Disputed Statements

Sad ص, 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

Saday (Tsa) ጸ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States Why the script was vocalised in the fourth century CE, after centuries of writing consonants alone, is argued and not settled

According To The Ge'ez script

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) reviews the Aksumite inscriptions that first show Ge'ez written with vocalisation, a fourth-century CE innovation that is not in dispute, and canvasses three explanations for why it happened then: an internal development inside the Aksumite royal chancery seeking a more precise script for administration; a response to the newly Christian court's need for scripture translated and taught with unambiguous vowels after Aksum's conversion under King Ezana; and influence carried by vocalised Indian scripts reaching the Aksumite court through Red Sea trade contact. Comparing the timing, the epigraphic evidence and the trade record for each explanation, the volume's contributors find none conclusive, since Aksum's fourth-century contacts touched all three at once; the dating of the change is settled, its cause is not.

Source The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.) tier 1

Saffron, Plants

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Whether "saffron robes" (the ochre-to-maroon monastic dress of Buddhist and some Hindu renunciates) were ever actually dyed with true saffron is disputed; scholar-monk Shravasti Dhammika argues saffron's cost and poor colorfastness rule it out as the historical dye source

Popular usage calls Buddhist and Hindu renunciate robes "saffron robes" by colour name; true Crocus sativus saffron is cited by at least one Buddhist scholar-monk as never actually used to dye them, on grounds of expense and poor colorfastness, with turmeric, jackfruit-wood and other dyes proposed instead. This is recorded as a live popular/scholarly disagreement, not a settled fact either way.

Source The Color of Saffron (Dhammika), Shravasti Dhammika tier 3

Sage, Incense

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Native nations object to smoke cleansing sold as a consumer product

Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Continuum, 2008, documents the specific objection Indigenous communities have raised to the commercial sale of the sage-burning ceremony by people outside those communities. Owen's method is sociological and documentary, reading the commercial New Age market for the practice against the communities' own public statements, and it identifies the objection precisely: not that outsiders find the practice meaningful, but that ceremony is being sold as a commodity by people outside the communities it belongs to, and that the commercial trade depletes the plant stands those communities themselves rely on. The atlas follows Owen in recording that the practice exists and that this objection is made, without setting out any procedure, words or transmission of the ceremony itself.

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

Sage, Incense

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Also object to commercial harvesting of white sage stands

Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Continuum, 2008, documents the specific objection Indigenous communities have raised to the commercial sale of the sage-burning ceremony by people outside those communities. Owen's method is sociological and documentary, reading the commercial New Age market for the practice against the communities' own public statements, and it identifies the objection precisely: not that outsiders find the practice meaningful, but that ceremony is being sold as a commodity by people outside the communities it belongs to, and that the commercial trade depletes the plant stands those communities themselves rely on. The atlas follows Owen in recording that the practice exists and that this objection is made, without setting out any procedure, words or transmission of the ceremony itself.

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

Sage, Incense

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States A current position of living communities, not history

Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Continuum, 2008, documents the specific objection Indigenous communities have raised to the commercial sale of the sage-burning ceremony by people outside those communities. Owen's method is sociological and documentary, reading the commercial New Age market for the practice against the communities' own public statements, and it identifies the objection precisely: not that outsiders find the practice meaningful, but that ceremony is being sold as a commodity by people outside the communities it belongs to, and that the commercial trade depletes the plant stands those communities themselves rely on. The atlas follows Owen in recording that the practice exists and that this objection is made, without setting out any procedure, words or transmission of the ceremony itself.

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

Sage, Plants

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Native nations and Native scholars object to the sale of smoke cleansing as a consumer product and to commercial harvesting of the white sage stands their communities gather from. This is a current position of living communities.

The objection is not to outsiders finding the practice meaningful. It is that ceremony is being sold by people outside the communities it belongs to, and that the trade takes the plant from the stands those communities use. Describing Salvia apiana as though it were an ancient European herb, or as though its ceremonial use were freely available, gets both the botany and the provenance wrong.

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

Saint, Religious Roles & Titles

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Tradition

Currently States The word is applied in English to holy persons of other traditions; that is a habit of the language and not a claim that the categories correspond

According To Cross-tradition

Comparativists differ on whether sainthood is a useful cross-cultural category at all, or whether it imports Latin Christian assumptions about a juridical afterlife status into traditions that have none.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, John Bowker (ed.) tier 1

Saint Yared, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 505

The source calls this a traditional date rather than an independently fixed one.

Source Yared (reference article), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Saint Yared, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 571

The source calls this a traditional date rather than an independently fixed one.

Source Yared (reference article), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Sakshi, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Samkhya treats the witness, purusha, as a permanently real and separate principle whose recognition is itself liberation; Advaita treats the witness stance as a provisional teaching to be seen through rather than a final position.

Source Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Volume III: Advaita Vedanta up to Samkara and His Pupils, Karl H. Potter (ed.) tier 1

Salafism, Denominations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Separation or Divergence

Currently States No separation as a body

Roel Meijer's edited volume Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement, Hurst, 2009, brings together specialists on Islamic movements to document that Salafism did not separate from any prior body; it is a reform current within Sunni Islam that calls for a return to the practice of the first generations, the salaf, rather than a schism with its own founding break. The volume's comparative method, reading case studies of Salafi movements and their legal practice across different countries, finds real internal disagreement over whether that stance sits inside or outside the four traditional schools of law: some Salafis reject taqlid, adherence to any school, entirely, while others continue to operate within Hanbali jurisprudence specifically. That disagreement, not any external separation, is what the dispute over its status actually concerns.

Source Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement, Roel Meijer (ed.) tier 1

Salafism, Denominations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Separation or Divergence

Currently States Salafism is a current within Sunni Islam calling for a return to the practice of the first generations

Roel Meijer's edited volume Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement, Hurst, 2009, brings together specialists on Islamic movements to document that Salafism did not separate from any prior body; it is a reform current within Sunni Islam that calls for a return to the practice of the first generations, the salaf, rather than a schism with its own founding break. The volume's comparative method, reading case studies of Salafi movements and their legal practice across different countries, finds real internal disagreement over whether that stance sits inside or outside the four traditional schools of law: some Salafis reject taqlid, adherence to any school, entirely, while others continue to operate within Hanbali jurisprudence specifically. That disagreement, not any external separation, is what the dispute over its status actually concerns.

Source Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement, Roel Meijer (ed.) tier 1

Salafism, Denominations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Separation or Divergence

Currently States Whether it stands inside or outside the four schools of law is disputed within it

Roel Meijer's edited volume Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement, Hurst, 2009, brings together specialists on Islamic movements to document that Salafism did not separate from any prior body; it is a reform current within Sunni Islam that calls for a return to the practice of the first generations, the salaf, rather than a schism with its own founding break. The volume's comparative method, reading case studies of Salafi movements and their legal practice across different countries, finds real internal disagreement over whether that stance sits inside or outside the four traditional schools of law: some Salafis reject taqlid, adherence to any school, entirely, while others continue to operate within Hanbali jurisprudence specifically. That disagreement, not any external separation, is what the dispute over its status actually concerns.

Source Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement, Roel Meijer (ed.) tier 1

Salafistes (2016), Screen Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Reception

Currently States The film's French release provoked a public censorship debate: the Culture Ministry argued it risked providing an unfiltered platform for jihadist messaging, and the national film classification body imposed a rare over-eighteen rating rather than a wider ban, a compromise that satisfied neither side fully. Some critics, including the director Claude Lanzmann, praised it as showing daily life under jihadist rule in a way no book or specialist commentary could match; others, examined directly in Maria Flood's peer reviewed study of the film's reception, argued that presenting jihadist subjects largely without critical commentary risked the film being read, or misread, as representative of the wider Salafi movement rather than of the violent minority it actually filmed.

Source Salafistes (Wikipedia and Studies in French Cinema), Wikipedia contributors; Maria Flood, Studies in French Cinema tier 2

Salmon, 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

Salvation, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2005) documents that within Christianity the disputes over salvation concern mechanism and scope: whether it is by faith alone or by faith formed in love, whether it can be lost, and whether it is offered to all or only to the elect. Universalism, the position that all are finally saved, has been held by a minority throughout Christian history, was associated with the third century theologian Origen, was condemned in the sixth century in the form attributed to him, and has recovered a measure of respectability in modern theology without becoming the teaching of any large body, which is why the question is recorded as unsettled rather than resolved.

Source Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.) tier 1

Salvation Through the Shed Blood, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether Mithraism promised salvation at all. The evidence is a single damaged painted line in the mithraeum under Santa Prisca in Rome, restored by its excavators as thanking the god for having saved by shed blood. The restoration supplies missing letters, the blood may be the bull and may not, and even on the most favourable reading the line says nothing about what an initiate was saved from or for.

Source The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries, Manfred Clauss tier 1

Salvation Through the Shed Blood, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within the tradition

Manfred Clauss's The Roman Cult of Mithras (2000) examines the sole surviving evidence for a Mithraic soteriological promise of salvation through shed blood: a single damaged painted inscription in the Mithraeum beneath the church of Santa Prisca in Rome. Clauss's method is epigraphic, reconstructing the damaged Latin text letter by letter from the surviving paint traces, and the restoration supplying words about being saved by shed blood, sanguine fuso, is accepted by some scholars working from the same damaged inscription and held unproven by others, since the missing letters could be filled a different way consistent with the surviving strokes.

Source The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries, Manfred Clauss tier 1

Salve Regina, Prayers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Traditionally ascribed to Hermann of Reichenau, known as Hermannus Contractus, an eleventh century monk and scholar who worked from the Benedictine monastery on Reichenau despite a severe physical disability from birth. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd revised edition, Cross and Livingstone, eds., Oxford University Press, 2005) records the ascription as uncertain, with other candidates including Adhemar of Le Puy also proposed and no attribution settled among scholars.

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd revised edition, Cross and Livingstone, eds., Oxford University Press, 2005) examined the traditional ascription of this Marian antiphon to Hermann of Reichenau, known as Hermannus Contractus, an eleventh century monk of the Reichenau monastery who worked despite a severe physical disability from birth. Weighing that tradition against the other candidate proposed, Adhemar of Le Puy, it finds no attribution settled among scholars and records the ascription as uncertain rather than resolved.

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