Disputed Statements

Talqin, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed

According To Islam

Talqin is the practice of instructing or reminding the newly deceased, typically at the graveside immediately after burial, of the answers the tradition holds the angels Munkar and Nakir will ask in the grave. Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad's The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection (2002) records that Islamic legal schools differ on its standing: some accept graveside talqin as a beneficial practice supported by weaker hadith and by established local custom, while others, working from stricter hadith criticism, regard it as an unsupported innovation, bidah, with no sound basis in the earliest sources. The method is comparative Islamic jurisprudence, weighing the same body of hadith concerning the grave and the afterlife against each school's own standards for what counts as a sound enough basis for a devotional practice. Because the disagreement is over evidentiary standard rather than a fact either side disputes, and Islam has no single central authority that can bind all schools to one ruling, talqin's scholarly standing remains debated across the legal traditions.

Source The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection, Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad tier 1

Talqin, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad's The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection (Oxford University Press, 2002) distinguishes talqin's two forms: prompting a dying person with the shahada, grounded in the Prophet's reported instruction and accepted across the schools, and talqin al-mayyit, instructing the deceased at the graveside in the answers to give the questioning angels, which the authors record as customary in many communities and rejected by others as an innovation without basis in the earliest sources.

According To Islam

Source The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection, Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad tier 1

Talqin, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Standing Detail

Currently States Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad's The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection (Oxford University Press, 2002) records that deathbed talqin, gently prompting a dying Muslim's confession of faith, is broadly accepted across the schools on the strength of the Prophet's own reported instruction, while talqin al-mayyit, instructing the deceased at the graveside in the answers to give the questioning angels, is disputed among jurists, some treating it as a beneficial extension and others rejecting it as an innovation without basis in the earliest sources.

According To Islam

Source The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection, Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad tier 1

Tamid (The Daily Offering), Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed

Tamid, the twice-daily continual burnt offering at the Jerusalem Temple, is the subject of the Mishnah's tractate of the same name, which reads unusually as first-person eyewitness narration of the priests' own procedure rather than abstract law, which is exactly why its historical status is argued. Shaye Cohen's From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (2006) sets out one position treating that narrative detail as transmitted memory genuinely passed down from priests who had themselves served in the Temple before its destruction in 70 CE, and another treating the narrative voice as a literary device the Mishnah's later redactors adopted to present an idealised, systematised order rather than an eyewitness account at all. The method is literary and source-critical, reading the tractate's narrative style and procedural detail against what is independently known of Mishnaic composition and against comparable narrative material elsewhere in rabbinic literature. The disagreement concerns the fine procedure and the narrative's own status, not whether a twice-daily offering was actually made, which is independently attested.

Source From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, Shaye J. D. Cohen tier 1

Tamid (The Daily Offering), Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Standing Detail

Currently States Shaye J. D. Cohen's From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Westminster John Knox Press, 2006) notes that the detailed, circumstantial account of the tamid, the twice daily public burnt offering that framed the entire sanctuary routine, comes down chiefly through the Mishnah tractate that bears its name, redacted around 200 CE, long after the Temple's destruction in 70 CE had already ended the offering it describes, so its procedural detail rests on memory and legal reconstruction rather than a record made while the service was still performed.

Source From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, Shaye J. D. Cohen tier 1

Tanit, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Worship and Practice

Currently States The Carthage tophet, an open-air precinct holding thousands of urned cremated infant and animal remains beneath stelae dedicated "to our lady Tanit and to Baal Hammon", the largest single body of physical evidence for her cult.

Whether the tophet burials represent ritual child sacrifice, as ancient Greek and Roman writers hostile to Carthage claimed and some modern archaeologists still argue from the demographic profile of the remains, or predominantly a cemetery for infants who died of natural causes and were given a religious burial and dedication, is a genuine and unresolved dispute in current scholarship. Osteological studies of age at death have been read to support both readings, and no consensus position exists; this atlas states the disagreement rather than adopting either side.

Source In Search of the Phoenicians, Josephine Quinn tier 1

Tantalus, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Mythic Association

Currently States Ancient sources give two different offenses for his punishment, serving his son Pelops to the gods as a test, or stealing nectar and ambrosia and revealing divine secrets to mortals

According To Ancient Greek Religion

Pseudo-Apollodorus's The Library (Bibliotheca), a Greek mythographic compilation of uncertain date drawing on much earlier sources, preserves the cannibalism story in which Tantalus serves his son Pelops to the gods, alongside the earlier alternative in which Tantalus instead steals ambrosia and nectar. Pindar's First Olympian Ode, composed in the fifth century BCE, rejects the cannibalism story outright as an impious slander invented by Tantalus's neighbours and offers the theft version instead, examining the same mythic material through the lens of what he considers becoming to say about the gods; the wider mythographic tradition preserves both versions without settling which is original.

Source The Library (Bibliotheca), Pseudo-Apollodorus tier 1

Tantra, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 300

Historians of Indian religion date the earliest tantric material anywhere from the third to the seventh century of the common era, and no single date commands consensus. The range is wide because the earliest surviving manuscripts are centuries younger than the doctrines and practices they record, so scholars must argue from internal textual evidence, comparative ritual and doctrinal parallels, and scattered external references rather than from a securely dated original text. Scholars also disagree on where the definitional line falls between formative antecedent material, shared with earlier yogic and ascetic currents, and tantra proper as a distinct, identifiable movement, and that disagreement moves the boundary at both ends of the range.

Source The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century, Geoffrey Samuel tier 1

Tantra, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 700

Historians of Indian religion date the earliest tantric material anywhere from the third to the seventh century of the common era, and no single date commands consensus. The range is wide because the earliest surviving manuscripts are centuries younger than the doctrines and practices they record, so scholars must argue from internal textual evidence, comparative ritual and doctrinal parallels, and scattered external references rather than from a securely dated original text. Scholars also disagree on where the definitional line falls between formative antecedent material, shared with earlier yogic and ascetic currents, and tantra proper as a distinct, identifiable movement, and that disagreement moves the boundary at both ends of the range.

Source The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century, Geoffrey Samuel tier 1

Tanzania, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Legal Status

Currently States The union constitution guarantees freedom of religion with no state religion, but Zanzibar operates its own Kadhi courts for Muslim personal status and mainland proposals to create equivalent courts have been repeatedly contested.

Tanzania's union constitution, governing the union of mainland Tanganyika and the island of Zanzibar formed in 1964, guarantees freedom of religion with no state religion for the union as a whole. Zanzibar, which retains significant autonomy within the union including its own legal system, operates Kadhi courts, Islamic courts with jurisdiction over Muslim personal status matters, reflecting Zanzibar's overwhelmingly Muslim population, distinct from the mainland's more religiously mixed population. Proposals to create equivalent Kadhi courts on the mainland have been repeatedly raised and repeatedly contested, opposed by mainland Christian leaders and secular voices who argue that introducing religious courts into the mainland's otherwise uniform civil court system would compromise the union's secular character, while proponents argue mainland Muslims should have the same access Zanzibari Muslims already have. No mainland Kadhi courts proposal has secured the political support needed to become law as of the report.

Source International Religious Freedom Report, United States Department of State, Office of International Religious Freedom tier 1

Taoism Arrives In Taiwan With Fujian Settlers, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 1660

The source states the influx of Fujian and Guangdong settlers began in the 1660s, a decade rather than a single year, and 1660 marks this event's atom for the decade's start; but the same source is explicit that there is little evidence the doctrinal, initiatory religion of Taoism itself, as against the folk worship of deities such as Mazu the settlers carried with them, was active in this early frontier period, since Taiwan held little draw for ordained Buddhist or Taoist religious leaders. Hoklo and Hakka Taoist masters transmitting institutional Taoism from Fujian and Guangdong are attested only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a reading the scholarly literature on Taiwanese Taoist ritual transmission (Kenneth Dean's study of Taoist ritual and popular cults in southeast China) corroborates. What is genuinely debated, then, is not which year in the 1660s settlers arrived, but whether "arrival" names the settlers' own folk practice at that date or the institutionally transmitted Taoism attested only two centuries later.

Source Taoism In Taiwan (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Tapas (Austerity), Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Dated for the Yoga Sutras themselves to between the second century BCE and the fourth or fifth century CE, though the word and concept are already present in Vedic literature many centuries earlier: an early dating follows the tradition's own attribution to a single ancient sage, while a late dating, argued by scholars such as Philipp Maas, reads the surviving text as a composite assembled together with its own earliest commentary.

The Yoga Sutras' date is disputed among scholars, from a single ancient author around the second century BCE to a later compilation as late as the fourth or fifth century CE; the debate turns on whether the text and its earliest surviving commentary were composed together or centuries apart.

Source The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, Edwin F. Bryant tier 1

Tapas (Austerity), Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Traditionally attributed to Patanjali, the compiler of the Yoga Sutras; scholarship debates whether this is the same Patanjali credited with the Sanskrit grammatical treatise of that name.

Whether the Patanjali credited with the Yoga Sutras is the same figure credited with the Sanskrit grammatical treatise of that name, and whether the text as it stands is the work of one author or a later compilation, are both disputed.

Source The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, Edwin F. Bryant tier 1

Tapas (Jain Asceticism), Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States -599

Jain tradition dates the life of Mahavira, the tradition's last Tirthankara, to 599 to 527 BCE, but modern historians place him roughly a century later, nearer the fifth century BCE, so the exact founding period is not settled.

Source The Jains, Paul Dundas tier 1

Tara (Mahavidya), Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Standing Detail

Currently States Most scholarship holds that the Hindu tantric Tara took her name and much of her iconographic form from Buddhist sources rather than the reverse, making her among the clearest documented cases of borrowing between the two tantric traditions, though the exact direction and mechanism of that borrowing, and whether it happened once or through repeated exchange, is still argued among specialists.

Source Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas, David R. Kinsley tier 1

Tara (Mahavidya), Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Most scholarship holds the Hindu Tara took her name and much of her form from Buddhist sources rather than the reverse, though the direction of borrowing is still argued.

Most scholarship holds that the Hindu Tara took her name and much of her form from Buddhist sources rather than the reverse, which makes her the clearest case of traffic between the two tantric traditions, though the direction of the borrowing is still argued by specialists.

Source Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition, David R. Kinsley tier 1

Tartarus, Realms

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States The origin of the Greek name Tartaros is uncertain and may be pre-Greek, with no accepted derivation from known Indo-European roots.

Ancient sources make no attempt to explain the name, and modern philologists have proposed no derivation that has won general acceptance; many regard it, like several other early Greek place and underworld names, as likely inherited from a pre-Greek substrate language rather than coined from Greek roots.

Source Theogony, Hesiod tier 1

Tatta ਤ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Sikh tradition credits Guru Angad, the second Guru, with giving the script its settled form in the sixteenth century

According To The Gurmukhi script

Two reference works give incompatible accounts. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Harbans Singh, editor-in-chief, Punjabi University, Patiala, 1998) carries the Sikh tradition that Guru Angad, the second Guru (1504-1552), devised the script. The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996), surveying the paleography of Indic scripts, holds instead that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Punjab as one of the Landa scripts descended from Sharada, and that comparing those existing Landa forms against the Gurmukhi letters attested from Guru Angad's era shows a fixing and standardising of a repertoire already in circulation rather than an invention from nothing. Neither side has displaced the other because the two accounts read different kinds of evidence, a community's own historical memory against a comparative script lineage, and the atlas records both without adjudicating.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, Harbans Singh (editor-in-chief) tier 2

Tatta ਤ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Historians of Indic writing place the letterforms earlier, in the Landa mercantile hands already used across the Punjab

According To The Gurmukhi script

Two reference works give incompatible accounts. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Harbans Singh, editor-in-chief, Punjabi University, Patiala, 1998) carries the Sikh tradition that Guru Angad, the second Guru (1504-1552), devised the script. The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996), surveying the paleography of Indic scripts, holds instead that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Punjab as one of the Landa scripts descended from Sharada, and that comparing those existing Landa forms against the Gurmukhi letters attested from Guru Angad's era shows a fixing and standardising of a repertoire already in circulation rather than an invention from nothing. Neither side has displaced the other because the two accounts read different kinds of evidence, a community's own historical memory against a comparative script lineage, and the atlas records both without adjudicating.

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

Tau ⲧ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Greek letters wrote Egyptian from about the first century CE, settled by the fourth

According To The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) surveys the small corpus of Old Coptic texts, pre-Christian magical and astrological papyri in which Egyptian was first written out using Greek letters plus a few signs borrowed from Demotic, against the standardised Coptic used in Christian scripture translation from around the third century CE onward. Comparing the two corpora, its contributors find the evidence thin enough to support two readings: that the Old Coptic magical texts already fixed the practice of writing Egyptian in Greek-based letters, or that the Christian translation project, needing a stable and teachable orthography for scripture, was the decisive act that standardised the script that survives. Because both readings draw on the same handful of surviving texts and no source describes an official act of decision, the volume treats the question as open rather than favouring either camp.

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