Disputed Statements

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 11000.000000

Scoped specifically to the 1947 to 1949 war surrounding Israel's founding, not the conflict's full and far more contested later history. The lower bound combines the widely used Israeli toll of roughly 6,373 dead with the lower-end estimates of Arab combatant deaths, around 5,000, surveyed in Benny Morris's history of the conflict. Palestinian Arab civilian and irregular combatant deaths from this period carry less complete contemporary record-keeping than the Israeli side, a limitation Morris himself has acknowledged.

Source Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (Morris), Benny Morris tier 1

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 21000.000000

Scoped to the same 1947 to 1949 war. The higher bound combines the same roughly 6,373 Israeli dead with the higher-end estimates of Arab dead that include civilian casualties, up to about 15,000, again surveyed in Morris's history. This atlas records the combined range rather than a single total precisely because Israeli and Arab tallies from this period rest on different and asymmetric record-keeping.

Source Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (Morris), Benny Morris tier 1

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Assessment

Currently States The recorded range is scoped specifically to the 1947 to 1949 war surrounding Israel's founding, not the conflict's full and far more contested later history: roughly 6,373 Israeli dead is a widely used figure with comparatively complete record-keeping behind it, against Arab combatant and civilian deaths estimated from about 5,000 to 15,000, a wider range reflecting the less complete contemporary record-keeping on that side, a limitation Benny Morris himself has acknowledged in the history this atlas cites. This conflict's own religious versus political-national framing is a live and contested question in the scholarship, not settled by this atlas: Morris and most historians of the 1947 to 1949 war treat it primarily as an ethno-national conflict over territory and sovereignty between Jewish and Arab national movements, with religious identity marking the two communities rather than constituting the war's own casus belli.

Source Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (Morris), Benny Morris tier 1

Israfil, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Text

Currently States He is not named explicitly in the Qur'an itself; the trumpet passages such as Surah 39:68 are attributed to him by hadith and later tradition rather than by the text's own wording.

The Qur'an describes the trumpet blast of resurrection without naming an angel; the identification of that angel as Israfil rests on hadith and later exegesis, and some classical scholars named Jibril instead.

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

Istihsan (Juristic Preference), Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether preferring on grounds the texts do not state is interpretation or legislation. The division is the sharpest methodological one among the Sunni schools and is about authority rather than outcomes, since the schools often reach the same ruling by different routes.

Source Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence, Mohammad Hashim Kamali tier 1

Istihsan: A Jurist May Set Aside a Strict Analogy for a Better Ruling, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Al-Shafii attacked it directly, on the ground that a jurist who prefers one ruling over another without a textual warrant has legislated rather than interpreted.

Istihsan permits a jurist to depart from the ruling a strict analogy would produce when that ruling would cause hardship or run against the law's wider purposes; it is a hallmark of Hanafi legal reasoning and is recognised in a comparable form by the Maliki school. Al-Shafii, founder of the school bearing his name, attacked the principle directly in his own legal writings, active in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, arguing that a jurist who prefers one ruling over another without a specific textual warrant has legislated on his own authority rather than interpreted the law. Hanafi jurists answered that istihsan is not unbounded preference but is itself governed by recognised legal principles, so that it interprets the law's purposes rather than substituting the jurist's will for it. The dispute is over whether departing from strict analogy on grounds of purpose and hardship is principled interpretation or disguised legislation, a methodological disagreement between schools that has persisted since al-Shafii's own lifetime because each side reads the same juristic reasoning differently.

Source Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence, Mohammad Hashim Kamali tier 1

It ࡇ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns A Rival System's Attribution

Currently States The script's ancestry is assigned either to a cursive form of Aramaic, the derivation favored by most script historians, or to the Parthian chancery script used in Sasanian era administrative documents.

According To The Mandaic script

Both derivations are held in the literature and neither has displaced the other. The Aramaic cursive camp points to the letterforms' overall resemblance to other late Aramaic cursive scripts of the region, including Nabataean and Syriac; the Parthian chancery camp points to specific letterforms, including certain medial and final forms, that resemble Pahlavi documentary hands more closely than any Aramaic cursive exemplar. No single find has settled the question, and Mandaic paleography treats it as open pending further comparative work.

Source Iranian Scripts for Aramaic Languages: The Origin of the Mandaic Script, Charles G. Haberl tier 1

Ivory Coast, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Legal Status

Currently States The constitution declares the state secular and guarantees freedom of religion; religious associations register with the Ministry of the Interior, and religious identity was central to the citizenship disputes underlying the 2002 to 2011 conflicts.

Ivory Coast's constitution declares the state secular and guarantees freedom of religion, with religious associations registering administratively through the Ministry of the Interior rather than through any religion-specific legal process. The State Department's report records that religious identity, closely correlated in Ivory Coast with regional origin and with the contested concept of Ivoirite, or authentic Ivorian national belonging, was central to the citizenship disputes that underlay the country's civil conflicts from 2002 to 2011, in which predominantly Muslim northerners, often of recent or contested immigrant descent, were pitted against a predominantly Christian and animist south over who qualified as a full citizen. The dispute here is less over the constitution's secular text, which is not itself contested, than over whether that formal secularism actually governed how citizenship and political eligibility were adjudicated during the conflict period. Whether the underlying belonging questions have been durably resolved since remains a matter of ongoing Ivorian politics.

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

Izcalli, Veintenas

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Approximate Gregorian Span

Currently States Early to late January

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

Izon (Ijo), Languages

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Language Family

Currently States The largest of the Ijoid languages. Ijoid is conventionally placed within Niger-Congo but stands apart from every other branch of it.

Standard reference works classify Ijoid within Niger-Congo. A minority of specialists hold that the shared vocabulary is too sparse and the basic word order too divergent for the relationship to be demonstrated, and treat Ijoid as unclassified or as an isolate branch. The atlas records the conventional placement together with the objection to it rather than choosing between them.

Source Ethnologue: Languages of the World, David M. Eberhard, Gary F. Simons and Charles D. Fennig (eds.) tier 1

J, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Chaldean Letter Value

Currently States 1

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

J. B. Rhine, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Principal Critic

Currently States C. E. M. Hansel, who reconstructed the physical settings of the Duke experiments and argued that ordinary sensory routes had not been closed off; Rhine and Pratt published detailed rejections of the reconstructions

Terence Hines's Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (Prometheus Books, 2003) surveys C. E. M. Hansel's architectural reconstructions of the Duke University buildings used in Rhine and Pratt's ESP experiments, offered as evidence that an ordinary sensory route between experimenter and subject was physically available and undetected by the original protocol. Hines's method is to compare Hansel's floor-plan-based reconstructions against Rhine and Pratt's own published accounts of the room layout, and finds the two sides' reconstructions dispute each other in physical detail, room dimensions, sightlines and what could plausibly be seen or heard through a shared wall, with neither the original investigators nor their critic conceding the other's version of the building.

Source Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, Terence Hines tier 1

J. Gaither Pratt, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States The Pearce-Pratt distance series of 1933 and 1934 at Duke, in which Pratt turned the cards in one building while Hubert Pearce recorded his calls in another

J. B. Rhine and J. G. Pratt's own published account of the Pearce-Pratt series (Journal of Parapsychology, 1954) reports the above-chance card-guessing results as the investigators recorded and scored them at the time, using a sealed, randomised deck and simultaneous timed recording in separate buildings. That reported result is accepted as accurately transcribed by later critics, but disputed as evidence of anomalous perception by those, following Hansel's architectural analysis, who argue the specific building layout used in the trials left an ordinary sensory route open that the protocol did not control for.

Source A Review of the Pearce-Pratt Distance Series of ESP Tests, J. B. Rhine and J. G. Pratt tier 1

J. Gaither Pratt, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Principal Critic

Currently States C. E. M. Hansel, whose 1966 reconstruction of the Duke buildings proposed a route by which the subject could have observed the target cards

C. E. M. Hansel's ESP: A Scientific Evaluation (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1966) presented Hansel's own on-site architectural investigation of the Duke University buildings used in the Pearce-Pratt series, arguing the physical layout permitted an ordinary sensory or signalling channel the original 1930s protocol had not excluded. Rhine and Pratt rejected Hansel's reconstruction of the buildings in print, disputing his description of the rooms and sightlines involved, and the disagreement, which turns entirely on the physical architecture of two specific rooms decades after the trials took place, was never independently resolved by a third party inspection.

Source ESP: A Scientific Evaluation, C. E. M. Hansel tier 1

Jabir ibn Hayyan, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States Traditional Islamic bio-bibliography (Ibn al-Nadim) names Tus, in Khorasan, with other medieval accounts instead naming Kufa, in Iraq. Scholarship associated with Paul Kraus holds that much of the corpus attributed to him is the work of a school active into the ninth and tenth centuries, which would mean no single birthplace applies at all.

Source Jabir ibn Hayyan: Contribution a l'histoire des idees scientifiques dans l'Islam, Paul Kraus tier 1

Jabir ibn Hayyan, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 721

Scholarship on the alchemical and scientific corpus attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan has long questioned how much of it can be tied to one identifiable lifetime, and the birth year usually cited, around 721, is the traditional dating carried by the biographical tradition rather than an independently fixed record.

Source Jabir ibn Hayyan: Contribution a l'histoire des idees scientifiques dans l'Islam, Paul Kraus tier 1

Jabir ibn Hayyan, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 815

Scholarship on the alchemical and scientific corpus attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan has long questioned how much of it can be tied to one identifiable lifetime, and the death year usually cited, around 815, is the traditional dating carried by the biographical tradition rather than an independently fixed record.

Source Jabir ibn Hayyan: Contribution a l'histoire des idees scientifiques dans l'Islam, Paul Kraus tier 1

Jabriyya, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Held By

Currently States An early eighth century position, most closely associated with Jahm ibn Safwan, holding that God is the sole and direct cause of every human act and that human beings possess no real power of their own to choose or cause their actions; not held by any major Sunni school in this full form today, though later Ashari theology retained a strong emphasis on divine decree while rejecting the position complete determinism.

Watt notes the label Jabriyya was applied broadly by opponents to several distinct positions on divine determination, not only to Jahm ibn Safwan own teaching, so the boundary of what belongs to the school is itself debated among historians.

Source Free Will and Predestination in Early Islam, W. Montgomery Watt tier 1

Jacob, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historicity debated

Lester L. Grabbe's Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? (2007) finds no extra-biblical evidence for Jacob on the same second-millennium documentary record examined for the other patriarchs, and that the patriarchal narratives cannot be securely placed in any specific second-millennium setting. Judaism, Christianity and Islam hold him to be a historical patriarch, father of the twelve tribes and namesake of Israel.

Source Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?, Lester L. Grabbe tier 1

Jaijawanti, Scripture Portions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether the Ragmala, the verse listing of rags that stands at the very end of the volume after the rag sections close, is part of the Guru Granth Sahib

One position holds the Ragmala to be an integral part of the scripture, present in the Kartarpur manuscript and printed in every standard copy, and reads it accordingly. Another holds it to be a scribal addition rather than the word of the Gurus, and some congregations do not recite it when completing a reading of the volume. The question has been argued within the Panth since the nineteenth century and is not settled.

Source Historical Dictionary of Sikhism, 3rd edition, Louis E. Fenech and W. H. McLeod tier 1