This topic in Arkoun’s atlas points to the path that takes Islam out of interpretive isolation and places it within the history of monotheistic religions and their intertwined trajectories. What is meant by comparison here is not the gathering of superficial similarities, but an examination of how concepts, laws, and representations are formed through a long history of exchange, difference, and conflict. This topic therefore helps organize material that works on texts, reception, religious legitimacy, and the limits of essentialism.
This dimension appears in Toward a Comparative History of Monotheistic Religions as a direct text on historical comparison among religions. It returns in Readings in the Qur’an when the Qur’anic text is read within a historical and symbolic horizon broader than school-based reading. It is also present in Fundamentalist Thought and the Impossibility of Foundationalization, because closing off the origin within a sealed identity impedes any comparative inquiry. It likewise appears in Battles for Humanism in Islamic Contexts when philosophy and religion are invoked within a broader human horizon. As for From Manhattan to Baghdad, it places comparison in a global context in which politics, religion, violence, and communication intersect.
Among the concepts close to this topic are: historicity, discourse analysis, tradition, the unthought, and secularization. These concepts help us understand comparison as a tool for reorganizing questions, not as a final judgment on any religion or tradition.
The reading paths associated with it begin with Text and History and then expand to A Quick Introduction to Arkoun for those who want a general picture of the place of comparison in the project. Tradition and Modernity and Memory and the Imaginary also open a path to understanding how comparison takes shape within history and representations, not merely at the level of abstract doctrines alone.