Comparison of Religions in the Medieval Arab and Latin Traditions

According to some recent studies, until the 16th or 17th century, there was no concept of religion as such (“religion in general”), because before then, people only recognised their own faith as religion, and it was only after the European Reformation, which created conditions for religious pluralism, that this situation changed. The purpose of this article is to introduce and validate an alternative perspective. The authors argue that long before the European Reformation, in both the Islamic East and Christian West, the concept of “religion” (“faith,” “sect,” etc.) was utilised by certain scholars, who were engaged in the comparative analysis of religions. Typically, the conceptual framework for such analysis was provided by (proto)science and philosophy: thus, ʾAbū Maʿšar (d. 886) examined religions in the naturalistic context of astronomy (astrology), while al-Fārābī (d. c. 950) used the core concepts of Aristotle’s moral and political philosophy. As early as the 13th century, Roger Bacon (c. 1214 – c. 1294) developed the ideas of his predecessors and produced what might be referred to as a synthetic medieval theory of religion, which, in turn, influenced the later discussions on “religion” and religions.