Open Questions

Open Ekpe

Why It Is Open Ekpe was already a mature, fully graded institution by the time the earliest outside observers described it, so their accounts date contact rather than founding, and Cross River oral tradition does not preserve a single founder or a securely countable founding year.

What Would Settle It Comparative Ejagham and Efik oral-tradition fieldwork or an archaeological or documentary find independently datable to a period before the earliest colonial-era accounts, tying an early stage of Ekpe's grade structure to a place and an approximate century.

Expertise Needed West African historical anthropology and oral tradition studies

Question posed in Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, Ivor L. Miller.

Open The Macina Jihad and the Diina of Maasina (1818 to 1862)

Why It Is Open Surviving sources describe troop strengths for individual engagements such as the Battle of Noukouma rather than casualties, and Sanankoua's specialist study drawing on family papers and regional archives does not attempt a running total across the jihad's founding, the Diina's four decades as a state, or its 1862 fall.

What Would Settle It A systematic reconstruction from Arabic-language chronicles, oral tradition and colonial-era administrative records of the Inner Niger Delta region, of the kind that could establish at least a documented floor for the jihad's opening campaigns and the Diina's 1862 fall.

Expertise Needed West African history; Arabic and oral-tradition source criticism

Question posed in Un Empire peul au XIXe siecle: la Diina du Maasina, Bintou Sanankoua.

Open Sokoto Jihad

Why It Is Open Only one battle of the jihad, the December 1804 defeat at Tsuntua, carries a specifically sourced casualty figure, and no historian has reconciled or extended that single data point into a war-wide total across the four years of campaigning that followed against Kebbi, Katsina, Daura, Kano and Gobir.

What Would Settle It A study working systematically from surviving Arabic-language chronicles of the jihad, including Muhammad Bello's own history of his father's campaigns, cross-checked against Hausa oral and written tradition, to build a reconciled casualty estimate across the war's major engagements and its civilian displacement.

Expertise Needed West African Islamic history; Hausa and Fulani chronicle sources

Question posed in The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman dan Fodio, Mervyn Hiskett.

Open West African

Why It Is Open The grouping gathers deities from at least four distinct traditions: Ala, Amadioha and Chukwu are Igbo, Nyame, Asaase Yaa and Ananse are Akan, Amma and Nommo are Dogon, Roog is Serer, and Mami Wata is pan-regional rather than belonging to any of them. A pantheon in this atlas is tied to a single tradition, so naming one tradition for this grouping would assert that all of these deities belong to it, which is false. Vodun (West African) is already catalogued as a tradition in its own right, and the Fon pantheon points at it, so the umbrella is not simply a missing tradition.

What Would Settle It A scholarly judgment on whether a region can stand as a pantheon at all, or whether a pantheon must belong to a single tradition. If it must, the grouping splits into Igbo, Akan, Dogon and Serer pantheons and each deity is reassigned to the tradition that holds it. If it need not, the comparative grounds for treating West Africa as one pantheon need stating, and each deity still needs its own tradition recorded alongside the regional grouping.

Expertise Needed West African religious studies; Igbo, Akan, Dogon and Serer ethnography

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

Open Sultan Sahak

Why It Is Open Scholarship provisionally places the opening of Sultan Sahak's teaching in the fifteenth century CE, but surviving accounts of his life are a composite of historical memory and devotional narrative, and no reading offers a death date.

What Would Settle It A documentary source external to the devotional Kalam-e Saranjam tradition naming a death date, or independent corroboration for one of the competing scholarly placements of his era.

Expertise Needed Yarsani and Kurdish religious history, Iranian studies

Question posed in The Religious Textual Heritage of the Yarsan (Ahl-e Haqq), Philip G. Kreyenbroek.

Open The Book of Abramelin

Why It Is Open The Book of Abramelin is narrated by a Jewish traveller of Worms who writes for his son. The narrative frame is circumstantial enough to look autobiographical and conventional enough to be a device. Proposals identifying him with a known figure of the period have been made and none has carried the field, and the surviving German and Hebrew witnesses do not agree closely enough to settle whether the persona belongs to the earliest layer of the text.

What Would Settle It A stemmatic study establishing the relationship of the German and Hebrew witnesses and which of them carries the frame narrative first, or an archival identification of a Jewish traveller of Worms matching the biography the text gives.

Expertise Needed Yiddish and Hebrew manuscript studies, with the social history of Ashkenazi Jewry in the late medieval Rhineland.

Question posed in Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Owen Davies.

Open Ogboni

Why It Is Open Ogboni is described in the scholarship as having developed alongside Oyo's own political institutions rather than being founded by a named person at a datable moment, and no Yoruba historical or oral source names a founder.

What Would Settle It Oyo court-history research or archaeology tying Ogboni's earth-veneration role and its check on royal power to an identifiable stage of Oyo's own political consolidation.

Expertise Needed Yoruba political history and religious anthropology

Question posed in The Yoruba Ogboni Cult in Oyo, Peter Morton-Williams.

Open Nehanda Nyakasikana

Why It Is Open Nehanda Nyakasikana enters the colonial and oral record as a leader of the First Chimurenga beginning in 1896 and is documented through her capture, trial and execution in 1898; no source records when she was born.

What Would Settle It A colonial administrative record or documented oral genealogy from Mashonaland naming the medium's birth year prior to her possession by the Nehanda spirit.

Expertise Needed Zimbabwean colonial history, Shona religious history

Question posed in The God of the Matopo Hills: An Essay on the Mwari Cult in Rhodesia, M. L. Daneel.

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 Alevism

Why It Is Open No government census in Turkey records sect within Islam, so every published Alevi population figure is a scholarly or advocacy estimate; the widely repeated ten to twenty million range is quoted across sources without a shared reference year.

What Would Settle It A dedicated demographic survey fielded in Turkey that asked about Alevi identity specifically, dated and methodologically documented, would let a real time-stamped estimate replace the undated range in circulation today.

Question posed in The Alevis in Turkey: The Emergence of a Secular Islamic Tradition, David Shankland.

Open BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha

Why It Is Open BAPS separated from the Vadtal diocese of the Swaminarayan Sampradaya in 1905 to 1907, a parent body distinct from BAPS itself, but no entity for that diocese or for the wider Swaminarayan Sampradaya as a parent organization currently exists in the atlas, so BAPS's branch-of relation has no live target to point at.

What Would Settle It Minting a denomination entity for the Swaminarayan Sampradaya, or specifically its Vadtal diocese, with its own sourced facts, would let BAPS's branch-of relation and any other Swaminarayan-descended body's equivalent be written honestly.

Question posed in History and Milestones (BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha, baps.org), BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha.

Open Celestial Church of Christ

Why It Is Open The church has no central membership roll and has been repeatedly divided by succession disputes since the 1980s, so published estimates of several million adherents across more than five thousand branches are given as a general "by the early 2000s" figure rather than tied to one dated count.

What Would Settle It A dated count from the church's own worldwide administration, or a fielded survey in Nigeria and Benin asking about Celestial Church of Christ membership specifically, would anchor the estimate to an actual year.

Question posed in Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand Contemporary Religious Movements, David B. Barrett.

Open Alexandrian Wicca

Why It Is Open Religious landscape surveys count Wiccans and Pagans as one combined category, and small, private, initiatory covens are not registered anywhere that would let a researcher isolate the Alexandrian line from other Wiccan traditions.

What Would Settle It A study that surveyed self-identified Wiccans on which initiatory lineage, if any, they belong to, of the kind Pagan studies scholars have occasionally run for specific regions, would let a tradition-specific estimate be drawn where only a combined one exists today.

Question posed in The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Ronald Hutton.

Open Anabaptism

Why It Is Open Anabaptism is a theological family rather than a single organized denomination; its living members already appear in the membership records of its daughter bodies, so no source totals them as one population without risking double counting.

What Would Settle It A scholarly survey that explicitly sums the reported membership of every living Anabaptist-descended body on a stated date, correcting for any overlap between them, would give the family a real combined figure comparable to a single denomination's.

Question posed in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.).

Open Basilideans

Why It Is Open No ancient source that describes Basilidean teaching, all of them hostile heresiological writers rather than the school's own records, gives any figure or even a qualitative sense of how many people followed it.

What Would Settle It New papyrological or epigraphic evidence from Roman Egypt naming Basilidean adherents or congregations, of the kind that has occasionally surfaced for other early Christian and Gnostic groups, would be the only realistic path to an actual estimate.

Question posed in What Is Gnosticism?, Karen L. King.

Open Breslov Hasidism

Why It Is Open Breslov has no central membership roll, so the scholarly estimate of its committed core is a researcher's reading of community size rather than a dated census, and the sources reporting it do not state the year the underlying fieldwork or count was made.

What Would Settle It A published methodology note from the estimate's original researcher, or a fresh dated count of registered Breslov institutions and their affiliated households, would anchor the figure to an actual year.

Question posed in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, Gershon David Hundert (ed.).

Open Church of Satan

Why It Is Open The organization has treated withholding a precise membership figure as deliberate policy since its founding, and no outside demographic survey counts organized Satanists as a category distinct from the wider religiously unaffiliated population.

What Would Settle It A survey instrument that asked specifically about affiliation with the Church of Satan, fielded independently of the organization itself, would be the only way to move past both the organization's own silence and the guesswork that fills it.

Question posed in Church of Satan (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors.

Open Dianic Wicca

Why It Is Open Religious landscape surveys count Wiccans and Pagans as one combined category, and small, often women-only covens outside any central registry leave no record a researcher could use to isolate the Dianic line from other Wiccan traditions.

What Would Settle It A study that surveyed self-identified Wiccans on which lineage or current, if any, they follow, of the kind Pagan studies scholars have occasionally run for specific regions, would let a tradition-specific estimate replace the combined figure in circulation today.

Question posed in Dianic Wicca (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors.

Open Dragon Gate

Why It Is Open China's official Daoist registration counts ordained monastics through the China Daoist Association and individual monasteries, not by which of Quanzhen's lineages a monastic was ordained into, so Dragon Gate clergy are never broken out from the wider Quanzhen or Zhengyi totals.

What Would Settle It A published survey of ordination records naming lineage affiliation across China's registered Daoist monasteries, of the kind scholars of contemporary Daoism have occasionally attempted for individual monasteries, would let a lineage-specific figure be drawn where only a combined one exists today.

Question posed in Daoism Handbook, Livia Kohn (ed.).