This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
An organization, in the atlas's own vocabulary, is an institution: a body with a leadership, a charter and a continuing existence, rather than a belief, a practice or a person. The type holds religious governing bodies and orders, the missionary and relief agencies a denomination or a religious community operates, learned and research societies that study religious and paranormal phenomena, and government bodies, national waqf authorities and religious affairs ministries prominent among them, that regulate religious property and institutions on a state's behalf. What unites the group is institutional continuity: an organization outlives the individuals who lead it and is described here by its founding, its charter and its recorded scope of work, distinct from the denomination or tradition it may serve, which is its own entity and usually its own separate entry.
Scholars of religion have long distinguished this institutional layer from belief and practice for the same reason the atlas does: a religious body's doctrine and a religious body's administration are separable questions. An inquiry into how a tradition organizes itself, who governs it, who funds it, who carries out its charitable and educational work, answers a different question than an inquiry into what it teaches, and the atlas keeps the two apart for the same reason a reader would.