ابن حزم وتصنيف الأديان‎: البدايات الأولية لنظرية ما قبل الدين

This research presents Ibn Hazm's effort in classifying religions, explaining the structure and objectives of the classification, and it also clarifies the temporal and epistemological contexts that influenced Ibn Hazm when he undertook this scientific effort, and also shows the impact of the shortcomings in Ibn Hazm's sources on Eastern religions and reflected on some parts of the classification, and confirms that what Ibn Hazm did was an objective and neutral scientific effort, which did not benefit the theological controversy that followed, as well as clarifying the scientific status that Ibn Hazm resorted to when He set some criteria that religions can rely on to discover how close they are to the truth, and that what Ibn Hazm did had a great impact on the stage of contemporary history of religions, as his sayings were acknowledged by the critical school of the Bible, because his effort was not limited to description, and this is the idea that the contemporary scholar of the history of religions, Ismail Raji Al-Faruqi, felt when he saw that what Ibn Hazm did could be a more serious process for the study of religions, as he moves on with the method of phenomenology Phenomenology has advanced to an advanced step represented in finding objective principles for evaluation that he called "pre-religious principles", and thus it seems that Al-Faruqi wanted to complement Ibn Hazm's effort and formulate new principles, to complete Ibn Hazm's theory of classifying religions into a scientific work that goes beyond the theses of the aforementioned method, which stands when understanding the religious phenomenon, to a pre-religious approach that seeks to have principles to move from the stage of understanding to the stage of evaluation.