Talk:The Meursault Investigation

Execution threat

The anecdote about the Islamist politician, Abdelfattah Hamadache wanting Daoud to be executed for blasphemy appears both on Daoud's page and here. Isn't it redundant for it to appear both places? I think it makes more sense to leave it on the biography page and leave it out here.Gerard de Lafayette (talk) 05:19, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

It appears to relate specifically to this book, so I'd consider it relevant. I would expect the Satanic Verses article to have sufficient info regarding the threats rather than having to navigate to Rushdie's personal page/article. My only issue is 82 out of 198 words of the author's article are dedicated to this issue, and the 'politician' seems to be a fringe nutter whose extreme views may not be shared by (m)any.Rayman60 (talk) 01:28, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

You have a point. The controversy is directly related to the book, so I'll move the text from the author page over here. (I also plan to expand Daoud's author page, once I learn more about him.

As for Hamadache being a "fringe nutter," it seems to me that that the eccentricity or distastefulness of his views don't matter to whether the controversy should be included in the article. Wikipedia's standards stress notability, which means the event being reported in more than one reputable source. Regardless of how truly culturally significant this Hamadache character is, because the episode has been picked up on by various publications, especially English-language ones (as The New York Times did, for instance), it is notable and verifiable. That being said, the question of his significance in Algeria proper still bugs me. Hamadache may be getting far more press in French-speaking and English-speaking publications than in Arabic platforms. I wouldn't know, because I don't know any Arabic.

If anyone with knowledge of Algerian Arabic would be willing to take a brief look at the coverage in the Arabic-language Algerian press, gathering links to articles in Arabic covering the episode would help justify the section's existence. In particular, journalists who approve of the fatwa against Daoud, on the one hand, and journalists pushing for the government to prosecute Hamadache for hate speech, on the other hand, would be especially significant.

Lastly, Rayman60, I skimmed through the article for The Satanic Verses, and I couldn't find anything relating to Kamel Daoud or the threats he received. Did you mean to suggest that the article contain a link to the controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie's book? That seems relevant, even though we're talking about Algeria instead of Iran, and a Sunni Salafist imam rather than the Supreme Leader of a Shiite-majority country, the situation is similar enough for them to be linked. Can we do this through a category link at the bottom of the page?Gerard de Lafayette (talk) 05:31, 8 November 2015 (UTC)