Disputed Statements

Qissa-i Sanjan, Other Writings

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition

Currently States The Qissa-i Sanjan, the Parsi community's own Persian verse account of its migration from Iran to Gujarat, was composed in 1599 by Bahman Kaikobad, centuries after the events it narrates, and dates the migration itself only broadly, to somewhere within the eighth through tenth centuries CE, a span the text's own internal chronology does not narrow further.

The migration's precise date and the historicity of specific narrative details, among them the ruler Jadi Rana who is said to have granted the refugees land and the milk-and-sugar episode of their first meeting, are not independently confirmed by any source outside the text's own seventeenth century account.

Source Qissa-i Sanjan, Bahman Kaikobad (attributed) tier 2

Qiyas (Analogical Reasoning), Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Not whether the law must be extended beyond the texts, which all sides concede, but who is entitled to do the extending and on what warrant, a question live since al-Shafii made the method of analogy explicit and closed the list of sources at four; Mohammad Hashim Kamali's Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence (Islamic Texts Society, 2003) surveys the schools' competing answers.

Source Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence, Mohammad Hashim Kamali tier 1

Qiyas: Analogical Reasoning Is a Source of Law, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States How the operative cause is identified. The schools dispute the test while agreeing that the extension itself is legitimate.

Qiyas, analogical reasoning, extends a ruling from a case already settled in the Quran or the Sunna to a new case sharing its operative legal cause, and is the fourth of the four sources recognised by all Sunni schools after the Quran, the Sunna and consensus. Kamali's textbook on Islamic legal theory records that while all four schools accept qiyas as legitimate in principle, unlike istihsan or al-masalih al-mursala, which some schools reject outright, they dispute how the operative cause of a ruling, the illah, is correctly identified in a given case, since identifying it wrongly extends the original ruling to cases it was never meant to cover. The schools have developed different technical criteria for establishing an illah, which is why applying qiyas to the same base case can yield different extended rulings in different schools even though all four accept the method itself as valid. The dispute is over the technical criteria for a sound analogy rather than over whether analogy is a legitimate source at all, which is why it has continued without threatening the method's basic acceptance.

Source Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence, Mohammad Hashim Kamali tier 1

Qoph ק, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Scholem places Sefer Yetzirah between the second and sixth century CE

According To Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, New York, 1961) surveys the manuscript recensions of Sefer Yetzirah and finds no single stable text: the surviving copies diverge enough in wording and in the letter-to-planet and letter-to-sign correspondences that quoting "the text" requires naming which recension is meant. Comparing the linguistic style, the doctrinal content and the external references made to the work across centuries of citation, Scholem argues the book could have been composed anywhere from the second to the ninth century CE, a span of roughly a millennium, with later Kabbalistic and Hasidic writers each reading it through their own era's overlay. The atlas follows Scholem's range rather than a narrower guess, and does not print the per-letter planet and sign tables at all, because doing so would silently pick one contested recension over the others.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Qoph ק, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Survives in three recensions that do not agree in detail

According To Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, New York, 1961) surveys the manuscript recensions of Sefer Yetzirah and finds no single stable text: the surviving copies diverge enough in wording and in the letter-to-planet and letter-to-sign correspondences that quoting "the text" requires naming which recension is meant. Comparing the linguistic style, the doctrinal content and the external references made to the work across centuries of citation, Scholem argues the book could have been composed anywhere from the second to the ninth century CE, a span of roughly a millennium, with later Kabbalistic and Hasidic writers each reading it through their own era's overlay. The atlas follows Scholem's range rather than a narrower guess, and does not print the per-letter planet and sign tables at all, because doing so would silently pick one contested recension over the others.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Quecholli, Veintenas

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Approximate Gregorian Span

Currently States Mid October into early November

Scholars have proposed several correlations between the xiuhpohualli year and the Gregorian calendar. The month range given here follows one widely reproduced reconstruction and is offered for relative placement only, not as a settled date: the 365 day count carried no intercalated leap day, so its alignment with the solar year is understood to have drifted across the centuries of its use, and colonial era testimony was recorded decades after the practice had ended.

Source The Aztecs (Smith, 3rd edition), Michael E. Smith tier 1

Quechuan, Language Families

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Homeland Hypothesis

Currently States The central Peruvian coast and adjacent highlands, on the standard account, rather than Cusco, which the Inca association would suggest.

The Cusco assumption is a reasonable inference from the Inca use of Quechua and is not what the internal evidence shows: the deepest divisions in the family lie further north and west. The point matters because it separates the language from the state that spread it.

Source The Languages of the Andes, Willem F. H. Adelaar with Pieter C. Muysken tier 1

Quem Quaeritis, Performance Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Year

Currently States 970

The earliest surviving instructions for performing the Quem Quaeritis exchange appear in the Regularis Concordia, a monastic customary compiled under Aethelwold, Bishop of Winchester from 963 to 984, and generally dated by scholars to somewhere between about 965 and 975; no exact year is recorded in the surviving Winchester Troper manuscripts, two partial copies commonly cited as Ox 775 and Cdg 473, so 970 is used here as the conventional midpoint of the accepted range rather than an attested date.

Source Quem Quaeritis / Visitatio Sepulchri (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Quetzalcōātl, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historical Note

Currently States Colonial era chronicles describe a historical or legendary Toltec priest king, Topiltzin Ce Acatl Quetzalcoatl, whose biography became fused in the sources with the mythic feathered serpent deity of the same name. Scholars of Mesoamerican religion genuinely disagree about how much the god and the tenth century ruler were originally distinct figures later conflated by Aztec and Spanish colonial sources, versus a tradition in which a ruler took the god's name as a title; the surviving accounts, recorded mostly after the conquest, are shaped by Aztec political interests and Spanish missionary framing, so no consensus separates myth from remembered history with confidence.

Source Religions of Mesoamerica, 2nd edition, David Carrasco tier 1

Qunut, Prayers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns What It Is Used For

Currently States Petition: asks for something

Qunut is the supplication offered while standing within the ritual prayer, a moment where the fixed choreography of salat opens into petition, its best known wording taught according to hadith literature by the Prophet to his grandson al-Hasan and asking for guidance, pardon, protection and blessing. Its function as petition is not disputed, but where it belongs is: the Sunni legal schools differ over whether it sits in the nightly witr prayer, in the dawn prayer, or is reserved only for times of calamity, a genuine point of difference among the schools that remains audible in different mosques' practice today. Marion Holmes Katz's Prayer in Islamic Thought and Practice (2013) surveys this placement dispute as part of the wider legal literature on salat, treating it as an unresolved difference between schools of law rather than a settled ruling.

Source Prayer in Islamic Thought and Practice, Marion Holmes Katz tier 1

R, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Chaldean Letter Value

Currently States 2

According To Modern planetary numerology, the scheme called Chaldean

The values recorded here follow Cheiro's Book of Numbers (Cheiro, the pen name of William John Warner, published by Herbert Jenkins, London, 1926), the most widely reproduced version of the so-called Chaldean numerology table. Cheiro's own text names no ancient Chaldean source for the letter values it assigns, and comparing it against other published numerology tables from the same and later periods finds no agreement between them on several letters; no Mesopotamian or Chaldean text has ever been produced that contains a comparable letter-number correspondence. That comparison is why historians of the modern occult treat "Chaldean" as a nineteenth and twentieth century marketing label rather than a checkable lineage claim. The value recorded here is Cheiro's published reading, not a settled fact.

Source Cheiro's Book of Numbers, Cheiro (William John Warner) tier 3

R. Gordon Wasson, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States In The Road to Eleusis (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), written with Albert Hofmann and Carl A. P. Ruck, Wasson proposed that Vedic Soma was Amanita muscaria and the Eleusinian kykeon was ergot derived. Both identifications remain actively debated among specialists and neither is confirmed by direct residue evidence.

Source The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann and Carl A. P. Ruck tier 3

Ra ر, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States One of the fourteen letters that stand disjoined at the head of a sura

According To The disjoined letters of the Quran

The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, editor-in-chief, HarperOne, 2015) surveys the classical and modern commentary tradition on the disjoined letters that open certain suras and reports no consensus reached across fourteen centuries of that commentary. The positions it records include that the meaning is known to God alone, that the letters abbreviate divine names or attributes, that they function as an oath, that they present ordinary letters of the language as a rhetorical challenge, and that some began as scribal or collectors' marks later treated as scripture. Comparing the internal textual evidence, which letters occur and in which suras, against the range of proposed readings, the commentary confirms which letters appear where while confirming that none of the proposed meanings has displaced the others.

Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief) tier 1

Rabanus Maurus, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 780

The source gives this year as about, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) tier 1

Rabanus Maurus, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 856

The source gives this year as about, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) tier 1

Rabbit, Animals & Totems

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The words spirit animal and totem are used in popular Western practice for a personal animal ally. Native scholars and communities object to both usages, on the ground that they take the vocabulary and the authority of particular Indigenous traditions and apply them to a generic and commercial practice.

Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (Continuum, 2008) documents the objection Indigenous communities in North America raise, ongoing and in the present tense, against the commercial "spirit animal" genre. Owen's study examines how the practice borrows specific Indigenous terms and claimed lineages, presenting them as licensing a service sold to outside customers, and sets that use against the communities' own accounts of what those terms and practices mean within their traditions. What is disputed, on Owen's reading, is not that people generally feel a kinship with animals, a widely attested feeling that belongs to no one tradition, but the specific commercial borrowing of Indigenous vocabulary and claimed authority. The atlas records the animal, records that the modern commercial practice exists, and records that this documented objection is made, without adjudicating between the parties.

Source The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Suzanne Owen tier 1

Rabia al-Adawiyya, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 714

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.) tier 1

Rabia al-Adawiyya, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 801

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.) tier 1

Radeniye, Sacred Dances

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The persistent charge that the assemblies ended in sexual license comes from prosecutors and missionary polemic and is not corroborated by the sectarians' own writings.

Engelstein reads the imperial judicial archive against itself and argues that a confession extracted by investigators who already knew what they expected to find is evidence about the investigation. Older accounts repeat the accusation as fact. The core description, secret assembly, own hymns, ecstatic circling and prophecy, is corroborated from several directions; the additions are not.

Source Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale, Laura Engelstein tier 1

Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Organizations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Institutional Wealth or Finances

Currently States The organization's wealth is held indirectly through its hereditary leadership: the Dhillon family (headed by Gurinder Singh Dhillon, RSSB's spiritual head) held an investment stake in Religare Enterprises via Logos Holding valued at roughly Rs 1,163 crore (about $254 million) at 2010 prices.

This distinguishes the hereditary leader's family investment vehicle from the religious organization's own treasury, which RSSB (a nonprofit society since 1957) does not publish as a consolidated figure.

Source The Dhillon Factor in Religare (Business Standard), Business Standard staff tier 2