Talk:List of Muslim historians

Points for Improvement

As a graduate student in Islamic history, I think that this page has the potential to be one of the more useful articles on wikipedia, at least the process of improving this article has been very useful for me. These are the key sources of Islamic history, and every serious student should know them.

First, it should be said that this category does make sense, since Muslims, at least prior to 1900 or at the earliest the mid-19th century, had a set historiographical tradition. Thus Muslim historians is not an irrelevant category, like say "Muslim computer programmers". It's actually a distinct set of people, generally centered around a Muslim center of power, such as a royal court, and sharing a certain tradition.

(As an aside, perhaps "Islamic historians" might somehow be a slightly better name, to show that this is about the Islamic historiographical tradition, rather than simply being a Muslim. In any case, this is a minor point.)

Now, as for how to improve the article further...
I've added a number of historians and corrected many links. The article now includes virtually all famous Muslim historians, but some eras are not covered. It might be valuable to subdivide these categories more (e.g., separate Egypt and Syria), but for now I'll concentrate on filling the difficult gaps. Here's a list of the eras whose historians are missing:
Fatimid Egypt
Yemen, all eras
Ottoman Algeria, Iraq, Egypt

Others are not well represented:
Ottoman Egypt
Safavid and Qajar Iran
Pre-Mughal India

In addition, there are regions of the world that have not been covered at all, but should be. The Encyclopaedia of Islam's article Tarikh covers, for example, East Africa, Western Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. So here are some specifics:
Mataram Sultanate
Golden Horde
Songhai Empire
Khanate of Bukhara
Pre-Ottoman Turkish historiography

-Agh.niyya (talk) 02:19, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Please do not delete names that do not yet have articles - I'm working on creating the articles, and it's more accurate and useful to include all important (or even extant) historians. Also note that some Ottoman names have been taken from the Turkish Wikipedia. -Agh.niyya —Preceding undated comment added 05:33, 5 July 2011 (UTC).