Project Noon

by Saad Ismail

*A paper originally presented at the Department of Islamic Studies, Aligarh Muslim University in January 2024.

1. Introduction:

“I have found it very hard to work my way into the subject, although I have a great liking for it, in which respect I stand quite alone in my time.”

al-Biruni

Abu Rayhan al-Biruni’s precocious and magisterial study Kitab al-Hind (The Book of India) was undoubtedly far ahead of its times. Exactly one millennium before us, the promising polymath found himself in the crossfires of changing political tides and was soon smuggled by Mahmud of Ghazna into the royal retinue and employed in the service of the emperor whose exploits he did not fully endorse. In fact, Biruni found himself compelled to join their court when Ghaznavid armies captured Khwarazm in 1017 and became, what George Malagaris calls, a ‘special kind of human loot’ (Malagaris, 2020). While the emperor would earn a particular kind of reputation over the years, history would come to regard the scholar quite differently. 

Al-Biruni belonged to an intellectual culture that had typically seen two kinds of treatments of the religious other. One, and perhaps the predominant, kind of representation tended to be polemical. While another group of scholars represented a more objective and fair-minded tradition. It is within this latter tradition that al-Biruni stands. As Arthur Jeffrey writes: 

“The interest of Jahiz of Basra (d. 869), of Ibn Hazm of Cordova (d. 1064), and of the Shi’a writers an-Nawbakhti (d. 912) and Ibn Babuya (d.1001) , in other religions and sects, is almost wholly polemical, but in the historians, such as al-Ya’qubi (d. 890) and al-Mas’udi (d. 956), there is evident interest in recording facts about the religions of surrounding peoples without any special polemical intent, while in the works of the encyclopedists such as the Fihrist of an-Nadim (d. 900), or the Bayan al Adyan of Abu’l Ma’ali (d. 1092), the interest is so frankly in the religions themselves that the authors tended to come under suspicion of not being very good Muslims…” (Jeffrey, 1951) 

2. Al-Biruni’s India:

The Book Investigating What Pertains to India, Whether Rationally Acceptable or Despicable, or simply The Book of India (Kitab al-Hind), still represents one of the most informative and detailed accounts of medieval India. (Tareen, 2023)

The book itself follows what appears to be a typical schema in medieval Muslim literature. The preface and the introduction contain almost exclusively ethnographic or religious data. The initial chapters pertain to doctrinal discussions, such as God, creation, metempsychosis, salvation, and idolatry, while the final chapters set out ritual practices, principally initiation and funerary ceremonies, obligatory sacrifices and dietary rules, together with fasting, pilgrimage and festival observances. Yet most of the book, sets forth a review of the achievements of Indian science in several fields: grammar, metrology, chrestomathy, astrology and astronomy, cosmology and cosmography, chronology, and of course, mathematics. 

Since the present paper is mainly concerned with al-Biruni’s method of inter-religious approach and understanding, a robust engagement with al-Biruni’s scientific discussion is beyond our present scope. In terms of inter-religious understanding, it may be said that al-Biruni’s India represents one of the first truly comparative cross-cultural intellectual exercises in history. He is said to have pioneered the study of comparative religion and is seen, in many ways, to be a forerunner of a method widely used in academic religious studies today, namely phenomenology. (Sharma, 1983)

The term itself is most famously associated in modern times with the twentieth century Austrian-German philosopher Edmund Husserl. Central to Husserl’s method of phenomenology is the idea of ‘bracketing’ i.e., seeking to understand a phenomenon on its own terms, bracketing out one’s biases and presuppositions. This is exactly what al-Biruni announces in the introduction to his Kitab al Hind. The polymath makes it clear that his book is not intended to be a polemical tract out to prove or disprove something. He felt that the contemporaneous Muslim literature on Hindu traditions was plagued by an inability to move beyond the urge to critique and condemn, to the point that a sound understanding of these complex traditions was nowhere to be found in the slim corpus of enthusiastic Muslim writings on the subject. With the exception of one or two notable cases, al-Biruni laments that:

“… everything which exists on this subject in our literature is secondhand information which one has copied from the other, a farrago of materials never sifted by the sieve of critical examination.”

The insistently critical al-Biruni was first and foremost a formidable scientist. His expertise spanned a wide variety of disciplines, some of which we have listed above. His anthropological study of Hindu societies and cultures, therefore, is driven by the selfsame scientific temperament and intellectual rigor in the quest for truth that had already aided him successfully in so many fields. In the quest for truth, scientific or social, one must always aim to be entirely unprejudiced. In seeking to grasp the truth, we are confronting a reality that is independent of us, which cannot simply be molded or falsified to fit our fancies. To do so would only be the most unflattering reflection of one’s own intelligence.

3. Aspects of al-Biruni’s Method:

i. Epistemic Pluralism:

One of the most striking aspects of al-Biruni’s writings is their epistemic pluralism – an openness to ideas and sources of wide and varying provenance. As Franz Rosenthal says:

It must be admitted that Biruni’s views of the meaning of knowledge and scholarship were eclectic in origin. He was wide open to all the influences alive in his cultural environment and ready to accept whatever was, as he phrased it, “best and most correct”. He thus noticed many things which his fellow scholars and scientists in his time and place, and before him and after him, failed to see and to utilize. While eclecticism in matters philosophical may be offensive to pedantic minds, in Biruni’s case it managed to take on the form of a system and resulted in an overall view of intellectual endeavor which has retained to this day the stirring ring of truth.  (Rosenthal, 1974)

Al-Biruni was certainly not unique in his epistemic pluralism. Such an attitude was a hallmark of much medieval Islamic writings, who may have derived inspiration in the famous hadith of the Prophet Muhammad: “The wise word is the lost property of the believer. Wherever they find it, they are most deserving of it.” (Tirmidhi). 

Al-Kindi, who is regarded as the father of Arabic philosophy and was the first of the Islamic peripatetic philosophers, also gives expression to a similar approach: 

 “We ought not to be embarrassed of appreciating the truth and of obtaining it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us. Nothing should be dearer to the seeker of truth than the truth itself.”

ii. Impartiality: 

As already hinted above, Biruni’s Kitab al Hind was written not for polemical purposes but for the pursuit of objective understanding. In Biruni’s own words: 

“This book is not a book of argumentation and disputation (laysa al-kitab kitab hujaj wa-dalal) to be used by those who wish to dispute their antagonists and refute them on matters of deviance or falsity versus the truth. Instead, this book is an account in which I present the words of the Indians on their face value. I also add similarities which can be found between them and the Greeks, in order to demonstrate the closeness between them.”

Biruni’s method of comparative illustration itself was not intended to valorize one tradition while demonizing the other. We find a telling display of impartiality in another major work of his The Chronology of the Ancient Nations, which is a monumental compendium of the calendars and chronological systems of an extensive range of societies and cultures from the late antique Hellenistic world to the ancient and medieval Near East and Central Asia. While discussing Jewish and Christian methods for the computation of the Passover festival in the book, al-Biruni remarks:

“Now since it has been our object in all that has preceded thus far, to point out scientific truth, to mediate between the two parties, and to clear up the differences between them, we have here set down the methods of each of the two sects according to their own opinion, as well as that of others, so as to show to each of them what is for and what against the same… in this we are guided by a desire that both parties should dismiss from their minds any suspicion that we are partial to either side.” 

In fact, al-Biruni grounds the spirit of objectivity in scriptural foundations:

“It has been said in the Koran, “Speak the truth, even if it were against yourselves” and the Messiah expresses himself in the Gospel to this effect: “Do not mind the fury of kings in speaking the truth before them. They only possess your body, but they have no power over your soul”.”

Yet despite unequivocal scriptural injunctions to fairmindedness, people seldom stick to their principles. In practice, many groups and sects tend to misrepresent the other as an easy tactic of vindicating oneself. Al-Biruni mentions the scholar Abu Sahl at Tiflisi complaining on one occasion about a certain author who had grossly misrepresented a theory of the Mutazilites in his book to show them in a bad light. Al-Biruni then suggests to Tiflisi that this is true not just of inter-sectarian Muslim animus, but also, and perhaps more greatly, of inter-religious relations. 

“Thereupon I pointed out to the master (Tiflisi) that precisely the same method is much in fashion among those who undertake the task of giving an account of religious and philosophical systems from which they slightly differ or to which they are entirely opposed.”

In fact, it is much easier to detect such misrepresentation, argues al-Biruni, if they occur within the frame of one’s own religion. He says:

“On the other hand, you would have great difficulty in detecting it in a report about entirely foreign systems of thought totally differing both in principle and details, for such a research is rather an out-of-the-way one, and there are few means of arriving at a thorough comprehension of it. The same tendency prevails throughout our whole literature on philosophical and religious sects. If such an author is not alive to the requirements of a strictly scientific method, he will procure some superficial information which will satisfy neither the adherents of the doctrine in question nor those who really know it.”

If the detailed quotations above are any indication, it should be clear that al Biruni’s primary purpose is to provide, what he terms “nothing but a simple historic record of facts”. His desire is to place before the reader “the theories of the Hindus exactly as they are”. In this vein, al-Biruni stands very much within the spirit of phenomenology as we will explore in further detail below.

iii. Reflexivity and Positionality:

Al-Biruni begins chapter 8 of the Kitab al Hind with the following words: 

“The subject of this chapter is very difficult to study and understand accurately, since we Muslims look at it from without…”

Here we find a telling display of an acute awareness of one’s own positionality and how it may limit one’s understanding of another community’s traditions. Needless to say, these are highly valorized qualities in modern ethnographic studies as well. To what extent al-Biruni was actually successful in using self-awareness to check his own biases as an observer is an altogether different matter, one which we will briefly explore below. 

iv. Moral Cultivation: 

Another key trait of al-Biruni’s scholarly method is that it is not simply an academic or mental exercise. Rather, the pursuit of truth requires nothing less than an existential and moral transformation. In this sense, al-Biruni’s method is an illustration of what Pierre Hadot termed ‘philosophy as a way of life’. A way of doing philosophy that Hadot found characteristic of ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, and which we may also extend to other classical philosophical traditions in Islamic, Indic, Chinese and Catholic milieus. (Chase, 2013. Rizvi, 2013. Hadot, 1995, Faruque, 2021) 

A passage from the previously cited Chronology of al-Biruni states:

“[Higher goals can only be achieved] after the purification of the worldly soul (nafs) from all accidental circumstances which ruin most people, and also from those causes which render them blind to truth (al-haqq), such as ingrained customs, extreme partiality to one’s own group (ta’assub), constant desire to be victorious over others (tazaffur), following one’s passions, being dominated by the intent to achieve positions of leadership and all such cravings. But what I have mentioned above is the most certain path which will lead you to the truth of your pursuit., as well as be the greatest help in removing all blemishes of suspicion and doubt. Otherwise, you will not achieve your desired aim, even with the most strenuous efforts.”

v. Empiricism:

Al-Biruni championed an empiricism in his scientific as well as ethnographic studies, a point which may have also caused him to lose favor among religious as well as philosophical orthodoxies. But it is this approach that ultimately grants credence to his method. He is loathe to rely on ‘hearsay’ instead of ‘eye-witness’ testimony. We find him berating his co-religionists for their uncritical reproduction of second hand reports. Biruni himself would refuse to do so on most accounts, and would take pains to make it clear when he was doing so. In his critical approach to examining testimony and evidence, he describes in detail how other writers have not been intellectually rigorous and scrupulous for various reasons:

a) Some writers are satisfied with superficial information.

b) Some reporters may harbor animosities and antipathies based on national pride or personal predilections.

c) Some may provide false evidence by embellishment of the facts. 

d) Some may ignorantly confuse speculation with facts.

vi. Deference to Difference: 

We must remember that al-Biruni, the Khwarizmian, was fully an outsider to al Hind, who unmistakably felt himself – and was also made to feel – a foreigner, a yavana, a mleccha. He would write: 

“the Hindus entirely differ from us in every respect… they totally differ from us in religion as we believe in nothing in which they believe, and vice versa… in all manners and usages, they differ from us to such a degree as to frighten their children with us, with our dress, and our ways and customs, and as to declare us to be devil’s breed, and our doings as the very opposite of all that is good and proper.”

He immediately recognizes, however, that hostility to foreigners is not reason enough to distrust them, refuse engagement, or fail to understand. It represents, rather, a baser tendency common to all human societies:

“We must confess, in order to be just, that a similar depreciation of foreigners not only prevails among us and the Hindus, but is common to all nations towards each other.”

Yet, it was precisely al-Biruni’s clear awareness of his own religious and ethnic positionality, in the view of the late German Indologist Wilhelm Halbfass, that would lead al-Biruni “to perceive the “otherness” of the Indian religious philosophical context and horizon with a remarkable clarity…,  unparalleled in the world of classical antiquity with its attitudes towards the “barbarians” and the Orient.” Al-Biruni saw no contradiction between his Islamic faith and the fair representation of beliefs he did not subscribe to. While his co-religionists would most likely have expressed shock and horror at his free expression of ‘idolatrous’ beliefs, al-Biruni’s standards of objectivity would not allow his personal preferences to distort and disfigure his vision of the other. Neither does one find in him any desire to renounce one’s own beliefs in order to extend intellectual sympathy to the other. This lends to al-Biruni’s account, what Halbfass terms, a “clarity of hermeneutic awareness”. Halbfass writes:

“Al-Biruni did not possess the amorphous “openness” of syncretism and the search for “common denominators”. That is why he could comprehend and appreciate the other, the foreign as such, thematizing and explicating in an essentially new manner the problems of intercultural understanding and the challenge of “objectivity” when shifting from one tradition to another, from one context to another.” (Halbfass, 1988)

vii.  Religion and Science:

At one place his India, Biruni explicitly comments that belief in the text of the Quran does not lead to absurd science, because the Quran does not take explicit positions on the configurations of the heavens or provide a detailed historical chronology that could be contradicted by other reports or by independent investigation. (Mirza, 2011)

Biruni even goes so far as to say that those entrusted with the care of religious matters, such as time-keepers at mosques, should be qualified scientists. And the only way to be qualified is to learn from the experts, be they Muslim or not. 

“So, if the muezzin is interested in deep investigation, and he abstains from (blind) imitation, and (if) his temperament is akin to the science of Ptolemy, and Archimedes, and Apollonius, and he never puffs himself up above these names, and he seeks schooling and education until he reaches this position, then verily he must take up the whole of the Book of Elements (of Euclid) and the middle works between it and the Almagest, and he must give (himself over) to eight treatises of it. Thus he came as empty as the devil, but he goes away as victorious as (the prophet) Enoch. If it happens that he becomes fed up from the very first with studying what we have mentioned, then let him take the shortest distance away from the work, let him shorten the length of hope by giving the bow over to one who can draw it and surrendering the matter to the experts.” (Treatise on Shadows, tr. Kennedy, 1976)

4. Limits:

1. Limited sources:

By al-Biruni’s own admission, he was constrained by limited access to source materials due to his status as a foreigner as well as the added notoriety of Mahmud Ghaznavi’s actions which were increasingly alienating indigenous communities from the Ghaznavid court. Biruni gives vent to his ambivalence, if not outright disdain, for his patron on numerous occasions. (Malagaris, 2020) For these reasons, despite Biruni’s expressed preference for first-hand accounts (‘eye-witnessing’) over secondary written sources (‘hearsay’), the great bulk of his data actually derives from his interactions with Hindu scholars and traders in the Ghaznavid court.

Now, regarding the material that he had access to, al-Biruni acknowledges the problem of textual corruption in the reports that he received and had to critically sift through. His sources were bedevilled by miswordings, mistranslations, and mishandling in transmissions that served to confound his pursuit of knowledge. 

Despite already having masterfully translated two Sanskirt texts, he writes in detail about the formidable challenge of the Sanskrit language, which he found to be no less complex than the Arabic language itself. He had translated into Arabic the Samkhya-karika and the Yoga-Sutras of Patanjali, the latter being in his view, a central “Holy Book” for Hindus. His remarks on Hindu philosophy are, therefore, unevenly inclined towards the Samkhya and the Yoga schools. The Vedanta, by contrast, is conspicuously absent in his treatment. 

Now, it would be short-sighted to see this preference for Yoga philosophy as owing to Biruni’s ignorance of other traditions. Rather, as Mario Kozah has recently pointed out, this choice represents an intelligent intrareligious intervention on Biruni’s part. 

“Al-Biruni saw in The Yoga-Sutras a harmony and unison between the soul (purusa) and matter (prakrti). This feature of Patanjali’s yoga allowed al-Biruni to present a cosmological alternative to the dualistic psychology of his contemporary and philosophical adversary Ibn Sina (d. 1037), who, in his famous text The Cure (Al-Shifa’), had argued that “the soul and the body are not one essence.… His preference for the teachings of Patañjali may not have been incidental or circumstantial but, in fact, a conscious and sophisticated promotion of an integrated and challenging vision of the soul.” (Kozah, 2015)

2. Value Judgments

On multiple occasions, Biruni fails in his own aspiration to neither commend nor condemn Hindu traditions, but simply to ‘present them as they are’. As Ainslie Embree pointed out, in among the most remarkable moments in his text al-Biruni called Hinduism “not the truth” (which, for him, meant not monotheistic) but “only a deviation from the truth” (Embree, 1971). In al-Biruni’s words:

“All heathenism, whether Greek or Indian, is in its pith and marrow one and the same belief, because it is only a deviation from the truth.”

We can also recognize other idiosyncrasies in his views. The claim that the doctrine of rebirth or metempsychosis were the cornerstone “of the Hindu religion… just as the Kalima is (the cornerstone) of Islam”, for instance. Not to speak of the peculiarly Islamicate structure of the Kitab al Hind itself that we alluded to above. 

One must nonetheless appreciate Biruni’s awareness of theological nuances such as is evident in his translation of the Sanskrit term deva into the Arabic malak (angel) and not ilah (god). A translation choice that tries to retain the Hindu cosmological view of devas as supernatural beings intermediate between God/Brahman and human beings, akin to the category of ‘angels’ in Islamic theology. On other occasions, however, Biruni can be scathing in his theological iconoclasm, though he takes pains to show that the view of the Brahminical elite were in line with his own iconoclastic view of the Divine. But this only means that he has little patience for the view of the vast majority of commoners who harbored what he saw to be ‘anthropomorphic’ ides of God. In a telling passage, we find Biruni expressing elitism, textualism, as well as a contempt for folk practices:

“However, nobody minds these classes and their theories, though they be numerous. The main and most essential point of the Hindu world of thought is that which the Brahmans think and believe, for they are specially trained for preserving and maintaining their religion. And this it is which we shall explain, viz the belief of the Brahmans.”

3. Textualism:

As a consequence of Biruni’s prioritizing of Brahminic Hindu traditions we find him downplaying non-textual traditions such as oral traditions, folk practices, myth, magic, tantra etc. Biruni is no longer a neutral observer when he chooses to center texts in his account of the traditions, nor yet when he deems certain texts to be more central than others.  

4. Elitism:

As is evident from the foregoing passages, Biruni’s discourse displays an unmistakable elitism under which human beings of all cultural backgrounds fall into two groups, the ‘awamm and the khawass, the elite and the masses, the literate and the illiterate. 

“The belief of educated and uneducated people differs in every community; for the former strive to conceive abstract ideas and to define general principles, whilst the latter do not pass beyond the apprehension of the senses, and are content with derived rules.”

Biruni even sees the task of the philosopher/scholar such as himself as that of Socrates: 

“Think of Socrates when he opposed the crowd of his nation…” 

To be fair, such elitism was a feature common to much ancient Greek as well as classical Islamic philosophy. In this sense, Biruni was very much a man of his times. Additionally, Biruni’s scorn for practices of the uneducated masses is perhaps more scathingly targeted against his Muslim co-religionists, such as when he berates them for the practice of physical veneration of images of the Prophet. He explains:

“It is well known that the popular mind leans towards the sensible world, and has an aversion to the world of abstract thought which is only understood by highly educated people, of whom in every time and every place there are only few.”

This may be another instance of Biruni universalizing his own particular iconoclasm across cultures. Not only is such universalism problematic for losing sight of its own particularity, but it is even more inapplicable in the case of the vast majority of Hindu philosophers who saw no need to shun the concrete in their affirmation of the abstract, as Biruni is wont to insist. The case of Shankaracharya illustrates this. Shankara was an Advaitin, a non-dualist, a champion of an ‘abstract’ theology of Brahman/the Divine as ‘Nirguna’ (beyond form/attribute), and yet at the same time remained an ardent Shaivite and participated in concrete rituals as well as composed devotional songs to Shiva.

5. Essentialism:

At a more fundamental level, al-Biruni is reconfiguring Hinduism by the simple act of branding it as a unified “religion”, an unwitting intellectual move that presages the European orientalism of the nineteenth century and strays from al-Biruni’s own desire to see things on their own terms.

“Before entering on our exposition, we must form an adequate idea of that which renders it so particularly difficult to penetrate the essential nature of any Indian subject.”

We saw instances of this in his textualism, and in his choosing certain texts and tenets over other as being central to ‘Hindu’ thought. Quite apart from the factual errors or idiosyncrasies in his choices of texts (such as the Yoga Sutras) and tenets (such as metempsychosis), the very act of ‘centralizing’ or creating a center, and thus also a periphery, privileges certain viewpoints and marginalizes certain others. Such essentialism and such ‘religion-making’ activity would become the hallmark of academic religious studies in our times. It remains the leading legacy of orientalism and signifies the coloniality of knowledge production. Another topic that is far beyond the limited scope of the present paper. 

5. Modern Religious Studies and the Phenomenological Movement:

The academic study of religion in modern times is composed of various approaches which include the history of religion, sociology of religion, anthropology of religion, psychology of religion, and philosophy of religion. Quite apart from these mostly self-explanatory approaches, ‘phenomenology of religion’ is an approach that draws on the multifarious approaches listed above but also seeks to offer perspectives that are cannot be reduced in any of the above terms (such as psychology or sociology). Phenomenology thus represents a quest for a non-reductionistic account of the phenomenon it seeks to study. The phenomenology of religion also emerged as a corrective to approaches that tended to be apologetic, ethnocentric, triumphalist, Social-Darwinian, and normative. 

Broadly, one may speak of two kinds of phenomenological studies:

A) Non-philosophical phenomenology: A broad term signifying the descriptive, systematic, comparative study of any object – for example, religions; in which scholars assemble groups of religious phenomena in order to disclose their major aspects and to formulate their typologies. It is such kinds of traditions of phenomenology that interests us in the present paper. 

B) Philosophical phenomenology: A more narrow tradition of philosophical preoccupation with themes such as the nature of consciousness and the conditions of consciousness in the case of Husserl and many of his successors. Philosophical phenomenology develops in different directions under various thinkers. Thus we have:

a) the ‘transcendental phenomenology’ of Edmund Husserl

b) the ‘existential phenomenology’ of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty

c) the ‘hermeneutic phenomenology’ of Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur 

While the majority of philosophical phenomenologists have not focused on religious phenomena, the vocabulary of philosophical phenomenology and, in some cases, its methodology has greatly influenced the phenomenology of religion. (Ryba, 2009)

6. Key Aspects of the Phenomenological Method

a) Descriptive nature: Phenomenology aims to be a rigorous, descriptive science, discipline, or approach. The phenomenological slogan ‘Zu den Sachen!’ (‘To the things themselves!’) expresses the determination to turn away from philosophical theories and concepts toward the direct intuition and description of phenomena as they appear in immediate experience.

b) Antireductionism: freeing people from uncritical preconceptions that prevent them from becoming aware of the specificity and diversity of phenomena, thus allowing them to broaden and deepen immediate experience and provide more accurate descriptions of this experience. Husserl attacked various forms of reductionism, such as ‘psychologism’.

c) Bracketing: (Epoché) Abstention/suspension of judgment. Sometimes the epoché is formulated in terms of the goal of a completely presuppositionless science or philosophy, but most phenomenologists have interpreted such bracketing as the goal of freeing the phenomenologist from unexamined presuppositions, or of rendering explicit and clarifying such presuppositions, rather than completely denying their existence. 

d) Eidetic vision: The intuition of (universal) essences, (Gr. Eidos), akin to Plato’s Forms. The central aim of the phenomenological method being to disclose the essential structure embodied in the particular data. The phenomena, subjected to a process of free variation, assume certain forms that are considered to be accidental or inessential in the sense that the phenomenologist can go beyond the limits imposed by such forms without destroying the basic character or intentionality of one’s data. For example, the variation of a great variety of religious phenomena may disclose that the unique structures of monotheism do not constitute the essential core or universal structure of all religious experience. 

7. Phenomenology of Religion:

For our purposes, we will focus on what Jacques Waardenburg has called ‘classical religious phenomenology’, the approach closely connected with the Dutch school in the first half of the twentieth century – where religious phenomenology had its origin and achieved most distinctive formulation. Key figures include Chantepie, Tiele, Kristensen, and Van der Leeuw. We will focus on the latter two to bring out some aspects of the method. 

A) Kristensen (d. 1953):

Kristensen may be said to represent an extreme formulation of the descriptive approach within phenomenology. He considered the traditional study of comparative religion as being insufficiently scientific and concerned with apologetically demonstrating Christianity’s superiority. (Kristensen, 1960) By contrast, phenomenology for him favored a neutral observation without the triumphalist or developmentalist overtones. Religious phenomenology’s concern was not to compare the excellence of religions, but to understand why a particular thing is valued within a religion. It begins by attempting to understand religion from its ‘own standpoint… that is how it is understood by its own adherents.’ (Kristensen, 1960)

Along with Rudolf Otto, another prominent religious phenomenologist, Kristensen takes the Holy as the sui generis category of religion, a category that is not susceptible to ‘intellectual, ethical, or aesthetic’ reduction. For Otto, numen or numinous means the concept of ‘the holy’ minus its moral and rational aspects. By emphasizing this nonmoral, nonrational aspect of religion, he isolates the ‘overplus of meaning’ beyond the rational and conceptual. This constitutes the universal essence of religious experience. (Otto, 1968)

None of this is to say that other approaches to religion are useless; they are simply less than ideal. Comparative religion fails because it valorizes a religion; history of religion is objectively too distant; and philosophy of religion is focused on idealities. The belief commitments smuggled into comparative religions bias its conclusions; the objectively empathetic method of history – which is incapable of delivering the ‘existential nature’ of religion – falls short of imaginative entry into religion; and, finally,  the essential method of philosophy does not search out religious facts. Phenomenology, by contrast, is charting a middle course, as it were, while also making a unique contribution. It does not operate independently, however, and maintains ‘mutual relations’ with the aforementioned approaches. From comparative religion, religious phenomenology accepts some typological categories; from history of religion it accepts the empathetic method and historical facts; from philosophy it accepts the definition of religion’s essence. But to these gleanings, phenomenology adds the ‘personal touch’, an ‘indefinable sympathy’ (or intuition) for alien religious data that grows through scientific discovery while being grounded in one’s own experience of what religion is. 

Kristensen at one place even suggests that the space that a phenomenologist inhabits is not simply an academic one. It is nothing short of a ‘spiritual’ encounter facilitated by the grace of the Divine:

(It) ‘without doubt, takes place by the illumination of a Spirit who extends above and beyond our spirit’ (Kristensen, 1960)

Kristensen’s kind of religious phenomenology may very easily be compared with aspects of Biruni’s method discussed above, including the precondition of a moral and spiritual transformation in the scholar herself. 

B)  Van der Leeuw (d. 1950):

Van der Leeuw, by contrast, represents the second kind of phenomenology discussed above. Among the religious phenomenologists, his approach perhaps comes closest to the Husserlian method (Ryba, 2009). Van der Leeuw’s phenomenological method possesses six steps for arriving at an ‘eidetic reduction’:

i. names are associated with phenomena; 

ii. the phenomenon is imaginatively and sympathetically interpolated into consciousness; 

iii. the phenomenon is focused on (bracketed) to the exclusion of others so that essential features may be observed; 

iv. the regular structural relationships between phenomenon and a wider field of phenomena are clarified; 

v. the logos/ meaning of the phenomenon is distilled; and  

vi. the disclosed structure is confronted with and corrected by other researches, such as archeology and philology.

8. Beyond Phenomenology:

While phenomenology of religion has perhaps been one of the most influential methods in academic religious studies in the modern period, it has nonetheless elicited criticism in more recent years (Flood, 1999). For instance: in the case of an approach like Van der Leeuw’s, how can we verify any eidetic reduction? Is an eidetic reduction falsifiable? Is it replicable? 

Additionally, despite its rejection of earlier models of positivism, phenomenology of religion may have unintentionally retained some of the positivistic assumptions regarding the description of unconstrued, uninterpreted, objective ‘facts’. There is indeed value in uncovering religious essences and structures, but these must be conceptualized as embodied and contextualized, not as fixed, absolute, ahistorical, eternal truths and meanings.

Douglas Allen writing in The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, explores what a rehabilitated phenomenology might look like (Allen, 2005):

“A more self-critical and modest phenomenology of religion may have much to contribute to the study of religion. It will include awareness of its presuppositions, its historical and contextualized situatedness, and its limited perspectival knowledge claims. But it will not completely abandon concerns about the commonality of human beings and the value of unity, as well as differences. Such a self-critical and modest phenomenology of religion will attempt to formulate essential structures and meanings through rigorous phenomenological methods, including intersubjective confirmation of knowledge claims, while also attempting to formulate new, dynamic, contextually sensitive projects involving creative encounter, contradiction, and synthesis.”

9. Al-Birunic Integration:

If Biruni’s method can be credited with some of the key aspects of modern phenomenology, then some of the criticisms that are levelled against the latter may be equally applicable to the former. In our foregoing discussion, Biruni certainly emerges as a precocious interfaith scholar, but he is not without fault. Biruni’s method may contain many pointers for modern interfaith dialogue, but it will have to be critically sifted in our own times much like Biruni had done in his. Simply recapitulating his work will not do, as Biruni insists: do not rely on ‘hearsay’ (even though it may be Biruni saying it). Rather, we must take inspiration from Biruni’s empiricism and independent thinking, and forge a robust method for inter-religious study in our times, drawing on Biruni, drawing on phenomenology, but not being limited by them, and always maintaining an epistemic pluralism that was the hallmark of Biruni’s method. 

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