Tor Andrae

Tor Andrae (1885–1947) was a Swedish historian of religions, theologian, and Orientalist whose studies of Islam and the Prophet Muḥammad exerted considerable influence on twentieth-century Western scholarship. Born in Vena, Sweden, Andrae studied theology at Uppsala University under the renowned scholar Nathan Söderblom and earned his doctorate in 1917. He subsequently held professorships in the history of religions at Stockholm and Uppsala and later served as Bishop of Linköping. His academic work combined comparative religion, theology, and historical criticism, with a particular focus on the origins of Islam, the life of the Prophet, and Islamic mysticism.

Andrae is best known in sīrah studies for his biography Mohammed: Sein Leben und sein Glaube (1932; English trans. Mohammed: The Man and His Faith), which became one of the most widely read Western Accounts of the Prophet during the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike some earlier Orientalists who focused primarily on political history, Andrae sought to understand Muḥammad as a religious personality and to explain the development of his prophetic consciousness within the broader context of Late Antiquity. He drew attention to the religious environment of Arabia and examined possible Jewish and Christian influences on early Islam, themes that remained central to Western Islamic studies for decades.

Another major contribution was his pioneering study Die Person Muhammeds in Lehre und Glauben seiner Gemeinde (1918), which investigated the image of the Prophet in Muslim devotion and religious thought. Later scholars have regarded this work as one of the earliest systematic examinations of Muḥammad’s place in Islamic piety. His research extended beyond sīrah to the study of Sufism, culminating in works on Islamic mysticism that explored the psychological and spiritual dimensions of Muslim religious experience.

Although many of Andrae’s conclusions regarding the Christian and Jewish background of Islam have been revised or challenged by subsequent scholarship, his works remain important landmarks in the historiography of Islam. His emphasis on religious ideas, spirituality, and devotion broadened the scope of Western studies of the Prophet beyond purely political or philological approaches. Consequently, Andrae occupies a significant place in the history of modern sīrah scholarship and the academic study of Islam.

## References

1 Tor Andrae, Mohammed: The Man and His Faith, trans. Theophil Menzel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936). 2 Tor Andrae, Die Person Muhammeds in Lehre und Glauben seiner Gemeinde (Stockholm: Nordiska Bokhandeln, 1918). 3 Tor Andrae, Mohammed: Sein Leben und sein Glaube (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1932). 4 Tor Andrae, Der Ursprung des Islams und das Christentum (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1926). 5 Tor Andrae, Islamische Mystiker (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960). 6 Annemarie Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 24–25. 7 Johann Fück, Die Arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1955), 302–7. 8 William A. Graham, “Andrae, Tor Julius Efraim,” in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 4th ed., vol. 1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), 469–70.