A new off-topic closure reason

Question

We have been receiving some questionable questions, which seem to be simply attempts of polemic and pushing of agendas and ulterior motives, some examples of these questions are:

• Did the first Caliphate make God and prophet (PBUH) angry?

• Is Ayeshah one of those with whom the prophet (pbuh) is in war with?

Such questions are not a good fit for this site, and so I believe we should have an -off-topic reason for this I suggest something like:

This question is off-topic because it is an attempt at polemic or pushing > agendas, for more information see: Islam—Stack Exchange is not for debates or apologetics

But with that, to add a new off-topic closure reason, one has to be deactivated, so my question is which one should be deactivated?

Answer 1

بسم الله الرحمن الرحیم

In the name of Allah the merciful the compassionate

I believe that you are assuming that the community is in agreement in having the proposed "Off-Topic reason" which is not accepted by the community and should be discussed at the very beginning, before doing any other things.

Then, when the community reached the consensus for having such an off-topic reason in this site, we'll find the one it should be replaced with.

So, I imagine that you are asking:

Do we need a new off topic reason for posts suspicious to be polemic?

To answer this question I should tell you that we need to define so some criteria to label a post as "polemic". As people from different Islamic school thoughts are active here we should deal with this issue very cautiously.

Knowing the above in mind we can't easily call the posts as polemic. On other hand, despite many of, if not most of, the existing issues between the two Islamic sects are really disputed, they are of the topics which has gathered the attentions from the scholars of the both sects. So, by stopping such posts, if they really exist, we are limiting the benefits of this site by putting a "keep out" sign for scholars and experts. Therefor, the number of hits to this site will decrease by having ordinary questions. So, by accepting this proposed rule we are stopping scholars and hence ordinary people from visiting the site.

Instead of this, I propose to devise schemes so that we can solve, or at least clarify, the disputed areas for the visitors. Of course both sects has it's own beliefs and possible answers for the so called disputed posts. Hence, we should teach active members how to act toward these posts instead of omitting the questions!

Answer 2

Even though I agree with some of the points by @Mohammad Hossein, I disagree that these questions shouldn't be closed.

Why are we closing these questions?

These questions aren't "bad" and if the site was able to handle the difference between the two sects without the need of debates and discussions such questions could be great.

But the problem is that if we allow such questions things can get out of control.

So my suggestion is to close these questions right now. We can allow them when the site becomes mature enough to handle such questions. In fact, if the site is able to handle these questions we can expand to handle Islamic politics.

For this I suggest to remove the current close reason:

Questions on politics are off-topic as they're rarely productive or relevant to the teachings of Islam.

And replace it with a more general one:

This question might lead to extended discussions, and increase the likelihood of the site being completely shut down. See also: Islam—Stack Exchange is not for debates or apologetics

Answer 3

I would suggest:

• Get rid of the Arabic reason (we can use the migration feature to migrate all Arabic question to arabic.SE)

• Add either too specific (I noticed we need this a lot) or the polemic one suggested above.

Answer 4

I don't know if a new close reason is necessary because the existing tools already cover a lot of bad questions.

It's obvious that if a question is not about Islam it's already off-topic so this only applies to questions about Islam already. But if a question isn't clear what it's asking it can already be closed as unclear and if a question is too vague to answer well it can be closed as unclear or too broad. And if it's just a bad question it can be voted down for being a bad question and no matter what nobody needs to answer a bad question if they don't want to.

Off topic reasons are supposed to be for those questions that people think this site is for but it really isn't. But polemic and push agenda and not real questions aren't a problem for just this site they're a problem for any site that uses Stack Exchange so the existing tools that apply to all Stack Exchange should already make it hard for these questions, but other sites can stop these questions all the time and we can't why?

What are the questions that this new close reason would apply to that shouldn't already be covered?