Open Questions

Open The Fatwa Against Salman Rushdie

Why It Is Open The Iranian government stated in September 1998 that it had no intention of threatening the author's life and would not encourage anyone to do so. It did not describe that as a revocation. Iranian clerical bodies and the foundation that offered a reward have held that a ruling of this kind cannot be withdrawn after the death of the jurist who issued it, and the reward has been publicly reaffirmed since. The two positions are held by different institutions in the same state and neither has been withdrawn.

What Would Settle It A published juristic analysis, from within the school concerned, of whether a ruling of this kind survives its issuer and what act would be required to end it. A clear statement from the authority claiming successor jurisdiction would settle the practical half.

Expertise Needed Islamic jurisprudence, Twelver Shia; contemporary Iranian legal and political history

Question posed in From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy, Kenan Malik.

Open The Herem on Baruch Spinoza

Why It Is Open The writ was entered in the minute book of the Talmud Torah congregation of Amsterdam and no act rescinding it has been catalogued here. The ban was of a kind that could be lifted on submission, and Spinoza never submitted. Proposals to lift it have been raised publicly in modern times, and the atlas has not verified a decision in either direction, nor identified who would have the standing to make one now.

What Would Settle It The minute books of the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish congregation for any later entry on the case, or a statement from the congregation or its rabbinate. A finding that no such act exists is equally useful and would close the question.

Expertise Needed Early modern Jewish history; Dutch archival research; halakhic scholarship on the law of the ban

Question posed in Spinoza: A Life, Steven Nadler.

Open The Eight Garudhammas

Why It Is Open Several of the eight presuppose an order of nuns that already exists and has its own procedure, which they cannot have had at the moment of foundation. The sixth requires ordination from both communities, which is impossible for the first generation and is contradicted within the same collections. Six of the eight appear elsewhere in the discipline as ordinary rules, each with its own account of the incident that occasioned it. The Pali, Chinese and Tibetan recensions differ in wording and in order. Tradition places the rules at the founding of the bhikkhuni order during the Buddha's own ministry, but the Buddha's own dates are themselves unsettled and no source assigns the rules a specific year within it.

What Would Settle It Comparative work across all surviving recensions of the foundation account, including those preserved only in Chinese and Tibetan translation, with attention to which items are stable across lineages that separated early. Bhikkhu Analayo and Ute Husken have carried this a long way and the field has not converged. Independently, a firmer scholarly resolution of the Buddha's own chronology, or textual evidence dating the rules apart from the ordination narrative that carries them, would settle the date even where the recension question remains open.

Expertise Needed Buddhist studies; Pali, Chinese and Tibetan vinaya philology

Question posed in The Foundation History of the Nuns' Order, Bhikkhu Analayo.

Open Kabbalah

Why It Is Open Posed by glyph-ceremonial-w5, 2026-07-25. At least three mutually inconsistent sigil sets exist for these 72 angels: the Wellcome Ms.4662 seals, Eliphas Levi's 36 double talismans, and the Golden Dawn's own seals as compiled by Lazare Lenain. None of the source images were fetchable as precise stroke data with the tools available this run (a 403 on the Wellcome material via academia.edu). Choosing one tradition and drawing it from memory would be fabrication presented as attested fact.

What Would Settle It Owner guidance on which tradition to follow, plus visual access good enough to trace that tradition's seals faithfully.

Expertise Needed Practical Kabbalah

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Order of Nine Angles

Why It Is Open The identification most often made in print, with David Myatt, is denied by Myatt himself, and no independent documentary or forensic evidence establishes who wrote under the name. The order's early history is documented mainly through its own publications.

What Would Settle It A stylometric comparison of the earliest Anton Long texts against Myatt's other pseudonymous and signed writing, or documentary evidence such as publisher correspondence or internal order papers naming the author, would settle it.

Expertise Needed Textual and stylometric analysis; history of new religious movements

Question posed in Satanism: A Social History, Massimo Introvigne.

Open Beowulf

Why It Is Open The one manuscript is dated on palaeographic grounds to about 975 to 1025, and that date is not seriously contested. The date of composition is, and estimates have ranged across three centuries. Arguments from metre, from linguistic archaism, from the historical allusions and from the poem's Christian frame have each been made to carry the case and each has been answered. The atlas records the manuscript date as a date and the composition date as disputed, rather than choosing.

What Would Settle It A dating argument that does not depend on assumptions about the transmission it is trying to establish. Linguistic and metrical tests have been the most productive line, and a test whose result is independent of whether the poem was copied and modernised on its way to the surviving manuscript would settle far more than another reading of the historical allusions.

Expertise Needed Old English philology, historical linguistics and metrics, palaeography

Question posed in Klaeber's Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, fourth edition, R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (eds.).

Open San Religion

Why It Is Open There is no answer on record and nobody holds a position, because the evidence to hold one was never gathered. Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd recorded /Xam between 1870 and 1884 and their work ended when their narrators went home and no further speakers could be found. The neighbouring communities of the southern and eastern Cape were recorded by no one. Their languages have no speakers and their descendants were absorbed into other communities. The San religion described in the scholarly literature is therefore the religion of the /Xam and of a small number of twentieth-century northern groups, generalised, and the generalisation covers an absence rather than a consensus.

What Would Settle It Recovery of further colonial-era linguistic or missionary material comparable to the Bleek and Lloyd notebooks: unpublished mission-station vocabularies, magistrates' and travellers' notebooks, or word lists held in South African, Dutch, German and British archives that have not been catalogued as linguistic material and so have not been looked for. A systematic archival survey aimed at this specific question has not been carried out. Failing that, the question stays open permanently, which is itself worth recording.

Expertise Needed Historical linguistics of the Khoisan languages; archival research in southern African, Dutch, German and British colonial and mission collections; southern African social history.

Question posed in Specimens of Bushman Folklore, W. H. I. Bleek and L. C. Lloyd.

Open Serer Religion

Why It Is Open This is a gap rather than an argument. The monument fields at Sine-Ngayene, Wanar, Wassu and Kerbatch, inscribed by UNESCO in 2006, were built over a long span and have been partially excavated, but no excavator has been able to attach them to a named present-day people, and no scholar has published a positive attribution to defend. Serer oral tradition, recorded most fully by Henry Gravrand, connects the monuments to Serer forebears and reads the burials as those of ancestors who are now among the pangool. Historians have neither confirmed that reading nor produced a rival one; they have set it aside as unproven and moved on, which leaves the question with no position holding the field.

What Would Settle It A dated burial and ceramic sequence from a securely stratified excavation across several of the monument fields, combined with ancient DNA from the tumuli burials and comparison against present-day Serer, Wolof and Mandinka populations. Radiocarbon coverage of the circles is thin and unevenly published, and no aDNA programme has been directed at the Senegambian monuments. Community consultation with Serer authorities would need to precede any sampling.

Expertise Needed West African archaeology; archaeogenetics; Senegambian oral history and its evaluation as a historical source.

Question posed in Stone Circles of Senegambia, UNESCO World Heritage List, UNESCO World Heritage Committee.

Open The Quran

Why It Is Open Fourteen of the twenty-eight Arabic letters, exactly half the alphabet, appear disjoined at the opening of a number of suras. The classical commentary tradition records a wide range of proposals for what they do and returns no agreed answer, and one position long held within that tradition is that the meaning was not disclosed. Modern scholarship has added further proposals without producing a consensus either. This is not a case of two camps disagreeing; it is a case in which no reading has been established.

What Would Settle It Nothing in the manuscript record settles the meaning, and it may not be settleable. What would narrow it is evidence that bears on the openings as written objects rather than as a puzzle: systematic collation of the earliest codices for whether and how the letters are set off, and a distributional study relating the sets of letters to the suras that carry them.

Expertise Needed Quranic studies, Arabic philology and early Islamic manuscript palaeography

Question posed in The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief).

Open Manasara

Why It Is Open Scholarly estimates for the date spread across the middle centuries of the first millennium CE, and the region of composition is not established either. The text is the most comprehensive surviving shilpa shastra treatise, so the answer would anchor the dating of the tradition around it, and at present the atlas can only record the spread.

What Would Settle It A dated inscription or a dated building whose plan, proportions or terminology can be matched to the Manasara's prescriptions specifically rather than to the shared vocabulary of the shilpa shastras. A critical edition establishing the relationship between the recensions would narrow the region.

Expertise Needed Indology, Sanskrit textual criticism, temple archaeology and epigraphy

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Chitrasutra of the Vishnudharmottara Purana

Why It Is Open The date is commonly given as the fifth to seventh centuries and is not the difficulty. The region is: the Chitrasutra is the earliest surviving Indian treatise on painting, so where it was written bears directly on which surviving wall paintings its rules were written for or against, and the atlas records the region as not established rather than assigning one.

What Would Settle It A regional attribution argued from the text itself, from its language, its named places, its ritual assumptions or its relationship to a datable local recension, rather than inferred backward from whichever painting tradition a reader wishes to connect it to.

Expertise Needed Indology, Sanskrit textual criticism, history of Indian art

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Reflexology

Why It Is Open The Sixth Dynasty relief at Saqqara is very widely cited by reflexology sources as evidence of ancient Egyptian practice. Egyptological readings of the same scene as ordinary manicure, pedicure or medical care exist. Engy El-Kilany has published a survey of foot care scenes in Egyptian tombs which secondary reports quote as calling the nature of the therapy depicted still debated, but that paper could not be obtained, and no Egyptological analysis settling the question either way has been found.

What Would Settle It A published Egyptological analysis of the Ankhmahor relief addressing the reflexology claim directly, either way.

Expertise Needed Egyptology and the history of medicine.

Question posed in Reflexology: Panacea or Placebo?, Hylton B. Menz, Paragraph on the tomb of Ankhmahor.

Open Naturopathy

Why It Is Open Regulation differs sharply by state, province and country, and the licensing picture changes. Summary figures circulate but could not be verified against primary regulatory sources at the time of writing.

What Would Settle It A jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction check against the regulators themselves, with the date of the check recorded, since the answer decays.

Expertise Needed Health policy and comparative regulatory law.

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Iridology

Why It Is Open The owl story is repeated in nearly every account of iridology's origin and is presented as its founding moment, but the accounts trace to later iridological literature rather than to anything Peczely wrote. It has the shape of a foundation legend.

What Would Settle It A statement by Peczely himself, or a contemporary account, describing the observation. Absent that, the earliest attestation of the story would at least date the legend.

Expertise Needed History of medicine, and Hungarian-language archival sources.

Question posed in Ignaz von Peczely, Inventor of Iridology, Edzard Ernst, Chapter 19, abstract.

Open Jainism

Why It Is Open The facet detector reports Jainism as carrying no Practice of kind Therapeutic while its Dharmic peers do. Jain fasting is ascetic rather than curative, and bhaishajya dana, the giving of medicine, is one of the four danas and so is charitable. Triage on 2026-07-29 could not name a Jain practice whose purpose is healing.

What Would Settle It A survey of the Shvetambara and Digambara prescriptive literature and of modern Jain institutional practice for a named healing observance, together with a ruling on whether Jain animal hospitals and the pinjrapole count as a therapeutic practice or as charity.

Expertise Needed Jain studies, South Asian religious history

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Sikhism

Why It Is Open The facet detector reports Sikhism as carrying no Practice of kind Therapeutic. Sikh medical service, from Bhai Kanhaiya tending the wounded of both sides to gurdwara dispensaries and hospitals, is real and well attested, but it is the ethic of seva applied to medicine rather than a separate named practice. Triage on 2026-07-29 could not decide whether the atlas should record it twice.

What Would Settle It A ruling on the atlas facet boundary between Charitable and Therapeutic, plus evidence from the Rehat Maryada and Sikh institutional history for a named healing observance.

Expertise Needed Sikh studies, history of South Asian medicine

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Norse Paganism

Why It Is Open The facet detector reports Norse Paganism as carrying no MythicalCreature of kind Hybrids while all three Polytheistic peers do. The Norse bestiary the atlas holds is built from outsized single species beasts, serpents, sea monsters and spirits. Whether Sleipnir, Hraesvelgr, the swan maidens and the merfolk are composite creatures or shapeshifters and beasts in another guise is a question about the facet definition as much as about the sources, and triage on 2026-07-29 could not settle it.

What Would Settle It A definition of the Hybrids facet precise enough to sort cases, applied to a full inventory of creatures in the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda and the fornaldarsogur.

Expertise Needed Old Norse philology, comparative mythology

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Organisation of Islamic Cooperation

Why It Is Open The OIC's own website refused every direct connection attempt on every domain tried, and no news coverage located quoted a specific total budget figure with a URL that could be confirmed by reading it directly.

What Would Settle It The full text of an OIC Council of Foreign Ministers Administrative and Financial Affairs resolution, or a communique stating the approved General Secretariat budget total.

Open International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance

Why It Is Open IHRA's own website refused every direct connection attempt, including its Annual Report pages, and a German Federal Foreign Office page describing one member state's contribution could not be reached to confirm either.

What Would Settle It Successfully reading IHRA's own Annual Report PDF, or a Permanent Office financial statement aggregating all member dues.

Open Taliban

Why It Is Open World Bank Afghanistan Economic Monitor reports are understood to publish domestic revenue collection figures for the Interim Taliban Administration, but every PDF fetched in research on this returned only encoded binary content, not readable text, and a VOA News article summarizing a report 403 blocked on fetch (queued, BlockedFetchId 26); no figure is recorded here on a search-summary alone.

What Would Settle It A text-extractable copy of a World Bank Afghanistan Economic Monitor or Development Update, or a corroborating IMF Article IV or UN Sanctions Monitoring Team report, actually read rather than summarized.

Expertise Needed Development economics, public finance

Question posed in History of the Academy, Academie des sciences, Academie des sciences.