Shoreshthe drift report · all case files
Case file

Yahyah Michot

Yahya Michot was a Belgian Muslim academic and professor of Islamic studies. In 2010 the opening said that, writing under a pseudonym, his pamphlet's "explicit reference to the Algerian massacre led to his removal from a professorship" at the Université catholique de Louvain. Today the word massacre is nowhere in the article; the opening lists only his academic posts and death. A reader today does not learn that Michot was once removed from a professorship over a pseudonymous pamphlet referencing the Algerian massacre.
Read line by line and written up by hand.
Machine-checked against the full current article on 2026-08-01. “massacre” appeared 1 times in this article's opening at its peak. Today it appears nowhere in the article, references included.
We saved snapshots of this article over twenty years; you are reading the 2010 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 2010

Nasreddin Lebatelier is the pseudonym of Jean Michot (also known as Yahya Michot ), a Belgian Muslim who gained some notoriety in the late 1990s for publishing Le Statut des Moines in Lebanon in 1997. This pamphlet included a translation of a short work by the famed 13th-14th century Muslim scholar Ibn Taymiyya , called 'On the Statute of Monks ', which has been read as a call for the killing of Christian monks if they are found outside their monasteries in a Muslim country. Lebatelier's introduction referred to the Algerian Armed Islamic Group 's beheading of seven Trappist monks in Tibhirine in 1996. He analysed not only the GIA's justification for the killings but also the Muslim community's consensus (ijmâ') which condemned these assassinations, and explained the religious authoritativeness of such a consensus.1 Lebatelier's publication of the pamphlet and the explicit reference to the Algerian massacre led to his removal from a professorship at the Université catholique de Louvain and later problems when he was appointed to Oxford. Michot defended himself by stating in reply that in the original publication in 1997 he had not endorsed the killing of monks.2

This is Wikipedia's own text, saved in our repository. Their copy of it is revision 370199520.
Today
“massacre” appeared 1 times in this article's opening at its peak. Today it appears nowhere in the article, references included. Read the current article and compare.
201020152020Oct '232025
massacre10000
Counts in the opening at each snapshot. Green: the word gained ground. Red: it was cut. Grey: no change.

Sections that no longer exist

Present on 6 October 2023, absent today. A heading can vanish because the section was deleted or because it was renamed or merged, and we have not separated those here, so treat this as a list of what to check rather than a verdict.

  • Controversy 2,383 characters
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.

← back to the drift report