User: Mustafaa

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"And among His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the differences among your languages and your colors; in these are signs indeed for the knowers." Qur'an 30:22.

Users that I am not: the blocked bigot User:Mustaafaa; nor User:Mustafa, who is real but has never edited anything. (Actually, "Mustafa" conceivably may be a previous incarnation of me; if so, however, I've long since forgotten the account details.)

Articles of particular interest to me: Anything linguistic, especially Semitic languages and historical linguistics.

Contents

1 Language articles I've been particularly involved with

1.1 Some other Wikipedia linguists
1.2 Language pages that deserve to be Article of the Week

2 Non-language articles that I've been particularly involved with

3 List of long articles that need fixing

4 POVs

5 Countering Systemic Bias

6 Possible articles in progress

7 Other links

Language articles I've been particularly involved with

Language isolates and unclassified languages: Jalaa language, Laal language, Shabo language, Shabo lexicon, Kujarge language, Oropom language, Weyto language, Bung language, Wutana language, Bete language, Lufu language, Imraguen language, Nemadi language, Mpre language, Kwavi language, (Oropom, Andamanese languages), Category:Languages whose existence is uncertain.

Other African languages: Fur language, Berber languages, Northern Berber languages, Chenoua language, Soddo language, Korandje language, Gimira language, Tuareg languages, Saho language, Senhaja de Srair language, Tarifit language, Ghomara language, Komuz languages, Nilo-Saharan languages, Afro-Asiatic languages, Tifinagh, Old Nubian language, Tagoi language.

Semitic languages: Varieties of Arabic, Samaritan Hebrew, List of Proto-Semitic roots, Soddo language, Moabite language, Phoenician languages, Edomite language, Ammonite language, Canaanite languages, Hebrew names, pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions, PERF 558, Nubi language.

Language stubs need work...

Some other Wikipedia linguists

User:Gilgamesh - Semitic and Hebrew
User:Mark Dingemanse - African languages
User:Garzo
User:Pasquale
User:Node_ue
User:Nickshanks

Language pages that deserve to be Article of the Week

Gbe languages - by Mark Dingemanse
Aramaic language - by Garzo

Non-language articles that I've been particularly involved with

Not necessarily exhaustive...

Articles that I've written lots in: MEMRI, Kingdom of Nekor, al-Fatiha, al-Alaq, Qur'an, Rif, Muqatta'at.

Articles that I've written less in: Abd el-Krim, Palestinian, Ifriqiya, Djerid, Ha-Mim, Banu Isam, Berghouata, Salih ibn Tarif, Darfur, Darfur conflict, sura, Jerusalem#In Mandaeanism.

List of long articles that need fixing

Issues nearly resolved: Sabra and Shatila Massacre.

Due to massive POV attack (not that it was much good to begin with): Jihad. (See also: Template:Timeline of Islamist militancy, Template:Islam.)

Due to incompleteness or inadequacy of Islamic history section: History of Palestine, Galilee, Persecution of Muslims, Martyr, Muhammad as warrior.

Due to incompleteness of Christianity section: Jerusalem.

Due to amateurism (delightful, but sadly not quite up to Wikipedia standards): Nuer language.

POVs

I think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tragic though it is, is massively overhyped - it gets more media coverage than most conflicts ten, or even one hundred, times as lethal (see Congo Civil War), and I'm not an expert on Islamic theology, but the persistent tendency of some people to add Islamophobic and anti-Arab propaganda to articles on both those topics is a real danger, and one I am often forced to respond to. I should add that I am a proud anti-Zionist of the second type: that is, I advocate the quixotic notion that everybody ought to just get along and live together peacefully, or in the article's words, argue for "a state in which Jews and Palestinians live together as equals."

On historical linguistics, I incline much more towards the long-ranger view than the ultra-sceptical positions that seem to be prevalent, which too often strike me as being founded more on a priori objections than on empirical evidence. I firmly support the comparative method, but regard mass lexical comparison as not a competitor but a necessary prelude to it. However, I also consider some long-rangers' work - in particular Merritt Ruhlen's - to suffer from unacceptably large degrees of semantic latitude.

Countering Systemic Bias

Here are some of the Countering Systemic Bias project open tasks. CSB is currently being simplified and fixed - see the Talk page. This template may soon be redundant.

CSB collaboration of the fortnight: Second Sudanese Civil War

Country carousel: A country is selected from a list every fortnight.

Burkina Faso, Category, Politics, History, Blaise Compaoré, Music of Burkina Faso

Voted items: Every fortnight, 5 articles are chosen in the voting section.

Nigeria Labour Congress, Culture of Turkmenistan, Nadine Gordimer, List of African writers (by country), Roy Wilkins. (* Any starred articles have a limited geographic scope.)

Possible articles in progress

It would be interesting to do a series on the presentation of other religions in the Qur'an, but I lost steam on that... so I'm leaving a link to User:Lameen/Judaism in the Quran in case I ever finish it. At the moment, series I'm working on include unclassified languages and, more desultorily, suras.

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