Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Lenn Evan Goodman, trans., The Case 

of the Animals versus Man before the King of the Jinn: 

A Tenth-Century Ecological Fable of the Pure Brethren 

of Basra (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978); Sayyed 

Hossein Nasr, Islamic Cosmological Doctrines (Boulder, 

Colo.: Shambhala, 1978), 25–104; Ian Netton, Muslim 

Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Breth-

ren of Purity (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982).

Buddhism and Islam

Buddhism and Islam are two of the world’s major 

religious traditions, and they have influenced each 

other at points throughout history. Both religions 

came into being in part through the isolated 

meditations and subsequent spiritual insights of 

the respective movements’ founders, Siddhartha 

Gautama (known later as the Buddha) in the sixth 

century 

b

.

c

.

e

. on the southern border of Nepal, 

and Muhammad in seventh-century 

c

.

e

. Arabia. 

After the seventh century, significant interactions 

between Buddhists and Muslims took place along 

trade routes through Central Asia known as the 

Silk Road. Through these routes, Islam made sig-

nificant inroads into Central Asia and China begin-

ning in the seventh century. Though Buddhism in 

Central Asia started to decline with the political 

expansion of Islam at this time, the region retained 

Buddhist influences, and the Mongol invasions of 

the 13th century helped to further bring Buddhist 

influences from the east into this largely Muslim 

region. Accompanying Muslim political expansion 

eastward, Islam spread from Iran and a

Fghanistan

into South Asia, where its eventual political ascen-

dancy coincided with the 12th-century disappear-

ance of Buddhism in the regions of Afghanistan and 

p

akistan

, where it had existed in its “Serindian” 

form, and in i

ndia

, its birthplace.

Over the centuries, Buddhists and Muslims 

have influenced each other in the fields of medi-

cine, art, architecture, and literature, evidenced, 

for example, in the blend of Muslim and Buddhist 

ideas in the Tibetan Muslim literary classic The 

Autobiography of Kha che Pha lu. Another example 

of such mutual influence is the life story of the 

great Sufi i

brahim

 

ibn

  a

dham

 (d. 778), whose 

hagiography bears striking thematic resemblance 

to that of the Buddha, for he renounced his life 

as the prince of Balkh—a region of present day 

Afghanistan, where Buddhism flourished in the 

early centuries 

c

.

e

. prior to the arrival of Islam 

in the eighth century—for a pious, ascetic life. 

Significant cultural contact between Muslims and 

Buddhists is also evidenced in the 13th-century 

world history called Jami al-tawarikh, written by 

a Persian official named Rashid al-Din (d. 1318), 

which includes a biography of the Buddha in its 

chapter on India, discusses Buddhist concepts 

in Islamic terms, and documents the presence 

of 11 Buddhist texts circulating in Persia in Ara-

bic translation. The destruction in 2001 of the 

Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan by the 

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