Disputed Statements

1860 Mount Lebanon and Damascus Massacres, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 12000.000000

The modern scholarly synthesis: Fawaz's archival study puts Mount Lebanon deaths, overwhelmingly Christian with Druze losses far fewer, at roughly seven thousand to eleven thousand; Rogan's more recent Damascus-focused archival reconstruction puts Damascus deaths at roughly five thousand, revising down older claims he does not credit. Combined, this reading gives a low estimate near twelve thousand.

Source An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860, Leila Tarazi Fawaz tier 1

1860 Mount Lebanon and Damascus Massacres, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 16000.000000

The upper end of the modern scholarly range, combining Fawaz's higher Mount Lebanon estimate with Rogan's Damascus figure; well below contemporary Western press and missionary claims of the time, some reaching twenty thousand to twenty five thousand for Damascus alone, which Rogan's archival work finds substantially inflated and neither historian relied on here credits.

Source An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860, Leila Tarazi Fawaz tier 1

19, Numbers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States Surah Al-Muddaththir names nineteen as the number of angels set over Hell, the one place the Quran states a specific number of this kind about itself. That plain textual fact is not in dispute. What is disputed is a modern claim, advanced from the 1970s by Rashad Khalifa, that nineteen also structures the Quran's letter and word counts as a deliberate mathematical signature. Most Sunni and Shia scholars and most academic scholars of the Quran reject or regard the claim as unproven and its author, who declared himself a prophet on the strength of it, as having left mainstream Islam; a minority movement holds it as central doctrine.

According To Islam (Quranic numerical structure, Surah Al-Muddaththir)

Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief) tier 1

1969 Ahmedabad Riots, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 660.000000

The Reddy Commission of Inquiry's official report recorded more than six hundred and sixty dead, the only figure produced by a body with legal power to take evidence; the commission's own report notes this as an undercount, since many bodies were never retrieved or the deaths never formally reported to police.

Source Report of the Justice Jaganmohan Reddy Commission of Inquiry into the 1969 Ahmedabad Disturbances, Justice P. Jaganmohan Reddy Commission of Inquiry tier 2

1969 Ahmedabad Riots, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 2000.000000

Kumar's study and other historians' work reads the real toll as likely reaching one to two thousand, with some unofficial contemporary reports claiming as high as two thousand; Kumar records the large majority of the dead, and of destroyed property, as Muslim, consistent with the Reddy Commission's own finding that the violence was directed disproportionately against the city's Muslim minority.

Source Communalism and Sexual Violence in India: The Politics of Gender, Ethnicity and Conflict, Megha Kumar tier 1

2002 Gujarat Violence, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 1044.000000

The Gujarat state government's own official figure, one thousand forty four dead, of whom seven hundred ninety were Muslim and two hundred fifty four Hindu, with two hundred twenty three more reported missing. Human rights investigators and later scholarship, Nussbaum among them, treat this official count as an undercount.

Source The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future, Martha C. Nussbaum tier 1

2002 Gujarat Violence, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 1926.000000

The independent Concerned Citizens Tribunal, convened by retired judges and civil society figures to investigate the violence outside government channels, estimated as many as one thousand nine hundred twenty six deaths, and some later accounts round this toward two thousand; the overwhelming majority of victims under any count were Muslim.

Source The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future, Martha C. Nussbaum tier 1

2002 Gujarat Violence, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Perpetrator Regime

Currently States Mobs organized by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, its youth wing the Bajrang Dal, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh carried out organized attacks including the Naroda Patiya massacre. Human Rights Watch documented Gujarat state officials directing or shielding the violence; a Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team investigated the state government's role, and its finding of no prosecutable evidence against then-Chief Minister Narendra Modi was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2022, a conclusion human rights groups continue to dispute.

Source Gujarat Riots: Summary of the Supreme Court Judgment Dismissing Zakia Jafri's Plea to Probe a Larger Conspiracy (LiveLaw) tier 2

A, 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

A closed community forbidding conversion and intermarriage, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within the tradition

According To Zoroastrianism

The bar on conversion and intermarriage is disputed across the diaspora rather than settled. Iranian and North American Zoroastrian bodies have accepted converts and the children of mixed marriages; the Parsi authorities in India have resisted both, and the question has been litigated in the Indian courts.

Source The Zoroastrian Diaspora: Religion and Migration, John R. Hinnells tier 1

Aaron, 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 source outside the Torah attests Aaron, and that the genealogy making him ancestor of the Aaronide priesthood, examined against the Torah's own priestly source material, is itself part of what is in question rather than independent confirmation of his existence.

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

Ab ࡁ, 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

Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1077

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

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

Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1166

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

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

Abhidhamma Pitaka, Scripture Portions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Textual Note

Currently States Widely regarded as the latest layer of the Pali Canon to reach its final form.

The Abhidhamma Pitaka is widely regarded among scholars of the Pali Canon as the latest of its three baskets to reach its final closed form. The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, edited by Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Princeton University Press, 2014), records this textual-historical judgment. The method is philological, tracking the Abhidhamma's vocabulary and technical terminology for signs of gradual development and comparing its systematic, list-based style against the narrative and dialogue style of the earlier Sutta Pitaka it analyzes, since technical vocabulary that expands and stabilizes gradually across a text's internal strata points to composition over an extended period. Tradition holds that the Buddha taught the Abhidhamma's content directly. Because the internal linguistic and stylistic evidence instead shows the gradual layering expected of composition over several centuries, textual scholarship reads the collection as reaching its final form well after the Buddha's death, in tension with the tradition it belongs to.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. tier 1

Abhidhamma Pitaka, Scripture Portions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Canonical Status

Currently States A systematic philosophical and psychological analysis of the teaching found in narrative form in the Sutta Pitaka; tradition holds it was taught by the Buddha, though most scholars see it as a later systematisation closed some centuries after his death.

The Abhidhamma Pitaka, the third basket of the Pali Canon, presents a systematic philosophical and psychological analysis of the teaching that the Sutta Pitaka gives in narrative and dialogue form. Theravada tradition holds it was taught by the Buddha himself. The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, edited by Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Princeton University Press, 2014), an authoritative reference on Buddhist doctrine and textual history, records the scholarly position on the Abhidhamma's formation. The method is comparative and historical, reading the Abhidhamma's systematic, technical vocabulary and its cross-referencing structure against the earlier narrative teachings in the Sutta Pitaka that it analyzes, since a text that systematizes and comments on another body of material is ordinarily later than that material. Because the Abhidhamma's method and content presuppose the Sutta teachings as already established, most scholars read it as a later systematization closed some centuries after the Buddha's death rather than as his own direct teaching.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. tier 1

Abhinavagupta, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 950

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Triadic Heart of Siva: Kaula Tantricism of Abhinavagupta in the Non-dual Shaivism of Kashmir, Paul E. Muller-Ortega tier 1

Abhinavagupta, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1016

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Triadic Heart of Siva: Kaula Tantricism of Abhinavagupta in the Non-dual Shaivism of Kashmir, Paul E. Muller-Ortega tier 1

Abhinivesha, Vices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Named within the Yoga Sutra, a text whose own compilation and dating remain unsettled among scholars: traditional accounts place Patanjali well before the Common Era, while modern philological scholarship has proposed dates ranging from roughly the second century BCE to as late as the fourth or fifth century CE, with the text possibly compiled from older material rather than composed at a single sitting.

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

Abraham, 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? (T&T Clark, 2007) examines the patriarchal narratives against the archaeological and extra-biblical textual record for the second millennium BCE Near East. Grabbe's method is source-critical, checking the biblical account against contemporary Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Levantine documentation, and finds no extra-biblical evidence for Abraham and no secure fit for the patriarchal narratives in any specific second-millennium setting. Judaism, Christianity and Islam nonetheless hold him to be a historical patriarch and the father of their faith, which is why Grabbe records the question as genuinely open between religious tradition and documentary history rather than settled either way.

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