ABSTRACT
These issues represent considerable demands upon the academic study of religion, and it is easier to demand than to respond. We do not claim to know all of the answers to the questions outlined above, only to be ready to undertake to find and instantiate some of them. Still, academic scholarship on the description of religions as systems of culture has progressed over the past generations. The conception of a religion as a system of the social order defines the requirements of description, analysis, and interpretation. Such a system is comprised by an account of a way of life, a world view, and a theory of social entity. Not only so, but what holds the whole togetheran urgent question that provokes a self-evidently compelling answer-has been defined for one religious system after another. We know how to differentiate a given religion into its constituent, distinct systems, so we speak confidently about Judaisms and Christianities. But, in that same context of description, analysis, and interpretation of religions and their systems, comparing and contrasting have not yet attained a level of certainty: we are only just beginning. What justifies the choice we have made to compare the religio-legal systems, Judaism and Islam, in their classical, normative statements?
