Open Questions

Open The Uyghur Internment in Xinjiang

Why It Is Open The OHCHR's 2022 assessment documents serious human rights violations across the Xinjiang internment system, but China has not granted independent international access to detention facility records or mortality data, and no independent body has published a verified death toll.

What Would Settle It Independent international access to detention facility records and mortality data, which has not been granted to date.

Expertise Needed Human rights documentation

Question posed in OHCHR Assessment of Human Rights Concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China, United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Open The 1391 Massacres of Spain's Jewish Communities

Why It Is Open Modern scholarship documents that survivors of the 1391 massacres either converted, often under direct threat, or fled to Islamic-ruled territory, Navarre, Portugal or France, but no source checked gives a reliable numeric total for those who fled distinct from those who converted or were killed. The one round figure found in circulation (a "100,000 fled" alongside equally round conversion and death figures) is inconsistent with the death-toll range already carefully sourced here and was judged unreliable rather than written.

What Would Settle It A demographic study of Iberian Jewish community registers or tax rolls before and after 1391, cross-referenced against the destinations named in contemporary accounts (North African, Navarrese and Portuguese Jewish community records), of the kind that has been done for the 1492 expulsion but not, so far as could be found, for 1391 specifically.

Expertise Needed Historical demography

Question posed in Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (2014), David Nirenberg.

Open The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain

Why It Is Open Contemporary chronicles (Bernaldez among them) and modern accounts alike describe severe hardship during the 1492 expulsion journey, disease, starvation, robbery, shipwreck and, in some accounts, refugees thrown overboard by ship captains, but no source checked, including Jonathan Ray's standard modern academic treatment "After Expulsion," gives a numeric mortality estimate for the journey distinct from the total number expelled, which is already recorded here as a displaced range.

What Would Settle It A dedicated demographic or archival study specifically isolating expulsion-journey mortality from the wider 1492 to 1497 diaspora experience, of the kind Kamen's 1988 Past and Present article did for the total population expelled but for which no equivalent study covering deaths in transit could be found.

Expertise Needed Historical demography

Question posed in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition, Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.).

Open The Kishinev Pogrom

Why It Is Open Secondary accounts of the April 1903 pogrom's property destruction disagree in a way that reads as citation drift rather than independent corroboration: the number "2,000" recurs but is applied inconsistently to "families" in some accounts and "people" in others, for what appears to be the same underlying claim, and neither version was traceable back to the established academic source already cited here, Judge's "Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom" (1992).

What Would Settle It A page-level check of Judge's 1992 monograph, or the contemporary Russian official commission of inquiry it draws on, for its own stated count of families or individuals left homeless, distinct from the homes-and-businesses-destroyed figures already recorded here.

Expertise Needed Historical demography

Question posed in Judge, Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom (1992), Edward H. Judge.

Open The Cultural Revolution

Why It Is Open The Cultural Revolution's suppression of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Confucianism and Christianity is well documented, but no historian has published a death toll isolating deaths caused specifically by anti-religious persecution from the campaign's much larger political death toll, itself estimated across a wide range by different historians.

What Would Settle It A study disaggregating Cultural Revolution-era deaths by the target's religious identity or role, comparable to the campaign-specific tallies that exist for other twentieth-century religious persecutions elsewhere in the atlas.

Expertise Needed Modern Chinese history

Question posed in Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule, Fenggang Yang.

Open Aqidah al-Tahawiyya

Why It Is Open Abu Ja'far al-Tahawi's own lifetime, 853 to 933, is well established, but no source pins the creed's actual composition to a specific year or even a decade within it.

What Would Settle It A securely dated manuscript, a contemporary reference to the work's composition, or a philological study anchoring its text to a particular stage of al-Tahawi's career.

Expertise Needed Islamic intellectual history

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

Open The Threefold Refuge (Tisarana)

Why It Is Open Tradition places its first use at the very start of the Buddha's teaching career, but the Buddha's own chronology is unsettled among historians, and no source assigns the formula a specific year.

What Would Settle It A firmer scholarly resolution of the Buddha's own chronology, or textual evidence dating the formula's earliest use independently of the traditional narrative that carries it.

Expertise Needed Buddhist studies

Question posed in The Foundations of Buddhism, Rupert Gethin.

Open The Mardin Fatwa of Ibn Taymiyya

Why It Is Open Ibn Taymiyya's own lifetime, 1263 to 1328, and Mongol rule over Mardin are both well documented, but no source pins the fatwa itself to a specific year within that span.

What Would Settle It A securely dated manuscript of the fatwa, or a documented occasion, such as a specific delegation from Mardin, that the text can be tied to.

Expertise Needed Islamic legal history

Question posed in Ibn Taymiyya (Makers of the Muslim World), Jon Hoover.