Talk:Mujahedeen

Spelling

re the AFghan fighters in the 1980s --There are two ways to spell it, mujahEdeen or mujahIdeen

CZ has been using mujahideen, the more common version. Compare for example Ency. Brit which uses mujahideen, likewise US State department I think the mujahEdeen form is used for the group now active in Iraq. see for their opinions Richard Jensen 03:37, 30 May 2008 (CDT)

Not a problem to what has been used most commonly here, although I'd certainly say there are more than two ways to spell it. When I worked for the Library of Congress, the disambiguation was a little better since we used the extended Roman alphabet of the American Library Association, which transliterated from Arabic with less ambiguity. Even so, there was a running transliteration debate with the International Organization for Standardization, which has four regional extended Roman alphabets.

As far as provenance of the term, I would look for first common modern usage, not what is done in Iraq. That probably means Afghanistan from the 1980s, although the term is older. Going for first modern usage is the best of bad alternatives when there is no recognized body that can be authoritative, as, for example, Libya can suggest how to transliterate the name of its leader.

Emphatically, I would avoid usage in Iraq, because between sound-bite journalists and various groups with their own cultural/psychological agendas, quite a number of both English and Arabic words get misused. There is, for example, a distressing number of people who seem to believe "insurgency" is a term specific to resistance groups, certainly not unified groups, in Iraq, rather than a term of art that has been in professional use for decades (e.g., Bernard Fall).

So, I would suggest picking one, fairly arbitrarily, and using redirects. One of my projects at the Library of Congress was our Arabic-orthography workstation, and the language specialists had trouble agreeing even in vernacular alphabets. Howard C. Berkowitz 09:18, 30 May 2008 (CDT)