Talk:Fatawā of Osama bin Laden

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Title of article[edit]

Since fatwa says that the plural of fatwa is fatāwa, shouldn't this article be titled "Fatāwa of Osama bin Laden"? --RCS talk 21:12, 26 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That may well be the Arabic plural, but in English the most common form is simply "fatwas". Jpatokal (talk) 12:09, 2 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Original Language of Excerpt[edit]

What language was the original written in? Either this is a very nonliteral translation or the Arabic of the fatwa lends itself quite well to an English translation. I think the source for this translation should be researched, and perhaps it should be noted that the translator has taken great liberties to poeticize the language for the English ear, which makes it unencyclopedic. Just on first read, I doubt that Osama, whose background is not scholarly, is capable of this level of argumentation.

I read the original fatwa just after the African Embassy Bombings in 1998 and I am certain this excerpt is not from the translation I read. I am not of the inclination to go searching for it again however.

Why doesn't the U.S. government make available an authenticated version of this historically important document upon which the media has founded so much of the coverage of Osama as having "declared war on America?" I do not think Wikipedia should assume that this is an accurate version of whatever polemic Osama apparently disseminated. And how the hell do we in the public even know that Osama wrote this thing? Whether or not this is original research, I would be just as inclined to believe that some intelligence agency wrote it to focus world attention on the terrorism thing anyway. I haven't even seen any quote from Osama in which he directly acknowledges his authorship of the fatwas anyway.

As dangerous as this may sound, I think this may be an example of a Protocols of the Elders of Zion type thing that spread very quickly due to the internet. A good compromise on this would be to title the article "Fatawa Attributed to Osama bin Laden" until such time as he is reliably quoted as having acknowledged his authorship of the document(s).

And honestly, to whomever is translating these things, at least do it accurately. Guerilla leaders living in caves don't write like this.

Arkhamite 23:17, 24 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Updated[edit]

I redid almost the whole piece, deleting the ominous quotations from the great man, which were clearly selected for the purpose of telling everybody that the world had better starting obeying the instructions of Usama bin Ladin.

The originals were in Arabic, at the Palestinian London paper al-Quds al-Arabi.

Bin Ladin has never denied writing these things AFAIK.

LDH 07:51, 3 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes he has never denied writing them, but has he ever acknowledged writing them? That's an important point. Would anyone believe him if, after what has occurred between al Qaeda and the West, Osama said, "Actually those fatwas just showed up in various places and we figured somebody wanted to go to war against us." When Osama acknowledged the fatwas in the Time interview, he did not say, "I have written and issued a fatwa declaring war on [whomever]." He referred to a terrorist organization - not al Qaeda - and said in the third person that they had issued the fatwa. And never did he say he wrote them. I don't think it is a far stretch to question whether the supposed declaration of war on America was ever made by Osama, and that the 9/11 attacks Osama owned up to were nothing more than extraordinarily destructive terror strikes, rather than in furtherance of any declared war on America.
I see a constant U.S.-led justification of the War on Terror, targeting Islamic extremists, bolstered by the idea that Islamic extremists, and especially al Qaeda, declared war on us. Yet I see no documented proof that they ever did. Perhaps one of our supposed allies declared war on us and signed Osama's name to it, since our allies had as much to fear from to terrorism as we did? You'll not find me defending terrorism, but remember that both the German and Japanese governments formally declared war on the U.S. after the Pearl Harbor Attacks, while not a single government, not even an unlawful government like the Taliban, declared war on the U.S. in relation to 9/11 or any other act of Islamist terrorism.
Perhaps I am a lone voice in the wilderness, but I would still like to see the title of this entry changed to "Fatawa Attributed to Osama bin Laden" until such time as he acknowledges having written or even issued them. As it stands, Wikipedia may in fact be promoting the most destructive act of political libel since those supposed secret Jewish world domination plans that the Czar's henchmen foisted on the public way back when.
Arkhamite 23:00, 5 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Huge mistake[edit]

On Ayman al-Zawahiri's article, there's a citation to a well-known scholar that claims that al-Zawahiri, not bin Laden, was the author of the fatwa:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayman_al-Zawahiri#cite_note-49

I haven't gotten a chance to look it up, but perhaps the title of this article ought to be changed? Ssmith619 (talk) 06:58, 7 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The Big Surprise Attack[edit]

1996: London Arabic newspaper Al Quds al Arabi publishes the first fatwa - an Islamic legal judgement - supposedly written and submitted via fax by a Saudi lay financier with no clerical authority and whom nobody had firmly connected to terrorism. The fatwa threatens total war on Jews and Americans and is conveniently signed with his real name by said financier, who courteously identifies his exact geographic location at the time. One and a half years later, a rogues' gallery of nefarious Islamists supposedly submits another fatwa to the same newspaper, again issuing a call for total war on their enemies, by which point the entire free world is gunning for them even before they have done anything, and six months before they even hit their first foreign target. Who really wrote these documents, and why aren't they receiving royalties for their work?

68.84.27.128 (talk) 00:08, 31 August 2010 (UTC) Arkhamite[reply]

Merger proposal[edit]

I propose that World Islamic Front be merged into Fatawā of Osama bin Laden. The material on WIF can easily be incorporated into this article under the section "1998 fatwā." Right now the articles seem to be discussing mostly the same material.--RDavi404 (talk) 15:00, 21 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Per WP:BB, I'm copying relevant/sourced material from World Islamic Front into the 1998 section, and redirecting that article to this one.--RDavi404 (talk) 15:42, 1 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

"Fatawā"[edit]

"Fatwā" is the singular form, "fatāwā" or English "fatwas" are its plurals; but there's no such word as "fatawā". --Z 20:27, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified[edit]

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Fatawā of Osama bin Laden. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 18 January 2022).

  • If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
  • If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 03:38, 30 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Fatawā_of_Osama_bin_Laden&oldid=1193296646"