The claim that human beings are born already oriented toward recognizing God is not unique to Islam, and setting fitra beside comparable claims in Christian and Confucian thought shows both a recurring intuition and real differences in what each tradition builds on it.
Christian theology has a structurally similar idea in the sensus divinitatis, an innate sense of the divine that some theologians, drawing on Romans 1:19-20, hold to be present in all people prior to special revelation. John Calvin gave the concept its classic modern name and treated it, much like the Ash'ari reading of fitra, as real but insufficient on its own, obscured and distorted by sin, a structure notably close to the Ash'ari position that fitra yields a bare receptivity rather than saving knowledge.
Confucian thought offers a related claim in Mencius's doctrine that human nature is originally good, illustrated by his argument that anyone who suddenly sees a child about to fall into a well feels an immediate, unreflective alarm, proof, he held, that the seeds of benevolence and wisdom are innate rather than instilled by education; his rival Xunzi held the opposite, that human nature is originally selfish and requires ritual and education to correct it, a debate that maps loosely onto the Mu'tazili-Ash'ari disagreement over how much fitra accomplishes unaided, though Mencius's claim concerns innate moral sentiment rather than innate theological knowledge specifically.