AbË RayÉn al-BÊrËnÊ is famed as a great scientist and a polymath. The intellectual world, however, is less familiar with the fact that al-BÊrËnÊ 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 discipline of comparative religion, and the fact that no other works of his contemporaries came near in dimension and depth,

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... d set him up as the forerunner of this discipline. AbË RayÉn al-BÊrËnÊ should, therefore, be declared the Father of Comparative Religion or Religionswissenschaft. The Muslim polymath, AbË RayÉn al-BÊrËnÊ, is highly respected by the intellectuals of the East and the West for his significant contributions to the field of the physical sciences. But his contribution to, what Arthur Jeffery calls, "the sciences of the spirit" has not yet been fully appreciated. This study attempts to fill in this gap. It is based on two of his monumental works on comparative religion entitled India and Chronology. He was unique in that he presented his views on other religions in an unprejudiced manner, studied them from the original and the best available sources, and was very much concerned about devising a method to make this branch of study rigorous and systematic.