Talk:Takbir

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Should the following text recently added to the lead section in Special:Diff/970457222/970590728 be included in the article?

It is also a islamic war cry for perpetration of communal atrocities against people of other faiths. Also, all over the world, terrorists use this as a war cry during attacks on civilians and military; similar to as in Charlie Hebdo Shooting or 2018 Liège attack where the terrorists used “allahu akbar”^[1][2][3][4] as a war cry.

— Newslinger talk 06:17, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

• A recent social media campaign led by OpIndia (RSP entry) and other right-wing Indian Twitter accounts objected to the language in the Jai Shri Ram article. As a result, the above text was added to the Takbir (allahu akbar) article, although the sourcing here is not nearly as strong as in the Jai Shri Ram article (Special:Permalink/970912382 § cite note-28). If any editors are able to find academic sources for these claims or provide suggestions for alternative wording, both would be appreciated. — Newslinger talk 06:26, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

• Comment The proposed text only focusses on modern terrorism, and is not properly sourced: it solely rests on primary sources of isolated events, but not on secondary sources which discuss the phenomenon itself. As it stands, the current way of using sources could also support a statement like "cars of the brand XXX are used by Jihadist terrorists when perpetrating communal atrocities against people of other faiths", with a news source about an attack which happens to mention the car manufacturer. This is the sort of quality you expect when edits are not driven by the intention to improve this encyclopedia, but by socmed campaigns.

That said, good sources about the takbir as a battle cry are easy to find, a Google Scholar search will lead you there. But it will also be clear that the use of the takbir as "battle cry" (or its Western perception as such) is not restricted to modern terrorist attacks, but has many historical precedents, including in contexts that do not count as "terrorism", but rather conventional warfare. The section "In Politics and warfare" offers good material about it, and the lead should summarize all aspects of that section, based on acadamic peer-reviewed secondary sources. But certainly, the appropriation of the phrase by modern extremists, and its ensuing perception as such by non-Muslims in public discourse deserve a mention in the lead. –Austronesier (talk) 08:17, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

• Add Maybe I should have been more clear. The notability of the abuse of the takbir by extremists cannot be separated from existence of the global right-wing bigot trope that Allahu akbar is "the Terrorist war cry". Peaceful Muslims are harassed, profiled or unduly come under suspicion just for uttering the takbir, the tahmid or just in sha'a llah in public,^[5] and that is notable, too. –Austronesier (talk) 18:39, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

• Comment I mostly agree with the above comment, but disagree regarding the idea that the phrase's appropriation by modern extremists deserves mentioning in the lede. It is used "to express resolute determination" which includes its used as a battle cry (as pointed out in Takbir#In Politics and warfare), regardless of whether the violence is terrorist/non-terrorist/legitimate/illegitimate etc. Usually, this phrase would be used by religious Muslims in all activities involving violence, regardless of whether they are offensive or self-defence. It looks like the phrase's use in extremist violence makes up for a very small portion of its overall use; therefore, I believe mentioning this in the lede gives significant undue weight. In the lede, just mention that it also gets commonly used as a battle cry, don't see any reason to mention anything further. — AhmadF.Cheema (talk) 13:09, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
• Comment Definitely not. Describing the takbir as an 'Islamic war cry', where its use is limited to extremist groups who profess to follow a very narrow interpretation of the religion, is inappropriate. This paragraph also seems to violate WP:NPOV in its prose. Sustenance in Sonder - IseDaByThatEditsTheBoat 17:34, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
• Strongly oppose It puts way too much weight on usage in extremism, compared to the literally every-day usage among almost 2 billion people. The wording is also very disingenuous, suggesting some normalisation of atrocities in Islamic terminology. One could write something very brief, such as "e.g. as a battle cry" after "used ... to express resolute determination or defiance". One could also add that in the Western world it is nowadays commonly associated with that usage, but only if a proper source is given (some linguistic/cultural commentary, not a news article) and the context is extended to emphasise the everyday usage. Tokenzero (talk) 21:22, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
• Comment While I strongly agree with the statement and it's necessity to be included the lede to maintain WP:NPOV and Due, the sources seems to be a bit lacking. I don't think the solution is to remove it completely, but to let be so that other editors can add to it, as this does not violate BLP. - BhaskaraPattelar (talk) 09:52, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose – there's so much wrong here, I don't know where to begin. For starters: the words war cry are used three times in two sentences in something proposed for the lead, thus of major importance to the article. All right then, so how many times do the four references supplied contain the expression, war cry ? One moment while I tally them all up... one second... almost done... Okay, done; I'm back: the total number of times that the expression war cry is used in all four of those references is: zero. What the editor has done here, is to take some accounts about terrorist attacks, and provide his own spin on what a shouted phrase means, supported by none of the sources. It's hard to take seriously an Rfc calling for a triple injection of a contentious characterization into the lead, supported by exactly nothing. Mathglot (talk) 11:49, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
• Comment As this New York Times article Allahu Akbar’: An Everyday Phrase, Tarnished by Attacks states it needs to be mentioned thin some form that is used by Muslim militants.Just a few references below there are several other references.Pharaoh of the Wizards (talk) 20:09, 5 August 2020 (UTC)^{[5][6][7][8][9]}

• Comment Per WP:LEAD, the "In Politics and warfare" text should be noticable in the lead, currently it is not. Also, it seems logical that "In Politics and warfare" should be part of "Usage" in the article structure, not on the same "level." Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:05, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
• Comment Per Austronesier and Gråbergs, include not just the instance of modern terrorism but all instances of its usage in the lead. That being said, not including its usage as a war cry in the lead (as it is currently) is missing out on giving WP:DUE weight to the MOS:LEAD. SerChevalerie (talk) 13:52, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose, but . . . The suggested version goes too far. However, per MOS:LEAD, the "Politics and Warfare" section of the article should appear in the lead. Would support a toned-down version. Adoring nanny (talk) 02:24, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
• I think the proposed wording is quite inappropriate for this article and so oppose for now. I appreciate Newslinger's request for alternative wording and let me come up some and we can then discuss that wording. The article's lead should reflect the rest of the article.VR _talk 14:29, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
• Strongly support Leaders of the world agree that radical Islamic terrorism is the biggest threat to humanity today. Everyday people should become aware of this threat. The biggest war cry for terrorists in training camps in Pakistan is "Allahu Akbar", which means "There is no one greater than Allah." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shahtirth94 (talk • contribs) 13:56, 15 August 2020 (UTC) — Shahtirth94 (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.
• Strongest possible oppose firstly, in WP terms this is interpretation of primary sources - which as Mathglot points out, isn't even very accurate and goes way beyond those handful of sources. Going beyond that, having edited many of these terrorist incident articles, what is much more commonly sourced than "the perp said 'Allahu Akbar'", is that "an unnamed witness or two CLAIMS they shouted it", this has happened even in incidents like 2016 Munich shooting - where the perp turned out to be a far-right, Christian convert, and 2016 Nice truck attack, where it has pretty much proven that background noise of truck and victims would have made it quite impossible for anyone to hear anything said by the perp. I don't doubt that there may have been incidents where the takbir was used by perps, but what is certainly true is that the claim, often by a small number of anon witnesses, that the expression was used during an attack has become a journalistic cliche, often dubiously sourced. As the NBC source says "The phrase “Allahu akbar” has become almost synonymous with terrorism in American popular culture" that is probably at least as reliably sourced as its actual use in attacks. Pincrete (talk) 15:22, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

@Pincrete: If there are sources that cover the phenomenon of people falsely hearing Allahu Akbar that might be interesting to cover in this article. Do you know of any sociologists, psychologists who might have written about this?VR _talk 15:36, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

No I don't. Except with the Munich attack (where early media assumptions about the perp were very wrong), other claims - including many in the sources here - tend to be dubious, rather than consciously dishonest. "An unnamed witness says", "an unnamed police officer says that unnamed witnesses heard" … … . It's WP:OR on my part of course, but in all the confusion, noise and panic of a violent incident, people who don't know a word of Arabic are suddenly clear about what was shouted? I have heard interview tapes in which the interviewer is clearly leading fairly peripheral witnesses as to whether "Allahu Akbar" was what they had heard shouted. That this was said several times in the Charlie Hebdo incident is better sourced, and possibly on other occasions, "she said he left, shouting, “Allahu akbar, allahu akbar”,… … "She said they yelled “allahu akbar” or “God is great” before running out of the office", but neither of these uses could possibly be described, and is not described, as 'a war cry' and the characterisation of it thus is mainly a media cliche in my experience. If terrorist use is covered at all, it should not be as proposed here IMO. Pincrete (talk) 16:14, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose. The few sources about this usage focused on the term (as opposed to ones that mention it in passing) specifically note that it is overstated and that that usage does not have any special meaning outside of its generally common use as a battle cry. --Aquillion (talk) 00:19, 22 August 2020 (UTC)