Disputed Statements

Bidah: Innovation in Religion Is to Be Rejected, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States How wide the category runs. Classical jurists distinguished innovations that are blameworthy from those that are neutral or commendable; the reformist currents refuse that division.

Bidah, innovation in religion introduced after the first generations without their warrant, is condemned in some sense across Islamic tradition, but classical jurists developed a distinction within the category, between innovations that are blameworthy and those that are neutral or even commendable, allowing later practices such as certain devotional customs to be accepted as legitimate development rather than corruption. Roel Meijer's edited volume on global Salafism records that reformist and Salafi currents reject that distinction, treating the category as running much wider and applying it to shrine visitation, saint veneration and much of the devotional calendar that classical jurists had accepted as permissible development. The dispute is over where the line between legitimate development and forbidden innovation falls, argued from the same body of hadith and early legal reasoning that both sides accept as authoritative, which is why it has not resolved: the disagreement is over interpretation of shared texts rather than over which texts are authoritative.

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

Bilge Khagan, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 683

Standard reference works give his birth as 683, a year reconstructed from the Orkhon inscriptions' own statements about his age at accession and death rather than read from an independent contemporary birth record. No Turkic or Chinese source of the period records his birth directly, so the figure rests on that later arithmetic and carries the usual margin of any age worked backward from a death date.

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

Bilge Khagan, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 734

Standard reference works agree he died in 734, reported by some accounts as death by poisoning; the exact circumstances are argued over even though the year itself is well corroborated across independent sources.

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

Bird, Dream Symbols

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States In the manual ascribed to Ibn Sirin birds betoken men of rank, one's works, or tidings

According To Islamic oneiromancy (attributed to Ibn Sirin)

The reading given here is drawn from Muntakhab al-Kalam fi Tafsir al-Ahlam, the dream-interpretation manual that circulates under the name of the early Islamic scholar Muhammad Ibn Sirin, who died in 728 CE. Comparing the manuscript history against Ibn Sirin's own lifetime, the received compilation is instead ascribed to al-Dari, working around the fifteenth century, more than seven hundred years after Ibn Sirin's death, which is why his authorship is treated as a traditional attribution carried by the text's popularity rather than a historical fact the manuscript record supports. The specific dream-symbol reading is recorded as this manual's content, not as Ibn Sirin's own words.

Source Muntakhab al-Kalam fi Tafsir al-Ahlam (attributed to Ibn Sirin), Attributed to Muhammad Ibn Sirin (d. 728 CE); the received compilation is later, ascribed to al-Dari (15th c.) tier 3

Bird, Dream Symbols

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States A bird in flight is commonly read as travel or prosperity

According To Islamic oneiromancy (attributed to Ibn Sirin)

The reading given here is drawn from Muntakhab al-Kalam fi Tafsir al-Ahlam, the dream-interpretation manual that circulates under the name of the early Islamic scholar Muhammad Ibn Sirin, who died in 728 CE. Comparing the manuscript history against Ibn Sirin's own lifetime, the received compilation is instead ascribed to al-Dari, working around the fifteenth century, more than seven hundred years after Ibn Sirin's death, which is why his authorship is treated as a traditional attribution carried by the text's popularity rather than a historical fact the manuscript record supports. The specific dream-symbol reading is recorded as this manual's content, not as Ibn Sirin's own words.

Source Muntakhab al-Kalam fi Tafsir al-Ahlam (attributed to Ibn Sirin), Attributed to Muhammad Ibn Sirin (d. 728 CE); the received compilation is later, ascribed to al-Dari (15th c.) tier 3

Black Elk, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States Not settled to an exact site. Standard references agree on the general region, along the Little Powder River, but disagree on which side of the river, in present day Wyoming or Montana.

Standard references, including Raymond DeMallie's scholarly edition of Black Elk's testimony and Encyclopaedia Britannica's Verified Biographies (2026), agree Black Elk was born in December 1863 along the Little Powder River during an Oglala Lakota winter camp, but disagree on which side of the river, and so which present-day state, the camp site falls in. Both DeMallie and Britannica use the hedged phrase at a site thought to be in present-day Wyoming, while other accounts place the same river camp in Montana. Because the river and the year are independently agreed and only the exact site and state are contested, this is a genuine, narrow uncertainty in an otherwise well-documented birth rather than an unrecorded gap.

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

Black Elk, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1863

His birth is placed around December 1863 along the Little Powder River; no formal birth record exists from that time and place, so the year rests on his own later recollection and on the accounts of interviewers who recorded his life story decades afterward.

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

Black July (1983), Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 371.000000

The Sri Lankan government's own official figure for the week of rioting; Tambiah's 1986 account records this alongside the unofficial estimates below as the conservative floor most contemporary reporting also used, and notes it likely undercounts victims outside Colombo whose deaths were never separately tallied.

Source Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy, Stanley J. Tambiah tier 1

Black July (1983), Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 2000.000000

Tambiah's own 1986 account records Tamil community estimates running as high as two thousand deaths across the week, a figure he treats as the credible unofficial ceiling; still higher unverified figures circulate outside the scholarly literature and are not adopted here.

Source Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy, Stanley J. Tambiah tier 1

Black Sea, Bodies of Water

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Region

Currently States Between Anatolia, the Caucasus, the steppe and the Balkans. Whether its refill from the Mediterranean around 5600 BCE was catastrophic and fed the Mesopotamian and biblical flood stories, as Ryan and Pitman proposed in 1997, is disputed; the refill itself is not

Ryan and Pitman's catastrophic-flood hypothesis and the later coring work arguing for a gradual rise are both in the literature; the link to the flood narratives is the weaker part of the claim.

Source The Black Sea: A History, Charles King tier 1

Black Stone of the Kaaba, Artifacts & Relics

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Physical Composition

Currently States Debated: meteorite, agate or basalt have all been proposed

Robert S. Dietz and John McHone published Kaaba stone: Not a meteorite, probably an agate in Meteoritics in 1974, examining published descriptions and photographs of the Black Stone's visible fragments, since Saudi religious authorities do not permit physical sampling of the stone itself. Their method was comparative petrological analysis working from external description rather than direct laboratory testing, from which they argued the stone is more consistent with agate than with a meteorite; because no physical sample has ever been permitted for direct analysis, no scientific consensus has been reached to confirm or overturn their conclusion.

Source Kaaba stone: Not a meteorite, probably an agate, Robert S. Dietz and John McHone tier 1

Black Stone of the Kaaba, Artifacts & Relics

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Material

Currently States Robert S. Dietz and John McHone's 1974 paper Kaaba stone: Not a meteorite, probably an agate (Meteoritics, journal of the Meteoritical Society) examined published descriptions of the Black Stone and argued against the popular meteorite identification on its colour, layering and the absence of documented meteoritic material with its described properties, proposing agate instead; basalt has also been proposed by other writers, and because the stone has never been subjected to direct modern mineralogical testing, its material remains debated among the three candidates.

Source Kaaba stone: Not a meteorite, probably an agate, Robert S. Dietz and John McHone tier 1

Blasphemy, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

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

What counts as blasphemy, and whether the law should recognise it at all, is contested across the traditions and states that legislate it. Jewish law narrowed the Hebrew Bible's capital penalty almost out of existence by confining it to pronouncing the divine name itself; England did not abolish its common-law offence until 2008 and Ireland only removed its constitutional provision by referendum in 2018, so blasphemy law is recent European history and not only a foreign phenomenon. Pakistan's 1980s penal code provisions, by contrast, carry a death sentence for insulting the Prophet after a Federal Shariat Court ruling struck out life imprisonment as an alternative, and are documented as disproportionately used against religious minorities. At the international level a further, live dispute concerns whether defamation of religion should count as a human rights violation, an idea free-expression organisations and several religious minorities themselves oppose as protecting doctrines rather than people. The Encyclopedia of Religion (Eliade, ed.; Jones, ed., 2nd ed., 2005) surveys blasphemy across exactly this range of legal traditions rather than treating it as belonging to any one of them.

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

Blue, Colors

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1666

According To Newtonian optics: the seven-colour spectrum

Isaac Newton's own account in Opticks (London, 1704) describes how he arrived at seven spectral colours: his earliest prism observations distinguished five bands, and he settled on seven, adding orange and indigo, by explicit analogy with the seven intervals of the musical octave, a numerological choice rather than a further optical finding. Reading Newton's own text against the continuous gradient a prism actually produces shows the seven-fold division is an interpretive choice about where to draw lines in that continuum, not a count nature supplies; observers from Newton's own time onward have disputed whether indigo is visually distinct from blue and violet at all. Any scheme in this atlas that treats seven colours as given inherits Newton's seventeenth-century analogy to the octave rather than an independent observation.

Source Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, Isaac Newton tier 1

Blue, Colors

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1704

According To Newtonian optics: the seven-colour spectrum

Isaac Newton's own account in Opticks (London, 1704) describes how he arrived at seven spectral colours: his earliest prism observations distinguished five bands, and he settled on seven, adding orange and indigo, by explicit analogy with the seven intervals of the musical octave, a numerological choice rather than a further optical finding. Reading Newton's own text against the continuous gradient a prism actually produces shows the seven-fold division is an interpretive choice about where to draw lines in that continuum, not a count nature supplies; observers from Newton's own time onward have disputed whether indigo is visually distinct from blue and violet at all. Any scheme in this atlas that treats seven colours as given inherits Newton's seventeenth-century analogy to the octave rather than an independent observation.

Source Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, Isaac Newton tier 1

Boann, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States James MacKillop's A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (Oxford University Press, 1998) reads Boann's name as generally understood to mean she of the white cow, built on the Old Irish word bo for cow, tying the river goddess to cattle as well as to the water of the River Boyne, which her own myth holds she created by approaching the forbidden Well of Segais out of pride that its waters would not dare harm her.

According To Celtic Paganism

Source A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, James MacKillop tier 2

Bodhidharma, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Legendary: known from narrative tradition, not the historical record

Chan Buddhist tradition names Bodhidharma as the founder who brought the teaching from India to China. John McRae's Seeing Through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism (2003) documents that the traditional biography, including the nine years facing a wall at Shaolin and the transmission to Huike, was assembled in stages across several centuries of later Chan hagiographical writing rather than recorded at the time. McRae's method is historical and text-critical, tracing how successive Chan lineage histories added, revised and dramatized episodes to serve the lineage claims of later Chan schools, a pattern his book treats as a defining feature of how Chan constructs its own history. Working from that layered textual record rather than from any contemporary fifth or sixth century source, McRae and other historians of Chan cannot establish whether a single historical founder lies behind the composite figure, which is why the question remains genuinely open in the field rather than settled either way.

Source Seeing Through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism, John R. McRae tier 1

Bodhidharma, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Worship and Practice

Currently States Bodhidharma is venerated at the Shaolin Monastery on Mount Song, where later tradition credits him with founding both the monastery's Chan meditation lineage and its distinctive martial arts training regimen. The tradition crediting him with founding Shaolin martial arts has no support in the earliest surviving biographical sources, which describe only his meditation teaching, and most historians of Chinese Buddhism regard the martial arts founding legend as a much later accretion, likely dating from the Ming dynasty or after, attached to his name to lend prestige and antiquity to Shaolin's fighting tradition; the meditation lineage claim rests on firmer, though still legendary, early textual ground than the martial arts claim does.

Source Seeing Through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism, John R. McRae tier 1

Bodhisattva Vow, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States -100

The Bodhisattva Vow is central to Mahayana Buddhism, its own text says, and Mahayana's own emergence is genuinely disputed among Buddhist studies scholars: commonly placed around the first century BCE on the evidence of the earliest Gandhari manuscripts, but many specialists read the shift as a gradual process within existing communities rather than a datable break, and both the exact date and the place of origin remain argued.

Source The Foundations of Buddhism, Rupert Gethin tier 1

Bogomilism, Religions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship, following Franjo Racki, read the medieval Bosnian Church as Bulgarian Bogomilism transplanted into Bosnia, and treated Bosnia's later mass conversion to Islam under Ottoman rule as that heresy's final refuge from Catholic pressure. John Fine's 1975 study of the Bosnian Church's own surviving records found a native monastic and ascetic body with no clear dualist theology, not demonstrably descended from the Bulgarian Bogomils at all, and later scholarship examining the Islamization question directly has found no reliable evidence tying Bosnia's Muslim majority to a Bogomil inheritance. The Bogomil to Bosnian Church to Islam chain is now widely doubted among specialists, though, as recent surveys of the debate note, the older identification has never fully disappeared from popular and some scholarly writing.

Traditional camp (Racki and those who followed him): the Bosnian Church is Bulgarian Bogomilism transplanted, and its adherents became Bosnia's Muslims. Fine's camp, now the more widely held reading: a native Bosnian monastic body, not demonstrably dualist or Bogomil in descent, and Bosnia's Islamization owes little or nothing to it.

Source The Bosnian Church: A New Interpretation (Fine, East European Monographs, 1975), John V. A. Fine Jr. tier 1