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Musaylima

Wikipedia's first sentence called it “self-proclaimed prophet who rose up towards the end of muhammad 's life”. Today it says “claimant of prophethood from the banu hanifa tribe”.
Measured, not asserted. Every count, date and revision on this page was taken from Wikipedia's own history and checked against the live article. The words quoted are theirs.
Machine-checked against the full current article on 2026-08-03.
We saved snapshots of this article over twenty years; you are reading the 2005 one. Red dashes: removed from Wikipedia since. Pale dots: rewritten; the numbered note shows what it says now. 1 tap a number or a side note to jump between them
The opening as it read in 2005

Musaylimah , commonly given the epithet al-Kadhdhaab "the liar", was a self-proclaimed prophet who rose up towards the end of Muhammad 's life (about 11 AH) among the Arab tribe of Banu Hanifa in Yamamah , calling himself the "Merciful ( Rahman ) of Yamamah". During Muhammad's life, Musaylimah sent Muhammad an emissary named Ibn an-Nawwahah swearing that Musaylimah was a prophet and offering to divide the earth between the two of them; Muhammad replied that the earth was God 's to divide as God pleased, and was so angered by the statement that he said he would have executed Ibn an-Nawwahah if he hadn't enjoyed immunity as an emissary. After Muhammad's death, he rose up against the new Islamic state led by Abu Bakr , and defeated the first two generals sent against him, but was defeated by Khalid ibn al-Walid . Examples of his claimed revelations are quoted, largely for the purpose of ridicule, by some early Muslim authors; the best-known of them reads like a parody of the Qur'anic surat al-Fil : "The elephant . What is the elephant? And who shall tell you what is the elephant? He has a ropy tail and a long trunk. This is a [mere] trifle of our Lord's creations." Another, alluded to in Tafsir Ibn Kathir , where it is described as a response to surat al-Asr (it has a similar rhyme scheme to al-Asr, in Arabic), is: O hyrax (Wabr), O hyrax! You are only two ears and a chest, and the rest of you is digging and burrowing.1

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 17030385.
Today
Wikipedia's first sentence called it “self-proclaimed prophet who rose up towards the end of muhammad 's life”. Today it says “claimant of prophethood from the banu hanifa tribe”. Read the current article and compare.
2005201020152020Oct '232025
Counts in the opening at each snapshot. Green: the word gained ground. Red: it was cut. Grey: no change.

What Wikipedia says this is

Every article opens by defining its subject. This one was redefined since 2005, and today's defining sentence is their current revision.

Then

self-proclaimed prophet who rose up towards the end of muhammad 's life

Now

claimant of prophethood from the banu hanifa tribe

Struck red text is no longer in the article; dotted amber text was rewritten. Every revision id links to Wikipedia's copy; the text shown is our own saved copy. Data: /data. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA; quoted for the record; not affiliated with Wikipedia.

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