The catalog is a survey of problems. This page is the audit of that survey — category by category, what 1,595 entries say about the moral, logical, and textual character of the Qurʾān and the six canonical Sunni hadith collections. Every number on this page is derived directly from the live catalog; nothing is rhetorical.
Every entry is rated Basic (apologists have a stock reply), Moderate (requires conceding something), or Strong (the apologetic moves themselves generate new problems). Of the 1,595 rated entries, 75% land at Moderate or above. Roughly three in ten fall into the Strong tier — where no stock apologetic survives contact.
Sorting categories by the percentage of entries rated Strong, not raw count, reveals which topics most reliably produce arguments that classical apologetics cannot absorb. The top 13 categories below all have a Strong rate above 40%; 6 of them clear 60%.
| Category | Entries | Strong | % Strong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scripture Integrity | 49 | 40 | 82% |
| Child Marriage | 22 | 17 | 77% |
| Incest | 16 | 11 | 69% |
| Apostasy & Blasphemy | 35 | 24 | 69% |
| Hudud | 74 | 49 | 66% |
| Governance | 104 | 63 | 61% |
| Antisemitism | 44 | 26 | 59% |
| Allah's Character | 55 | 32 | 58% |
| Moral Problems | 123 | 70 | 57% |
| Abrogation | 44 | 23 | 52% |
| Sexual Issues | 91 | 46 | 51% |
| Disbelievers | 211 | 104 | 49% |
| Warfare & Jihad | 132 | 65 | 49% |
Word-frequency across all 1,595 entry bodies (not the source texts themselves — the catalog's analysis of them). These are the themes the catalog had to keep returning to, ranked by how often the editor had to reach for each word to explain what the Qurʾān or hadith said.
Each section below lists the raw count, strength distribution, and the statistical pattern that emerges when you look at the set of entries as a whole. Categories are ordered by how resistant the topic has been to any standard apologetic move.
The hardest category to defend in the whole catalog. Zero entries rated Basic. Seventeen of twenty-two are Strong-tier, a rate matched by no other topic. The pattern is structural: the sources are explicit. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim both preserve the narration that Aisha was married at six and the marriage was consummated when she was nine. Sunan Ibn Mājah supplies the tafsir corroboration of Q 65:4, which legislates waiting-periods for divorced pre-pubescent wives — a ruling that makes sense only if such marriages were happening. The statistical shape here is revealing: the category is small (22 entries) because the argument is concentrated and the defender runs out of room quickly. Every angle closes fast.
The doctrine the Qurʾān most loudly asserts — and the corpus most clearly contradicts. 42 of 51 entries are Strong. Zero are Basic. The doctrine under scrutiny — that the Qurʾān is the unchanged and preserved (Q 15:9) word of God — has to survive the hadith testimony that verses were lost (Surah al-Ahzab once had 200 verses; now has 73), that Uthman collected and burned variant copies, that the "stoning verse" and the "adult suckling" verse were physically present in scripture and then vanished. Every such report is narrated by the tradition's own top chain-of-narration scholars in their own sahih collections. The apologetic choices are (a) reject the authentic hadith, (b) redefine "preservation," or (c) accept material loss — each of which empties the original claim. Hence the 82% Strong rate.
The third-hardest category in the catalog — 11 of 16 entries land at Strong. The pattern is narrow and concentrated: two engines drive nearly every entry here. The first is Q 33:37, in which Allah instructs Muhammad to marry Zaynab bint Jahsh — the ex-wife of his own adopted son Zayd — and dissolves adoption as a kinship-creating institution in the same stroke so that the marriage does not count as incest under the older Arabian norm. The second is the Salim / Sahl hadith in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim (Book 8, #3424–3428), where Muhammad instructs Sahl's adult foster son Salim to be nursed by Sahl's wife so she becomes maḥram to him, a rule later generalised into the doctrine of adult breastfeeding (raḍāʿat al-kabīr). Both engines solve a real human problem — accommodating a prior relationship — via mechanisms that modern intuition reads as legislated kinship-laundering. The category overlaps heavily with Prophetic Privileges and Women.
"Whoever changes his religion, execute him" — Abu Dawud #4351, Bukhari #6922 — is not a fringe narration. It sets a legal norm that 13 Muslim-majority countries still codify in the 21st century, several of them with capital penalties actively on the books. The category has zero Basic entries because the primary text is direct and the historical record of application is unambiguous. The apologetic move here — "no compulsion in religion" (Q 2:256) — itself becomes a contradiction entry the moment it is invoked against the apostasy hadith, which is why contradictions and apostasy overlap so often in the catalog.
Again, zero Basic entries. The corpus prescribes stoning for adultery, hand amputation for theft, alternate-side limb amputation for banditry, and 40 or 80 lashes for wine. Many of these rulings are applied against confessions made by defendants the hadith itself describes as mentally compromised — Maʿiz, Ghamid — with Muhammad personally supervising the stoning. The Muslim-approved Saheeh International text, the Saudi-published Bukhari, and sunnah.com's own translations are the sources, not hostile ones. The apologetic retreat to "the ijtihad got stricter than the text demanded" requires abandoning 1,400 years of the ʿulamāʾ consensus that applied these penalties in the form hadith describes.
Zero Basic entries. The Gharqad hadith — the end-times oracle in which stones and trees announce the Jews hiding behind them so Muslims can kill them (Bukhari, Muslim) — is not a marginal narration but is in the two Ṣaḥīḥayn. The Qurʾān's description of Jews as having been transformed into apes and pigs (Q 2:65, Q 5:60), the claim that Jews worship Ezra as God's son (Q 9:30), and the expel-the-Jews material in Abu Dawud drive the category together with ~30 hadiths cataloguing the Banu Qurayza executions and the expulsion of the Jewish tribes from the Arabian peninsula. The statistical shape — no entry defensible at the easy level — reflects how unusually explicit this material is.
The second-largest category in the catalog, and one of the hardest to neutralise. One hundred and five of the 212 entries are Strong. This is the theological engine behind warfare, apostasy, hudud, and antisemitism entries — the Qurʾān's posture toward kāfirūn is assertively exclusionary, and the hadith literature concretises that posture into specific legal rulings. Q 9:29 (fight the People of the Book until they pay jizya in humiliation), Q 98:6 ("the worst of creatures"), Q 3:85 (no religion other than Islam accepted) — all register here, and their treatment across 1,400 years of Islamic jurisprudence is not a marginal story. The catalog's 105 Strong-tier entries in this category are the internal hydraulic system driving several other categories.
Mutʿah (temporary marriage), adult breastfeeding to establish maḥram status, "thighing" of pre-pubescent brides, the principle that "a virgin's silence is her consent," sex with captives outside of marriage, coitus interruptus with enslaved women, nine wives in a single night — these are not reconstructed from hostile polemic. They are narrated by Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmidhi, Nasaʾi, Ibn Majah, and Abu Dawud under their own compilers' names. The category overlaps heavily with Women and Prophetic Character.
The Qurʾān regulates slavery; it does not abolish it. The phrase mā malakat aymānukum — "what your right hands possess" — is legal scripture, not archaic idiom. Eight chapters of Abu Dawud are devoted to the treatment of captives. Muhammad's marriage to Safiyya immediately after her husband's killing at Khaybar, his concubinage with Mariyah, and the distribution of the captive women of Awtas to the companions are narrated in all six canonical collections. Of 63 entries, only five are Basic. The category is small because slavery is not contested in the sources — it is simply there, in the law, and the apologetic must argue that an abolition the text never issued was implicit.
The twelve-Quraysh-caliph prophecy, the dhimmi humiliation rules, the legal inferiority of non-Muslim testimony, the "land belongs to Allah and His Messenger" doctrine, the hudud-bearing state — these convert Islamic theological claims into constitutional ones. 64 of 105 entries rate Strong, and two of the three Basic entries are not even easy concessions; they're acknowledgements that apologists have themselves moved the goalposts on what "Islamic governance" has historically meant.
The doctrine that earlier Qurʾānic verses can be cancelled by later ones — including the "Sword Verse" (Q 9:5) abrogating ~124 pacific verses by classical count — sits at the logical heart of several downstream problems. Only one of 44 entries is Basic. The apologetic move ("abrogation is a misinterpretation") contradicts the tradition's own hermeneutics: the classical tafsir literature treats naskh as settled. Arguing against it requires jettisoning the very Muslim scholars the catalog cites elsewhere when they are taken as authorities.
The Banu Qurayza massacre (600–900 men beheaded in a single day), the night raids, the assassination of Kaʿb ibn al-Ashraf in his bed, the "I have been made victorious with terror" hadith (Bukhari 2977), the beheading imagery of Q 47:4 — these are among the entries here. 66 of 133 are Strong. The overlap with Prophetic Character is 71 entries, meaning roughly half of everything in this category is simultaneously an indictment of the Prophet's personal conduct as the hadith depicts it.
Anthropomorphism ("Allah has a foot," Bukhari 7384; descends to the lowest heaven nightly; sits on a throne), the "best of deceivers" self-description (Q 3:54), sealing hearts before punishing for disbelief (Q 2:7), the "mercy in 100 parts" quota (only one part released to creation) — each of these generates a separate entry. 32 of 55 are Strong. The apologetic strategy here splits: some defenders treat anthropomorphism as mutashābihāt (ambiguous, to be left alone), which creates a new entry about why Allah chose ambiguity in his "clear" book.
The largest hadith-anchored category, and the spine of the catalog. 410 entries, 191 at Strong-tier. Nearly all of it comes from Bukhari and Muslim — Muhammad's own most authoritative biographers in the tradition's own account. It overlaps with Women (99 shared entries), Warfare (71), Disbelievers (72) — meaning the character questions converge with the ethical, military, and theological categories. No single-page apologetic response survives 191 strong-tier entries; the only workable Muslim reply at this scale is to reject the canonical hadith collections, which the tradition itself treats as definitive.
Small category because the primary material is concentrated: Abu Dawud #4462 ("whoever you find committing the act of the people of Lot, kill the one doing it and the one it is done to"), the Lot narratives, men-imitating-women cursings, mukhannath exile, and eunuch rulings. Six Muslim-majority countries still impose the death penalty for homosexual acts on the basis of these hadiths. The 36% Strong rate understates the category's practical weight — it's a domain where a few entries each legislate real, ongoing executions.
More than four wives (Q 33:50 gives Muhammad the exemption that binds every other Muslim man to four); revelation-on-demand surrounding the marriage to Zaynab; the honey affair where divine revelation (Q 66:1) arrived to settle a domestic dispute between co-wives; the "gift" (hiba) women who could marry him without dowry. 18 Strong entries. The pattern: whenever Muhammad's personal interests and general Islamic law diverged, a verse or a tradition resolves the conflict in his favour.
The largest category in the catalog. Inheritance halved (Q 4:11), testimony halved (Q 2:282), the beating verse (Q 4:34), polygyny, the Qurʾānic rule that the virgin's silence is consent (Tirmidhi), the "deficient in intellect and religion" hadith (Bukhari 304), menstrual impurity rules, hell-majority narration (Bukhari 304 again: "I saw most of its inhabitants were women"). The word "women" appears 1,569 times across the catalog's entry bodies — more than any other content word. The 128 Strong-tier entries give the category the highest Strong-tier absolute count of any category that isn't Prophetic Character.
Fatalism versus responsibility (Allah predestines disbelief, then punishes for it); collective punishment (villages destroyed for unbelief); eternal disproportion (finite sin / infinite punishment); the fiṭra paradox (all are born Muslim, yet Allah places most in hell); pre-Islamic damnation (moral humans before Muhammad are still condemned). These aren't hostile framings — they're what falls out of the Qurʾān's own claims when they are held together rather than read one at a time.
The Qurʾān's own test (Q 4:82): "Had it been from other than Allah, they would have found in it many contradictions." The catalog documents 308 of them — internal, Qurʾān-to-hadith, and hadith-to-hadith. 148 are Strong-tier: contradictions so direct they cannot be resolved without adopting naskh (which creates new problems, see Abrogation above).
The Islamic Dilemma (Allah simultaneously confirms and rejects the previous Scriptures), claims of Qurʾānic clarity that require extensive classical commentary to understand, the "produce a sura like it" challenge that never got a Muslim-accepted answer to what counts. The strength profile mirrors Contradictions: most apologetic moves work at the Basic tier but fail when pressed on the specifics.
The crucifixion denial (Q 4:157) against the unanimous testimony of first-century historiography (Josephus, Tacitus, Mara bar Serapion) and the entire Christian canon. The Qurʾān's mother-God-son Trinity error (Q 5:116), the clay-birds miracle and the palm-tree childbirth borrowed from the apocryphal Infancy Gospels (on the External Sources page), Mary presented as Aaron's sister (Q 19:28). 18 Strong entries — enough to make this a structural problem for the Islamic-Christian dialogue.
The Qurʾān's physical cosmology is not modern and rarely harmonises with modern astronomy without heavy reinterpretation. The seven heavens, flat-earth imagery (Q 15:19 "we spread the earth and placed mountains"), sun setting in a spring of murky water (Q 18:86), moon-splitting (Q 54:1), the sun "prostrating under the Throne" hadith (Bukhari 3199), and the 60-cubit Adam (~27 metres) are all here. 40 Strong. Most of the category is Moderate because apologists can deploy metaphor-reading at considerable elasticity, but each metaphor-move compounds a later one.
Skin repeatedly regrown so the burning can continue (Q 4:56), molars the size of Mount Uhud (Muslim 2851), a disbeliever's body inflated for increased surface area, 999 of every 1,000 damned (Bukhari 4741), the report that women constitute the majority of hell's population. The moral-problem category (previous) supplies the logical frame; this category documents the sensory realisation.
Houris (perpetual-virgin female companions, hadith specifies seventy-two per male believer), hollow-pearl tents sixty miles wide (Bukhari 4879), rivers of wine and milk, food-becomes-musk-sweat and no excretion, the promise that every believer will be "of the age of thirty-three." The lower Strong-rate reflects that most entries here are descriptive rather than directly legalistic — but the pattern (tangible male-gendered reward architecture) is one of the catalog's most frequently noted.
The category that catalogues the corpus's most physically off-putting material — the pieces that even sympathetic modern readers tend to speak about only obliquely. Camel urine prescribed as medicine (Bukhari 233, Muslim 1671 — the ʿUrayna incident, in which Muhammad directs a group to drink the milk and urine of camels to recover from illness); "dip the whole fly" (Bukhari 3320 — if a fly falls in your drink, dip it fully in so the wing carrying the disease is counterbalanced by the wing carrying the cure); paradise sweat is musk, food becomes eructations of perfume, no excretion in paradise (Muslim 2834); dog-saliva seven washes plus one with dust; menstrual-sex rules specifying permitted positions; curses for anal sex between spouses; explicit rulings on bestiality, masturbation, and sexual contact with animals for slaughter. Most entries are Basic-tier because each individual narration is small, but the statistical shape here — 54 entries, ~70% of them in the Ṣaḥīḥayn — portrays a revealed corpus whose hygienic, medical, and erotic register sits awkwardly against the claim of timeless divine perfection. The category overlaps most often with Ritual Absurdities and Women.
The Dajjal (Anti-Christ borrowed from Christian apocalyptic), Gog and Magog, the sun rising from the west, the Kaʿba destroyed by an Ethiopian, Jesus's second coming breaking crosses and killing pigs — a highly-borrowed end-times map that maps onto earlier Jewish and Christian eschatology in substantive detail, which the Pre-Islamic Borrowings category also tracks.
Stories the Qurʾān narrates as revelation that also appear — sometimes verbatim — in Jewish rabbinic literature, Christian apocryphal writings, and Zoroastrian apocalyptic: Cain's crow teaching burial (Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer), Mary shaking the palm tree during labour (Gospel of pseudo-Matthew), Solomon and the jinn (Testament of Solomon), Abraham in the fire (Jewish midrash), the Sleepers of Ephesus (Syriac Christian legend). Each borrowing has a direct antecedent in the External Sources index.
The evil eye (real; to be warded off), ruqya (Qurʾānic incantation for healing), jinn possession, the Prophet bewitched by a Jewish sorcerer (Bukhari 5763), Harut and Marut teaching magic at Babylon (Q 2:102), tattoos cursed, cupping and seven dates as medicine. Low Strong-rate because most entries are Basic-tier superstition items rather than legal texts — but the cumulative picture is a cosmology saturated with occult causation.
Dog-saliva seven washes (one with dust), left-hand/right-hand injunctions, yawns from Satan, spit three times to your left when a bad dream occurs, drink zamzam standing vs sitting, enter bathroom left-foot-first. Only thirteen Strong entries because most of these are individually small — but 98 of them together portray a religious life governed in fine detail by rules that require specific divine revelation to know.
The broadest category, and the most diffuse. Talking ants (Q 27:18), sleepers for 300 years (Q 18), a worm eating Solomon's staff, apes-and-pigs transformations, a hoopoe reporting on the Queen of Sheba, the Prophet's she-camel refusing to move. 713 entries, only 83 Strong — the category's job is ambient rather than forensic: a systematic record of the many narratives in the canonical corpus that modern Muslim apologetics prefers to speak about only individually and selectively.
Every entry carries one or more categories. The following ten pairings occur most frequently — the arteries through which the catalog's internal logic circulates.
| Overlap | Shared entries |
|---|---|
| Prophetic Character ∩ Women | 99 |
| Contradictions ∩ Logical Inconsistency | 94 |
| Cosmology ∩ Strange / Obscure | 88 |
| Prophetic Character ∩ Strange / Obscure | 82 |
| Contradictions ∩ Strange / Obscure | 74 |
| Magic & Occult ∩ Strange / Obscure | 74 |
| Logical Inconsistency ∩ Strange / Obscure | 73 |
| Disbelievers ∩ Prophetic Character | 72 |
| Prophetic Character ∩ Warfare & Jihad | 71 |
| Strange / Obscure ∩ Women | 71 |
The 1,595 entries are not evenly distributed. They cluster around four nodes: Prophetic Character (408), Women (376), Contradictions (301), and Treatment of Disbelievers (211). Those four alone account for three-quarters of the Strong-tier entries in the catalog. The highest-intensity pockets are smaller and narrower — Child Marriage, Scripture Integrity, Apostasy, Hudud — where the sources are so direct that the apologetic retreats to "you don't understand the context" or "the hadiths are weak," neither of which survives when the relevant hadiths are from Bukhari and Muslim.
The catalog does not need every entry to land. It needs the aggregate shape to land. 30% of entries are Strong. 75% are Moderate or Strong. Across 30 categories, 24 of them sit above 28% Strong-rate — including every category where the source material is most explicit (Child Marriage 77%, Scripture Integrity 82%, Incest 69%, Apostasy 69%, Hudud 66%, Antisemitism 59%). A divine-origin claim that survives one or two Strong-tier entries is not disturbed; a divine-origin claim that must survive 485 of them is in a different situation entirely.
All statistics on this page are derived directly from the catalog's own data-attributes. Browse the underlying entries on the Catalog page, or dig into any single category by clicking its header above.