one proposed change at a time, and only to move on to a new one after consensus has been achieved for sure. An example of this is Talk:Qamaruzzaman Azmi; I would post a proposal, then wait for discussion. If someone responded, we worked things out. If nobody responded after three days, I would carry on. I would not open a new proposal until the previous one had been resolved. It's much better and easier to manage that way, and even though it's more time consuming it also cements said changes more firmly because it demonstrates that any and all disputes have been resolved (or never existed in the first place). MezzoMezzo (talk) 04:03, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

User:MezzoMezzo Got it. Thanks. Edit: I just now read through that talk page, and it was extremely beneficial (and pretty funny at moments). I made the page a favourite for future reference. Bapehu (talk) 04:35, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

Predictions section source problems - POV and SPS

This section is made up of quotes attributed to Shaykh Nazim. The sole source for this section is Vadillo, a secondary source that is clearly polemical towards Nazim, i.e. title of book is "Esoteric Deviation in Islam" of of which Nazim is supposed to be a prime example. I cannot find a single 3rd party review of this book, save for two anonymous forum postings. worldcat.org shows the book held by 6 libraries.

Moreover, it's an weighty attribution. Vadillo is putting in subject's mouth that he has made repeated specific predictions which have failed. Source says that subject himself sources these predictions to Muslim prophet Muhammad. This is particularly contentious because this subject's noteworthiness is based on his position as a Muslim cleric. The clear implication is that he is that this Muslim cleric would in effect attribute a lie to the central figure of the religion, its prophet Muhammad. I think this qualifies as WP:EXCEPTIONAL.

Additionally, the Vadillo source appears to be SPS. I can find no reference to Madina House publisher except for publications of Murabitun World Movement. Vadillo appears to be a principal of this organization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Umar_Vadillo#Sources). Bapehu (talk) 05:39, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

There has been no comment or provision a source that might be reliable from which to quote shaykh Nazim. I am removing the unreliably unsourced material. Bapehu (talk) 02:26, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Anonymous edits on Shaykh Nazim's successors and his sufi way

Please think twice before adding unsourced content to this article. Wikipedia is not the place for you to contribute your two-cents because you think that you are an authority on the issue: you very well may be, but WP:NOR. Wikipedia is just not the place for editors to express their personal opinions about this subject. Please: bring a source, stick with a Neutral Point of View, and then by all means contribute to making this article as fine as it can be. Thanks to everyone working on this article.

If you wish to make a Wikipedia article on Shaykh Abdel Kerim Kibrisi and his successors, then by all means do so. If you wish to make an article on the Osmanli Naksbendi way, do so. Perhaps a section in this article would be appropriate if you can provide relevant source material. But Wikipedia is not a fan page.

If you have relevant, neutral sources and wish to add content based on them concerning Shaykh Nazim's successor in his Sufi Way, then by all means. But judging from the edit history of this page since Shaykh Nazim passed away, this is a controversial subject: we need a reliable source.Bapehu (talk) 07:25, 25 January 2015 (UTC)