Disputed Statements

Islam Arises in Mecca, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 610

Islamic tradition places Muhammad's first reported revelation around 610 CE at Mount Hira near Mecca; the precise year rests on later biographical and hadith literature rather than a contemporary record, so 610 is used as a representative year for the start of this period.

Source Ibn Ishaq (recension of Ibn Hisham), Sirat Rasul Allah, translated by A. Guillaume as The Life of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq; ed. Ibn Hisham; trans. A. Guillaume tier 1

Islam Is Established Among the Turkic Peoples of Central Asia, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 892

Turkic conversion to Islam under Samanid influence in Transoxiana was a gradual process spanning generations rather than one dated event; Satuq Bughra Khan's own personal conversion is conventionally placed around 934, decades into this window. 892 is used as a representative point at the opening of that process, not a settled year for any single conversion.

Source An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples, Peter B. Golden tier 1

Islam Is Established Among the Turkic Peoples of Central Asia, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1005

1005 is a representative point at the close of the Samanid to Karakhanid transition, during which Turkic conversion to Islam consolidated across Transoxiana following Satuq Bughra Khan's own conversion around 934; the process had no single closing date, and this end year marks where scholarship generally treats the conversion wave as complete rather than an event fixed on the calendar.

Source An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples, Peter B. Golden tier 1

Islam Is Established in Bosnia Under Ottoman Rule, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1600

The Islamization of the Bosnian population unfolded gradually over roughly a century after the Ottoman conquest; 1600 is a representative point near the close of that process rather than a single dated event.

Source Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923, Caroline Finkel tier 1

Islam Is Established in the Mali Empire, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 1050

Trans Saharan trade carried Islam into West Africa gradually from the eleventh century onward, with no single dated conversion event; 1050 is a representative point within that gradual process, not a settled year.

Source Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, Nehemia Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins (eds.) tier 1

Islam Is Established in the Mali Empire, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1337

1337 is the conventionally cited year of Mansa Musa's death, marking the height of Mali's Islamic court culture after his 1324 hajj; exact regnal dates in the Mali Empire are approximate in the surviving record.

Source Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, Nehemia Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins (eds.) tier 1

Islam Is Established on the Swahili Coast, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 780

Indian Ocean trade carried Islam to the Swahili coast gradually from as early as the eighth century; no single fixed arrival year is recoverable, so 780 is used as a representative point within that window.

Source The Indian Ocean, Michael Pearson tier 1

Islam Is Established on the Swahili Coast, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1300

1300 marks the approximate height of the medieval Indian Ocean trade network along the Swahili coast, when city states such as Kilwa were at their most prosperous as Muslim trading polities, rather than a single dated event; the Islamization of the coast was a centuries-long process tied to that trade, not a court conversion on a fixed day.

Source The Indian Ocean, Michael Pearson tier 1

Islam Reaches China Under the Tang Dynasty, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 651

651 CE is the documented Arab embassy to Emperor Gaozong that modern historians treat as the first firmly attested contact; a separate, earlier tradition credits Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas with a direct 616 to 618 embassy, a claim this atlas names as legendary rather than adopts, since Wikipedia's own article states modern historians doubt Sa'd himself ever reached China.

Source Islam in China (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Islam Reaches the Americas, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 1900

Muslim presence in the Americas in fact begins earlier, with enslaved West African Muslims brought before abolition; 1900 is a representative point near the start of the twentieth century immigration and conversion waves that grew this into an established, demographically significant population, not a single dated event.

Source A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri tier 1

Islam Reaches the Indonesian Archipelago, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1500

Islam's spread through the archipelago and the Malacca Sultanate continued gradually via trade and Sufi networks through the fifteenth century; 1500 is a representative point near the close of that process rather than a single dated event.

Source Sufism: A Global History, Nile Green tier 1

Islam Reaches Western Europe Through Postwar Labor Migration, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Start Year

Currently States 1945

1945 marks the broad postwar starting point of Muslim labor migration into Western Europe; the specific national programs began at different, later years, West Germany's own guest worker program specifically ran from 1955 to 1973, so 1945 is a representative opening point rather than a single dated event.

Source The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany, Rita Chin tier 1

Islam Reaches Western Europe Through Postwar Labor Migration, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1980

1980 is a representative closing point for the postwar labor migration wave; Germany's own guest worker program formally ended in 1973, but France's and Britain's parallel migrations, tied to their own colonial histories, continued somewhat later.

Source The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany, Rita Chin tier 1

Islam Spreads in South Asia Through the Chishti Order, Spread Events

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns End Year

Currently States 1236

1236 marks the death of Delhi Sultanate ruler Iltutmish and the close of the Sultanate's early consolidation, but the Chishti order's own spread through the South Asian countryside continued for centuries beyond this point; it is a milestone within an ongoing process, not a true terminus.

Source Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond, Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence tier 1

Islamic State, Secular Organizations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 2014

The organization traces an organizational lineage back to al-Qaeda in Iraq, founded in 2004, through several name changes before declaring itself a caliphate. Scholars differ on which point counts as the group's own origin: this entry records 2014, the caliphate declaration under which it took the name Islamic State and claimed the obedience of Muslims everywhere, since the entity as such is the caliphate claim rather than any of its organizational predecessors.

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

Islamic State, Secular Organizations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Institutional Wealth or Finances

Currently States At its territorial peak around 2015, the Islamic State was, by multiple analysts' assessments, the wealthiest terrorist organization in history. A 2015 breakdown attributes about 500 million US dollars to oil and gas sales and about 360 million to taxation and extortion, plus a one time roughly 500 million US dollar haul from looting Mosul's bank vaults in 2014; oil revenue alone fell from around 40 million US dollars a month in 2015 toward about 4 million a month by late 2016 under coalition counter finance pressure.

Total annual figures across different analysts range from several hundred million to roughly six billion US dollars depending on which revenue streams and years are aggregated; this entry follows the itemized breakdown for 2015 components that admit clearer individual sourcing.

Source Oil, Extortion Still Paying Off for ISIS (RAND Corporation, 2017) tier 2

Israel, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Legal Status

Currently States Defined by Basic Law as the nation-state of the Jewish people (2018) alongside Basic Laws guaranteeing freedom of religion and conscience; the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif is administered by a Jordanian-funded Waqf under Israeli security control.

Israel's 2018 Basic Law, Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, defines Israel constitutionally in specifically Jewish national terms, standing alongside separate, earlier Basic Laws that guarantee freedom of religion and conscience to all residents regardless of the 2018 law's framing. The Temple Mount, called Haram al-Sharif in its Islamic designation, sharing the same physical site sacred to Judaism and Islam, is administered day to day by a Jordanian-funded Waqf, an Islamic religious trust, while remaining under overall Israeli security control, an arrangement in which Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian authorities actively dispute both sovereignty over the site and the specific terms of prayer access for Jewish and Muslim worshippers respectively. The State Department's report documents this administrative arrangement as the current operative status without adjudicating the underlying sovereignty dispute, which long predates the 2018 Basic Law and is bound up with the wider unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Resolution would require a negotiated settlement of that wider conflict rather than any change to religious freedom law specifically.

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

Israel, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Capital

Currently States Jerusalem is the seat of the Israeli government and the capital named in Israeli law; most UN member states and the United Nations itself do not recognize this, treating the city's status as unresolved pending a permanent settlement, and most countries maintain their embassies in or near Tel Aviv.

Jerusalem is named the capital of Israel in Israeli law and functions as the seat of the Israeli government, including the Knesset and the Prime Minister's office, but most United Nations member states and the United Nations itself do not recognise this status, treating Jerusalem's ultimate status as unresolved pending a permanent settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which Palestinians also claim East Jerusalem as the intended capital of a future Palestinian state. Consistent with non-recognition, most countries maintain their embassies to Israel in or near Tel Aviv rather than in Jerusalem, though a smaller number, including the United States since 2018, have relocated their embassies to Jerusalem, itself a contested diplomatic act read by Palestinians and much of the international community as prejudging the city's disputed status. The dispute is over whether a state's own designation of its capital is sufficient for international recognition when the territory in question is also claimed by another party to an active conflict, a question the CIA World Factbook's descriptive entry itself is not positioned to resolve.

Source The World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency), Central Intelligence Agency tier 1

Israel Antiquities Authority, Custodians & Museums

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Relevant Holding

Currently States Caiaphas Ossuary, recovered from a 1990 salvage excavation of a Jerusalem tomb, widely though not universally identified with the high priest of the Gospel accounts

The Israel Antiquities Authority holds the ossuary from the Caiaphas Tomb, discovered in North Talpiyot, Jerusalem, in 1990 and excavated and published by archaeologist Zvi Greenhut in 1992, an inscribed bone box naming a member of the priestly Caiaphas family, the family named in the Gospels as holding the office of high priest at the time of Jesus's trial. Greenhut's excavation report establishes the tomb's date and its association with the historically documented Caiaphas priestly family from the inscription and the tomb's own archaeological context, but some scholars question whether the specific inscribed name necessarily identifies the individual high priest named in the Gospels rather than another member of the same extended priestly family bearing the same name. The method is epigraphic and archaeological, reading the inscription's text and the tomb's burial context against what is independently known of the Caiaphas family from Josephus and other historical sources. Because a shared family name does not by itself specify which family member is named, the identification with the specific Gospel high priest remains debated even though the family association is not.

Source The Caiaphas Tomb in North Talpiyot, Jerusalem, Zvi Greenhut tier 1

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Religious Dimension

Currently States This atlas states the conflict's core as national and territorial: two national movements, Zionism and Palestinian Arab nationalism, contesting sovereignty over the same land, a reading Benny Morris and the broader mainstream historiography treat as the conflict's basic structure since its early twentieth century origins, when both early Zionism and the Palestinian national movement's own founding leadership were substantially secular nationalist, the latter partly Christian as well as Muslim. Scholars of religious violence, Mark Juergensmeyer among them, argue that a genuinely religious dimension, distinct from ethnic nationalism, has grown more central since the late twentieth century: religious Zionist settlement theology after the 1967 conquest of the West Bank reframed territory as covenantal rather than merely national, and the rise of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad since the 1980s cast resistance in explicitly Islamic terms as a religious duty rather than a nationalist claim alone. This atlas states the nationalist core as the conflict's basic structure and records the growth of religious framing as a debated and contested addition to it.

Source Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Juergensmeyer), Mark Juergensmeyer tier 1