Al-Bīrūnī: Father of Comparative Religion

Abstract

Abū Rayān al-Bīrūnī is famed as a great scientist and a polymath. The intellectual world, however, is less familiar with the fact that al-Bīrūnī is a great scholar of comparative religion. The religions he studied and the methodology he formulated for a “scientific method” of studying religion are impressive. That his works took place very early in the history of the disciplineof comparative religion, and the fact that no other works of his contemporaries came near in dimension and depth, indeed set him up as the forerunner of this discipline. Abū Rayān al-Bīrūnī should, therefore, be declared the Father of Comparative Religion or Religionswissenschaft.