Disputed Statements

Hamzah Fansuri, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1590

Hamzah Fansuri's death date is a genuine scholarly dispute rather than a simple gap. Guillot and Kalus, on the strength of a funerary stele bearing his name, argued for a death around 1527. Drewes and, following him, Braginsky instead argued for a death around 1590, reasoning in part from the absence in his own work of the seven grades of being doctrine that became prominent in the Malay world only in the early seventeenth century. Al-Attas placed his active career under Sultan Alauddin Ri'ayat Syah, who reigned from 1588 to 1604, a dating closer to the later camp. No consensus has been reached; 1590 is recorded here as the later camp's estimate, with the earlier stele-based claim recorded in this note rather than adopted as the value.

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

Handsome Lake, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1735

His birth is placed around 1735 in the Seneca village of Conewaugus on the Genesee River; as with most Haudenosaunee leaders of the period, no contemporary written record fixes the year, which rests on later oral and documentary reconstruction.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica: Verified Biographies (online academic reference), Encyclopaedia Britannica editors tier 2

Hanuman, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Hanuman's name is traditionally read as one with a disfigured jaw, recalling a childhood injury, though some scholars propose an earlier, possibly Dravidian, source for the name instead.

Hanuman's name is traditionally explained within the tradition as one with a disfigured jaw, hanu, recalling a childhood injury told in some Puranic accounts. Some scholars instead propose the name derives from an earlier, possibly Dravidian, source unrelated to that folk etymology, and the question is not settled.

Source The Ramayana of Valmiki, Valmiki (attributed); Robert P. Goldman (general editor) tier 1

Haoma, Sacred Objects & Ritual Items

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Botanical Identification

Currently States Ephedra in current practice; whether it is the plant of the Avestan hymns is unsettled

Haoma is the sacred plant pressed for its juice in Zoroastrian ritual and personified as a deity in the Avesta, the Iranian cognate of the Vedic soma described in similar terms in the Rigveda. David Flattery and Martin Schwartz's Haoma and Harmaline: The Botanical Identity of the Indo-Iranian Sacred Hallucinogen and Its Legacy in Religion, Language, and Middle Eastern Folklore (1989) records the strongest evidence for identifying haoma with ephedra: the living Zoroastrian Yasna ceremony has been performed continuously into the present using ephedra, an unbroken living practice rather than a scholarly reconstruction, the strongest single piece of evidence in the whole soma and haoma question precisely because it is observable practice rather than inference. Against that identification, the same inherited tradition documents substitution on its Vedic side, other plants pressed in place of the original when unavailable, and nothing in the Iranian record rules out a comparable substitution having occurred there too. The method is comparative philology and ethnobotany. Because an unbroken rite does not guarantee an unbroken species, the identification remains debated.

Source Haoma and Harmaline: The Botanical Identity of the Indo-Iranian Sacred Hallucinogen and Its Legacy in Religion, Language, and Middle Eastern Folklore, David Stophlet Flattery and Martin Schwartz tier 3

Haredi Judaism, Denominations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns State Funding Mechanism

Currently States Israel: state-funded exemption from military conscription for full-time yeshiva students, traced to Ben-Gurion's 1948 arrangement, repeatedly struck down by Israel's courts (1998, 2012, 2024) and never yet replaced by a law the courts have let stand

Whether Israel's decades-long arrangement funding and exempting full-time Haredi yeshiva students from military conscription is a settled state policy or an unresolved constitutional violation is itself the live dispute. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion agreed informally in 1948 to exempt a small number of yeshiva students under a policy later known as Torato Umanuto, his Torah is his occupation, administered for decades through ministerial discretion; Israel's High Court of Justice ruled in 1998 that this had no proper legislative basis and ordered the Knesset to legislate, which it did in 2002 with the Tal Law, which the Supreme Court then struck down as unconstitutional in 2012 for violating the principle of equal civic burden, and the arrangement remained contested until the Supreme Court ruled again in June 2024 that the government could no longer fund yeshivas for draft-age students who had not enlisted, a ruling the Knesset has not yet settled with legislation the courts have accepted, so the mechanism recorded here describes a funding and exemption practice still being actively relitigated rather than a stable state policy.

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

Harm (Xa) ኀ, 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

Harmandir Sahib (The Golden Temple), Sacred Sites

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Welfare and Humanitarian Aid Operations

Currently States The Golden Temple's langar, the Sikh tradition's free community kitchen open to all regardless of faith, caste or background, is widely reported to feed between 50,000 and over 100,000 people every day, rising further on weekends and festival days such as Guru Nanak's birthday. No single official daily count is published by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, which administers the langar; the figure is a standing claim repeated across journalistic sources over several years rather than a dated annual statistic.

Source The 24/7 Kitchen That Feeds 100,000 People Every Day, Farah Celjo tier 2

Harmandir Sahib (The Golden Temple), Sacred Sites

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Basis of the Humanitarian Aid Figure

Currently States Journalistic or Scholarly Estimate

Recorded as a scholarly estimate rather than an official audited count: published estimates of langar meals served vary and no single undisputed figure exists.

Source The 24/7 Kitchen That Feeds 100,000 People Every Day, Farah Celjo tier 2

Harold Puthoff, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States The Stanford Research Institute remote viewing programme, begun in 1972 and reported in Nature in 1974, in which viewers attempted to describe sites selected at random and visited by an experimenter

Russell Targ and Harold E. Puthoff published Information Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding in Nature in 1974, reporting remote-viewing experiments conducted at the Stanford Research Institute using a protocol in which a subject described a location a separated team member was visiting. The paper underwent Nature's standard peer review and was published as a real, refereed study; the interpretation of its results was directly contested in the same journal four years later, in 1978, when critics reanalysed the experimental protocol and argued it contained cues that could explain the reported accuracy without any anomalous transmission of information.

Source Information Transmission under Conditions of Sensory Shielding, Russell Targ and Harold E. Puthoff tier 1

Harold Puthoff, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Principal Critic

Currently States David Marks and Richard Kammann, who reported in Nature in 1978 that the transcripts carried cues allowing correct matching without any anomalous information

David Marks and Richard Kammann published Information Transmission in Remote Viewing Experiments in Nature in 1978, re-examining the transcripts and judging procedure from Targ and Puthoff's 1974 remote-viewing study. Their method was to identify sequential and editorial cues in the transcripts, such as their order matching the order in which locations were actually visited, that a judge could use to match descriptions to targets without any anomalous perception. Puthoff and Targ rejected Marks and Kammann's account of how the judging was conducted in their own reply, and no agreed resolution of the dispute over the original protocol's adequacy followed from either side's publication.

Source Information Transmission in Remote Viewing Experiments, David Marks and Richard Kammann tier 1

Hasan-i Sabbah, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1050

His birth is placed around 1050 in Qom, in the Seljuk Empire; no contemporary record fixes the exact year, and the conventional figure rests on the reconstruction of his early life from later Ismaili and hostile chronicle sources alike.

Source The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam, Bernard Lewis tier 1

Hashirim Asher LiShlomo, Musical Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Release Year

Currently States 1623

Given as 1622 by the Milken Archive of Jewish Music (October, in the Jewish year 5383) and as 1623 by Wikipedia and most catalogue entries; the Hebrew year 5383 itself spans both Gregorian years, which is the likely source of the discrepancy rather than a genuine dispute over when the print run occurred. 1623 is used here as the more commonly catalogued year.

Source Wikipedia, "Salamone Rossi", Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Hastijihva, Nadis

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States The Yoga Upanishads disagree sharply on where Hastijihva ends. The Trishikhibrahmana Upanishad stretches its course as far as the tip of the big toe of the right foot, while the Darshana Upanishad instead gives the right eye as its terminus, a genuinely different location rather than a variant description of the same one. No harmonised reading appears anywhere in the corpus.

Source The Yoga Upanishads, T. R. Srinivasa Ayyangar (translator), edited by S. Subrahmanya Sastri tier 2

Hatha Yoga Pradipika, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition Start Year

Currently States 1400

Svatmarama's own working dates are unrecorded. James Mallinson and Mark Singleton's Roots of Yoga places the compilation in the fifteenth century on the strength of the earliest surviving manuscript, copied around 1496, but whether the text was assembled early in that century or close to the manuscript's own date is unresolved, since it draws together older hatha material from Matsyendranath's and Gorakhnath's lineages that could have been gathered at any point across the period.

Source Roots of Yoga, James Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.) tier 1

Hatha Yoga Pradipika, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition End Year

Currently States 1500

Svatmarama's own working dates are unrecorded. James Mallinson and Mark Singleton's Roots of Yoga places the compilation in the fifteenth century on the strength of the earliest surviving manuscript, copied around 1496, but whether the text was assembled early in that century or close to the manuscript's own date is unresolved, since it draws together older hatha material from Matsyendranath's and Gorakhnath's lineages that could have been gathered at any point across the period.

Source Roots of Yoga, James Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.) tier 1

Hathor, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lineage

Currently States Regarded, depending on period and cult center, as daughter of Ra, as wife of Horus at Edfu and Dendera, or, within the Osiris myth cycle, as effectively merged with Isis.

Egyptian tradition holds several genuinely different accounts of Hathor's place in the divine family rather than one consistent genealogy: daughter of Ra in solar theology, wife of Horus at Edfu and Dendera, and elsewhere folded into Isis. The local cults never reconciled these into a single line.

Source The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Donald B. Redford (ed.) tier 1

Hawaii, States & Territories

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Most often connected to Hawaiki, a homeland name shared across Polynesian oral tradition, and to the legendary navigator Hawaii Loa credited in some accounts with discovering the islands, though the exact derivation is not settled.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference), Encyclopaedia Britannica editors tier 2

Hawk, 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

Hawt (Hha) ሐ, 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

Haya, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States What modest dress requires in practice is answered differently by the legal schools and by regional custom, and the question of face covering in particular is contested among jurists.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam, second edition (Brill, 2005), records that what modest dress, haya, requires in practice is answered differently by the legal schools and by regional custom, and that the question of face covering in particular is contested among jurists examining the same Quranic verses and hadith. The schools differ on whether the face and hands are included in what is to be covered, and the jurists who exclude them and those who include them both argue from the identical texts; regional custom then varies the practice further, so the visible differences between Muslim societies' dress are not evidence that one of them has abandoned the underlying value of haya.

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