Talk:Ismail Ibn Sharif

message: Just having read "White Gold : The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves" by Giles Milton, I think you'll find plenty of references to Moulay Ismael in that book. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 131.130.120.218 (talk • contribs) .
I also read "White Gold", which makes me curious about the wording of this Article. "Christian prisoners" vs. "slaves from sub-Saharan Africa". The Christians were slaves as well. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 168.75.97.126 (talk • contribs) .
: I have read some of White gold by Giles Milton. too many unreferenced lines and many story about Moulay Ismail sounds like fable rather than historical biography. as example:
"Moulay Ismail slaughtered a wolf at the maingate. killed it with his own hands. it head was chopped off and built into the centre of the gate"Ahendra (talk) 19:57, 14 November 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Milton gives references in the endnotes to his book.  It would not be possible to check the source of this particular story without reading about 10 books cited by Milton for pages 100-109.  It is obvious that Milton is not vouching for the historical accuracy of all anecdotes found in the sources.  One can only say that if even a tenth of the stories about Moulay Ismail are true, he was one of the great monsters of history.86.141.32.73 (talk) 17:50, 4 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  White Gold by Giles Milton 

message: It should also be mentioned that 888 children is considered the record number of off-spring for a man (while the corresponding record for a woman is only 69 by a 19th century Moscow woman that produced many triplets). Source: The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond (ISBN-13: 978-0-06-084550-6) pg. 88 KiNgFrOmHeLl (talk) 00:55, 21 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Children 

message: The daily average of copulation of 1.2 women over 60 years is mathematically wrong. As a simple calculation, if he only copulated with an average of 1 woman per day it will take him less than 3 years to create more than 888 pregnancies. Of course in practice a copulation does not always result in a pregnancy and a pregnancy does not always result in a successfull birth.
28 Nov 2009.
per day  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.129.91.148 (talk) 20:54, 28 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I see no references on having approximately 500 women in harem. So I removed that info, and fixed the links about having 888 children with a correction of 867 children including 825 sons and 342 daughters (as per Guinness record book). Reference goes to the main article. Regards, Tanvir 09:07, 22 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Children 

message: I've noticed that this page doesn't actually provide full bibliographical details for its major references like De Castries, Al-Nasiri, "Moroccan archives", etc. The citations notes are there but they're not linked to any defined references. They're defined on the French page, from which I assume they were copied, so they need to be copied here. (I'm not familiar enough with the short/split citation format to import them easily myself.)</br>
On a less urgent note, a lot of this page apparently relies on very old sources from the early 20th century or even earlier. That's not necessarily a problem by default, but in the future this page should really strive to incorporate current scholarly knowledge about this topic -- some information has probably not changed since those early authors, but some claims may have been revised by more recent and more in-depth research. (e.g. His use of forced labour is well-known, but claims about tens of thousands of Christian slaves being the labour force that built his palaces don't seem to have withstood closer academic investigations; see discussions and cited sources at Kasbah of Moulay Ismail for a start.)
Cheers, R Prazeres (talk) 05:42, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for noticing this. I also noticed right after editing that this article is based entirely on French-language colonial sources, which concerned me enough that I shot an email to User:Brigade Piron asking if he'd be willing to review it -- but I'm glad I wasn't the only one. The books and articles named in the Further Reading section are English-language, post-colonial sources, so ought to be investigated for the possibility of being more methodologically careful and more helpful for our student readers. I'm afraid I don't have the time to dig in any further right now. NotBartEhrman (talk) 15:58, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I got your message, . I am not sure what I can add. I know very little about North African history, I'm afraid, and still less about the Early Modern period! As you say, there are almost certainly modern sources out there but it's a question of finding someone with access to them. Have you tried the relevant WikiProjects? —Brigade Piron (talk) 15:18, 23 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: It'll probably wait til an interested editor comes along, but for what it's worth, some of the books already listed in "Further reading" are probably good starts for future revision or cross-referencing. Abun-Nasr's book is a standard reference for North African history (and does a good job of offering a "big picture" view as well as specific details, depending on the topic). El Hamel's book is about a more specific subject but from what I've seen he includes a lot of historical information. Blunt's book looks less promising (it's still old, it's not clear to me that he's a specialist, and he seems to rely mainly on European sources at a glance) but at least it's in English. If you can read French then of course there are quite a few general history books on Morocco you could look for: the one by Daniel Rivet I'm more familiar with and is usually good on providing new perspectives, and there's also one by Michel Abitbol and another by Bernard Lugan, though I've heard criticism about the latter. R Prazeres (talk) 18:41, 23 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bibliographical details missing; and page needs more current sources