Talk:Abu Bakr al-Razi

Discovery of ethanol and sulfuric acid

There is a recurring issue of good faith editors adding to this article that al-Razi discovered ethanol, as well as sulfuric acid, citing sources that do not themselves refer to any other source (in particular, these sources fail to tell us in which primary sources the claims are based). This means that none of the sources making these claims are properly secondary sources, but per WP:PSTS secondary sources rely on primary sources for their material, making analytic or evaluative claims about them and articles may make an analytic, evaluative, interpretive, or synthetic claim only if it has been published by a reliable secondary source.

Now if no proper secondary source exists, why do all these sources repeat these claims? For two reasons.

1. The first reason has been uncovered in this long thread on the Reliable sources noticeboard: there actually are secondary sources arguing that al-Razi discovered sulfuric acid on the basis of primary sources, but all of these date to the 19th century, and it turns out that the primary sources they are basing the claim on are Latin texts attributed to al-Razi which scholars have not considered to have been written by al-Razi ever since the researches of Julius Ruska (in particular Ruska 1939; see also Moureau 2020 for a recent overview).
2. The second reason is that our Wikipedia article on al-Razi itself has featured these claims from 2004 to 2021. It has been established (in the same RSN thread and before that on this talk page) that at least one source that is often cited for these claims on Wikipedia (Modanlou 2008) has itself literally copied (plagiarized) the claims from our 2006 Wikipedia article (Modanlou 2008 He discovered and purified alcohol (ethanol) and pioneered its use in medicine. Also, he is credited with the discovery of sulfuric acid, the “work horse” of modern chemistry and chemical engineering vs Wikipedia 2006 As an alchemist, Razi is credited with the discovery of sulfuric acid, the "work horse" of modern chemistry and chemical engineering. He also discovered ethanol and its refinement and use in medicine). One other source (Amr & Tbakhi 2007) uses very similar wording he is credited with the discovery of sulfuric acid and ethanol, and Schlosser 2011 actually just cites our Wikipedia article.

Of course, while it's interesting to try to uncover just why all these sources are repeating the same unfounded claims, the most salient point for our purposes is simply that there is no proper modern secondary source, as policy requires. In this context, it should be noted that this source refers for the alcohol claim to al-Hassan & Hill 1986, and someone should check what al-Hassan & Hill 1986 are basing the claim on (I don't have access to this source). If they are referring to a primary source we may want to include a paragraph on them in our article. At the same time it should be noted that the main author of al-Hassan & Hill 1986 (Ahmad Y. al-Hassan) later wrote a dedicated article on the history of alcohol in Arabic texts (first as a chapter in al-Hassan 2001 pp. 65–69 and then as a 2009 paper republished online called Alcohol and the Distillation of Wine in Arabic Sources From the Eighth Century Onwards), in which he does not even mention al-Razi. This needs some looking into.

For now, please do not add the claims to the article unless you've found a properly secondary source that bases the claims on an analysis of primary sources. Since we as Wikipedia may in part be responsible for the wide circulation of these claims, having featured them prominently for 17 years, it's also our responsibility to get it right now. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 17:26, 11 December 2022 (UTC)

854–932

Many sources attest 854–932 as when he lived, thus these should be included in the footnote as other possible dates.

See:

• Mohamed Tolba Said, Mohamed; Ismail, Daud; Abd Rahim, Fazlena; Abdul Rahman, Asyraf; Wan Khairuldin, Wan Mohd Khairul Firdaus (2018). "Transformasi dan Sumbangan Al-Razi (854-932m) dalam Bidang Perubatan" [Transformation and Contribution of Al-Razi (854-932m) in The Field of Medicine]. Jurnal Islam dan Masyarakat Kontemporari. 17 (1): 36–44. doi:10.37231/jimk.2018.17.1.270. ISSN 2289-6325. S2CID 149936120. ProQuest 2437119807 ResearchGate:350284547.

• Freeman, Benjamin (ed.). "AP WORLD PEOPLE TO KNOW". Freemanpedia.

BhamBoi (talk) 21:46, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

Hello BhamBoi! Freemanpedia looks like a self-published or user-generated (?) source and so is not reliable for Wikipedia's purposes. Mohamed Tolba Said et al. 2018 does not look like it was written by historians (of science) and so is not reliable in context. It's probably a good idea to review Wikipedia:Reliable sources (all three links above are part of that page).

In any case, sources which give 854 CE as a birth date are highly suspect, since this is the date featuring in Goodman 1960–2007 as a typo: Goodman 1960–2007 gives 854 CE as the equivalent of 250 AH (the AH date given by Goodman 1960–2007 and most other older sources, though some newer sources give 251 AH), but 250 AH actually corresponds to 864 CE, making it clear that "854" is a typo for "864". Many sources likely copied the 854 CE date from Goodman 1960–2007 (which otherwise is a very authoritative source), but in this case they are copying what was originally a typo (neither Goodman 1960–2007 nor any other source ever gives 240 AH as the birth date, which would be the correct AH date corresponding to 854 CE).

I do not know where the sources mentioned above took the 932 CE death date, but all other sources either say that it's 925 CE (most newer sources) or that it's 925 or 935 CE (older sources). Given the top-notch quality of the sources already used, it would be hard to argue that it's WP:DUE to add a completely different date given by lower-quality sources, but in this case (as explained above) the sources do not meet basic criteria for reliability anyway.

Thanks for taking this into consideration, ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 23:10, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

Quotes on Religion

@H20346 I observed that you reintroduced content that @Apaugasma had previously removed. As a new user, I aim to seek clarification. Regarding WP:NPOV, my understanding is that statements need to be framed from an third-party perspective. Could you please clarify what message or point the author intended to convey by including those two quotes? Some context would be helpful in understanding their significance. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the book. LeónGonsalvesofGoa (talk) 17:25, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

I forgot to mention, I don't have access to References 59-60. I am having difficulty accessing Reference 61. Is the link correct? LeónGonsalvesofGoa (talk) 17:39, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

@LeónGonsalvesofGoa: thanks for opening this discussion.

@H20346: when I said that these quotes are not taken from al-Razi's own works but from somewhere else, I did not mean the Princeton source (Starr 2015) that you cite (the two other sources are unreliable though), I mean that the quotes are taken (by Starr 2015 and others) from a variety of medieval authors who were hostile to Abu Bakr al-Razi, such as for example Abu Hatim al-Razi (this is covered in our Abu Bakr al-Razi#Debate with Abu Hatim section). Observe what Adamson 2021 writes about this:

In his Proofs of Prophecy, Abū Ḥātim selectively quotes and paraphrases from a work by al-Rāzī on this topic, and presents him as having flatly denied the validity of prophetic revelation. Accepting this evidence as more or less reliable, some modern-day scholars have celebrated al-Rāzī as a “freethinker” comparable with such daringly unorthodox thinkers as Ibn al-Rāwandī (Urvoy 1996, Stroumsa 1999), or even as having had pagan sympathies (Vallat 2015a, 2015b, 2016). Against this, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī quotes our al-Rāzī as having offered interpretations of the Qurʾān, which were designed to show that this revelatory text and indeed the whole history of prophecy was in agreement with his own philosophy (this evidence is presented and discussed in Rashed 2000, 2008). The bio-bibliographical tradition is also ambiguous in its evidence. For instance al-Bīrūnī, who clearly admired al-Rāzī, admits that he made foolish and obstinate remarks about religion and prophecy. But another broadly favorable witness, Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, says that a supposed work attacking religion was perhaps written by “malicious enemies of al-Rāzī and ascribed to him” (for references, see Adamson 2021: 11).

So the question among scholars is whether the words that Abu Hatim and others put into Abu Bakr al-Razi's mouth were actually written by him (rather than by enemies who ascribed their works to him), and whether they really represent what he himself thought. Because of this, we should not present the quotes as Abu Bakr al-Razi's own words without any discussion. It would be valuable to include some individual quotes, but only when accompanied by an analysis of their provenance, their reliability and their meaning, as discussed by scholars like Stroumsa, Rashed, Adamson, and others. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 19:15, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

This reference is unreliable because it's self-published (https://www.google.com/books/edition/In_Search_of_the_Sublime/qDdIEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0). Why is the third reference (61) considered unreliable? I wish I could access it to understand the reasons behind its unreliability. LeónGonsalvesofGoa (talk) 05:05, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

You probably can access it, there is a typo in the url in the article: see Şen 2022 ('quote' on pp. 89–90). This source is not reliable because its author is not a historian, which makes it inappropriate to use in this context (Şen 2022 would be an appropriate source to use in articles that deal with philosophy of science and medicine, but not history of science).

But this is not entirely the point here: Starr 2015 is a historiographical source, yet his treatment (pp. 181–183 here) is lacking because it naively assumes that all the works attributed to al-Razi were really written by him, and that the 'quotes' are unproblematically al-Razi's own statements (he calls them from Razi's pen). This is thoroughly contradicted by actual Razi experts such as Stroumsa 1999, Rashed 2008, Adamson 2021, and others. When non-experts like Starr 2015 contradict experts such as the scholars mentioned, they too become unreliable in context.

Only an author who explicity declares which work precisely any Razi 'quote' was taken from (Abu Hatim, al-Biruni, etc.) and who provides a discussion, however brief, of whether the statement is really likely to go back to al-Razi himself, would be reliable in this context. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 13:53, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

If I understand correctly, reliability cannot solely be assessed based on publication. It also needs to be evaluated in conjunction with other scholarly works in a specific field. I concur with your reasoning and have removed the content in question. LeónGonsalvesofGoa (talk) 23:58, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Glad you agree! You do understand correctly: source reliability is not a black or white issue where any given source is always either absolutely reliable or absolutely unreliable, but a grayscale where sources are either more or less reliable depending on a lot of factors, one of which is context.

When it comes to weighing sources against each other with respect to the academic reputation of their authors, the relevant Wikipedia policy is actually WP:BESTSOURCES, which is part of our neutrality policy: When writing about a topic, basing content on the best respected and most authoritative reliable sources helps to prevent bias, undue weight, and other NPOV disagreements. If every source that is nominally 'reliable' (e.g., because it is published by a university press) would be equally valid as any other nominally 'reliable' source, any editor could just hunt online for a 'reliable' source that supports their own personal views and demand that it be included in the article (there are actually a lot of inexperienced editors who do just this). To prevent this from happening, as well as the endless debates about neutrality that would ensue, Wikipedia editors should always be looking for the most authoritative sources on any subject, and let article content be determined by what they are saying. This is what we call 'due weight'.

Sadly, knowing how to find authoritative sources is a skill that only very few people actually possess, to the point that 9 out of 10 Wikipedia editors are not even aware that there is such a thing as 'most authoritative sources' (I guess this is something most people only learn from being themselves involved in academic research, and for some reason most academics are scared to death even by the idea of editing Wikipedia). And so this often is quite a hellish place, where people are constantly adding 'stuff they found' without any regard for its academic status in the relevant field. A lot of articles consist entirely of such random 'stuff' (actually this one is also largely built from that type of editing), and the job of experienced editors is often to 'weed out' the most egregious mistakes from articles that, taken as a whole, are and will remain a total mess.

In that sense, the large majority of Wikipedia's articles are just temporary write-ups that, while offering some basic encyclopedic information as long as they are there, are really waiting for an expert to come around and rewrite them from scratch into something that actually represents the existing knowledge about the subject. Abu Bakr al-Razi is very much one of these articles. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 01:42, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Humanities 2 1400-present

This article is currently the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 16 January 2024 and 7 May 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Loujienkh (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Kberberian (talk) 15:31, 16 February 2024 (UTC)