Talk:Muhammad after the occupation of Mecca

message: The battle of Hunayn bit seems to be taken from another website directly, yet isn't sourced. Can someone please cite the original source, and change that block of text into something original and useful? Galactor213 (talk) 02:04, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: Here's my logic. My dictionary tells me that "to conquer" means 1. to acquire by force of arms; win in war: ie "to conquer a foreign land." 2. to overcome by force; subdue: ie, "to conquer an enemy." Given that he Muslims entered Mecca in 630, AFTER Abu Sufyan had embraced Islam and promised no military action, and given that the city gave itself over to Muhammad without recourse to force, the word conveys a mistaken meaning. The city submitted to Muhammad in order to PREVENT a conquest.
I have put aside the fact that 1.7 billion Muslims (including me) reject the word "conquest" and use the word "fateh" ("opening") to describe what happened. I don't expect non-Muslims to use our word. And words like "liberation" might also contain a value judgment that not everyone would accept. So I thought "occupation" might satisfy editors and readers as being both an accurate and a neutral term. I hope this explanation helps. I'm willing to explore other options if any editors would like to initiate a dialogue. Best wishes, George Custer's Sabre (talk) 04:49, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Are you saying that the article is wrong, and that Mecca did not surrender to Mohammed after the Quraish leader learned that Mohammed's army of 10,000 men was advancing on Mecca?  Do you have reliable sources for your alternative version of events?-- Toddy1 (talk) 07:27, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

text: Normal English languages sources call this conquest - for example Oxford Islamic Studies Online, Treaty of Hudaybiyah.-- Toddy1 (talk) 08:09, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  Dear  Toddy1, thank you for replying again. It might be seen as a bold claim to state that "normal English language sources" call it conquest. Given that there are many thousands of books on this subject, you'd need to demonstrate this via a reasonable statistical sampling. I have around 1,000 books on early Islam, of which 1/2 or so are by Muslim authors (in English but also in Arabic too) and very few of the Muslim scholars' books refer to this event as a conquest (Martin Lings' book is the notable exception). Given that Muslim authors shouldn't be invalidated because of their faith (I'm sure you'll agree that that would be as wrong as, say, excluding Jewish history books if the authors are Jewish), I'm merely trying to find a neutral term. As I explained, I'm well aware that poor frightened and pressured Abu Sufyan worked hard, once he saw the writing on the wall, to avoid a conquest. In this regard he was rather successful. Similarly, the annexation of Austria in 1938 -- the Anschluss -- was not an invasion or conquest, or called either, but an occupation based on a coerced political decision. Note that the Wikipedia page on the German occupation of Czechoslovakia the following year shows that it was also a coerced political settlement involving threats, fear, but no "conquest". The Wikipedia page on Austria doesn't use the word "conquest" and the page on Czechoslovakia uses it only once to denote what Hitler had planned to do (but didn't end up doing it. Instead he took the country through coerced diplomacy based on fear). I'm not trying to justify ANY of these historical events, or white-wash them. I'm just trying to remove what seems to me to be less accurate but heavily value-laden terms. Regards and thanks for your reply, George Custer's Sabre (talk) 09:21, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Name change