The study of world religions was pioneered by two medieval Muslim scholars
Long before European universities founded departments of religious studies, al-Biruni and Ibn Hazm, writing around the year 1000, compared faiths across cultures and are now called the fathers of comparative religion. Their successors face a stubborn problem: the very idea of a religion may be shaped by one tradition's assumptions.
Comparative religion sets the doctrines, practices and influence of the world's faiths side by side, probing questions of ethics, metaphysics and salvation. Al-Biruni, who lived from 973 to about 1050, wrote The Remaining Signs of Past Centuries around 1000 AD, a study of the calendars of many peoples woven together with astronomy, mathematics and accounts of their customs and beliefs. Later landmarks include the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh's Sufi comparative text of 1655 and, in the 19th century, the work of social scientists such as Rudolf Otto, Max Weber and Max Müller.
Nicholas de Lange of Cambridge University warns that the discipline grew up inside Christian theology faculties and tends to squeeze other traditions into a Christian-shaped strait-jacket. Some faiths do not even think of themselves as religions in the Christian sense. Buddhism and Chinese folk traditions, for instance, were never treated as mutually exclusive and blended into forms such as Pure Land Buddhism, whereas Western thinking usually assumes belonging to one faith rules out another.
Salvation is another trap. A researcher who assumes every religion promises eternal life after death will misread Hinduism and Theravada Buddhism, which aim instead at escaping the cycle of rebirth. Scholars therefore often start with a geographical map devised by Charles Joseph Adams: Middle Eastern, Indian, East Asian, African, American and Oceanic religions, plus the faiths of classical Greece and Rome.
Comparison turns up intriguing links. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all place Abraham in their sacred history, and Judaism and Islam share especially close structures of law and practice. Zoroastrianism, which spread through the Achaemenid and Sasanian empires and survives among the Parsis of India and Pakistan, shares with the Abrahamic faiths a struggle between good and evil, resurrection of the dead and an emphasis on free will; scholars still debate whether it shaped them. Mandaeans, a Gnostic monotheist community, honour John the Baptist as their chief prophet and practise frequent baptism.
Source: Comparative religion
