Home›The Near East and Egypt›Principal Tradition OfBrowse ByPrincipal Tradition OfThis page groups sacred regions by their formal rank within one specific faith. Wikipedia notes that Jerusalem "is the holiest city in Judaism and Christianity and the third-holiest city in Islam (behind Mecca and Medina in the Arabian Peninsula)." Browsing by principal-tradition-of lets a visitor find every region holding the same rank within its faith.FactsPrincipal Tradition OfSourcesComments (0)Reader Challenges (0)FactsDirectoryCategoryWell-attestedRegions 1Principal Tradition OfFilter Results13 entriesAdherents TodayAllAn Israelite Samaritan population survey puts the community at approximately nine hundred people, divided chiefly between Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim and Holon near Tel Aviv, making Samaritanism among the smallest continuously practised religions in the world. (1)Demographic study of the Zoroastrian community puts the worldwide population at approximately one hundred twelve thousand to one hundred twenty two thousand people, concentrated among the Parsis of India and the Zoroastrians of Iran, with smaller communities in North America, the United Kingdom and Australia. The number has fallen across the twentieth and twenty first centuries and is a central concern inside the community itself. (1)Estimates of the global Yazidi population range from under five hundred thousand to over one million, concentrated in Iraq's Sinjar and Sheikhan regions with substantial diaspora communities in Europe formed largely after the Islamic State attack on Sinjar in 2014. The range reflects genuinely disputed counting, not merely unpublished data: pre-2014 Iraqi and Kurdish regional figures disagreed with each other before the attack, and the killing, abduction and mass displacement documented since have made any single current count harder rather than easier to establish. (1)Estimates of the worldwide Mandaean population range from about sixty thousand to two hundred thousand. Iraq held sixty to seventy thousand before 2003 and had fallen to about five thousand by 2007, with most of the community displaced into Iran, Syria, Jordan and diaspora communities in Australia, Sweden and the United States, so the range reflects real demographic disruption and disagreement between community and outside counts rather than merely unpublished data. (1)Pew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report estimates the global Jewish population at about 14.8 million as of 2020, the smallest of the major world religions measured, concentrated primarily in Israel and the United States. (1)Pew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report puts the global Christian population at 2.3 billion as of 2020, about 28.8 percent of the world's population, up 122 million from 2010 even as its share of world population fell. (1)Pew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report puts the global Muslim population at 2.0 billion as of 2020, about 26 percent of the world's population, up from 1.7 billion in 2010 and growing about twice as fast as the world's population as a whole over that decade. (1)Adherents Today MaximumAll900 (1)121,962 (1)14,800,000 (1)2,000,000,000 (1)2,300,000,000 (1)Adherents Today MinimumAll900 (1)111,691 (1)14,800,000 (1)2,000,000,000 (1)2,300,000,000 (1)Also Known AsAllManichaean (1)Basis of the Membership FigureAllChurch-Reported Rolls (1)Independent Survey (3)National Census (1)Scholarly or Demographic Estimate (6)Current StatusAllA small Samaritan community survives today, divided between Holon in Israel and Mount Gerizim near Nablus, and continues to observe Passover with an animal sacrifice on the mountain in a practice long since abandoned by other traditions. (1)Era of DeclineAllHittite state religion ended with the collapse of the Hittite New Kingdom around 1200 BCE, after which its temple cults and pantheon passed out of continuous practice. (1)Public cult practice faded following the region's conquest by successive empires and the spread of Christianity and later Islam, with cuneiform religious writing itself dying out by the first centuries CE. (1)Survives in Central Asia and China, and in Fujian into the late imperial period (1)The Neoplatonic school at Athens is closed in 529 CE (1)The temple of Philae closes in the 6th century (1)Zoroastrianism lost its position as the state religion of Persia after the Arab Muslim conquest of the Sasanian Empire in the seventh century, and most of its adherents converted to Islam over the following centuries. (1)Era of Decline End YearAll1180 BCE (1)100 (1)529 (1)550 (1)1600 (1)Era of Decline Start YearAll1200 BCE (1)100 BCE (1)380 (2)600 (1)651 (1)Establishment StatusAllDeclared Not Established (1)Disestablished (1)Varies by Province (2)Form of the ConfessionAllThe Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed are the two most widely shared credal statements across the branches of Christianity. (1)The shahada, the declaration that there is no god but God and Muhammad is His messenger, is Islam's central creed and the first of the five pillars. (1)FounderAllJesus of Nazareth; the movement was organised by his followers after his death (1)Mani (c. 216-c. 276 CE) (1)Muslims hold Islam to be the restoration of the primordial religion rather than a new founding (1)No single historical founder is claimed. Mandaean doctrine names Yahya Yuhana, John the Baptist, as its true teacher, already recorded here as a doctrine of the tradition, though standard scholarship treats Mandaeism's own origins as older and more diffuse than one founding figure, emerging among Aramaic speaking baptismal sects of the Jordan Valley or southern Mesopotamia in the first centuries of the common era. (1)None (1)None in the historical sense (1)Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir (d. c. 1162), around whose community the tradition took its present form (1)The Prophet Muhammad (c. 570-632) (1)Tradition traces the covenant to Abraham and the Torah to Moses (1)Zarathushtra (Zoroaster); his date is contested (1)How the Expectation Is EnforcedAllCodified Obligation With Consequences (1)Customary Norm (1)Legal StatusAllIsrael/Palestinian Authority: the Kiryat Luza community on Mount Gerizim holds dual Israeli and Palestinian Authority identification (1)Marriage Position DetailAllQur'an 4:3 states: "And if you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with the orphan girls then marry (other) women of your choice, two or three, or four." Classical and contemporary Sunni and Shia jurisprudence alike reads this as permitting, not requiring, a man to be married to up to four wives at one time, on two conditions: material justice between the wives, in spending, clothing, and time, which Qur'an 4:129 immediately qualifies by noting that perfect justice in feeling, as opposed to material treatment, is not humanly possible and so is not what is required; and the financial capacity to support each wife. Monogamy remains the ordinary practice for most Muslims worldwide; the ruling recognizes polygynous marriage as licit rather than mandating it. (1)Membership Figure As OfAll1919-03-01 (1)1965-01-01 (1)2003-01-01 (1)2004-01-01 (1)2010-01-01 (2)2011-01-27 (1)2011-12-19 (1)2012-01-01 (2)2013-01-01 (2)2019-01-01 (1)2020-01-01 (3)2024-01-01 (1)Membership Over TimeAllA more recent estimate the U.S. State Department attributed to Yazidi community leaders put the population in Iraq at between 500,000 and 700,000, published just days before the Islamic State's August 2014 assault on Sinjar, after which mass displacement made any figure still more uncertain; Iraq has fielded no religion census since 1965. (1)A tertiary reference gives a more recent approximate total of about 900 as of 2024, continued growth beyond the community's own most recently published count, though without a named survey date of its own. (1)An Al-Monitor study estimated Iraq's Mandaean population at just 3,000 by 2019, a collapse of more than 95 percent since 2003 amid sectarian violence and mass displacement to Iran, Syria, Jordan and the wider diaspora. (1)By 1 January 2013, the same survey recorded 756 individuals (357 in Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim, 399 in Holon near Tel Aviv), a real and dramatic recovery, more than a fivefold rise from 1919, tracked by the community itself since no outside census counts Samaritans as a distinct category. (1)By 2020, the same Pew study found the global Christian population had risen by 122 million to 2.3 billion, even as its share of world population fell from 31 percent to 28.8 percent, as Sub-Saharan Africa overtook Europe as home to the largest share of the world's Christians. (1)By 2020, the same Pew study found the global Muslim population had grown 21 percent to 2.0 billion (26 percent of world population), growing twice as fast as the rest of the world's population over the decade, driven by Muslims having more children and a younger average age than members of any other major religion. (1)By Pew's 2020 "Jewish Americans in 2020" survey, that share had grown to 2.4 percent of US adults, an estimated 7.5 million people, a national self-identification measure rather than any single body's own membership rolls. (1)In its December 19, 2011 Global Christianity report, Pew Research Center estimated 2.18 billion Christians worldwide as of 2010, nearly a third of the estimated 6.9 billion global population, compiled from a country-by-country analysis of about 2,400 sources including censuses and nationally representative surveys. (1)In its January 27, 2011 report, Pew Research Center estimated about 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide as of 2010, 23.4 percent of the estimated 6.9 billion global population, compiled from roughly 1,500 sources across 232 countries and territories. (1)In Pew Research Center's 2013 "A Portrait of Jewish Americans" survey, 2.2 percent of US adults, an estimated 6.7 million people, identified as Jewish, according to Pew's 2020 follow-up report summarizing both waves. (1)Iraq's Mandaean community, historically the tradition's center, numbered 60,000 to 70,000 people before the 2003 invasion, an outside scholarly estimate rather than any government or community count. No comparable global figure with a matching date and method exists. (1)Pew's June 2025 update to its global religion modeling revised its own 2010 Christian estimate down slightly to 2.1 billion (31 percent of world population), a mild revision of the 2011 report's 2.18 billion figure for the same year, both recorded here side by side rather than one replacing the other. (1)Pew's June 2025 update to its global religion modeling revised its own 2010 Muslim estimate upward to 1.7 billion (24 percent of world population), a modest revision of the 2011 report's 1.6 billion figure for the same year, both recorded here side by side rather than one replacing the other. (1)Rivetna's 2012 revision of the same study (Revision 3, dated October 28, 2012, published in the FEZANA Journal's Fall 2013 issue) put the global Zoroastrian total at 111,691 to 121,962 depending on which Iranian population estimate is used, an 11.0 percent decline from the 2004 study driven mainly by sharp drops in Iran (down 37.5 percent), India (down 12.4 percent) and Pakistan (down 21.0 percent), partly offset by growth in diaspora countries such as the United States (up 32.5 percent). (1)Roshan Rivetna's worldwide Zoroastrian demographic study, published in the FEZANA Journal's Winter 2004 issue, estimated the global Zoroastrian population (Parsis in India, Iranian Zoroastrians, and the worldwide diaspora combined) at 124,953. (1)The 1965 Iraq census, the most recent Iraqi census with a published Yazidi figure, counted 70,000 Yazidis, nearly 1 percent of Iraq's roughly eight million people at the time. (1)The Samaritan community's own tracked population survey recorded 140 individuals on 1 March 1919, near the community's historic low point after centuries of decline from persecution, forced conversion and strict endogamy. (1)Observance NoteAllReading the sky was formal state theology, not private divination. The omen series Enuma Anu Enlil catalogued thousands of correlations between celestial events and royal fortune, and in the Neo-Assyrian period professional scholars wrote directly to the king reporting lunar eclipses, planetary positions and other sky readings as matters of state, their letters preserved in the royal archives at Nineveh. A king who ignored these reports was understood to be ignoring the gods' own communication. (1)Sacrifice at open air altars, civic festivals such as the Panathenaea at Athens, and the great Panhellenic games at Olympia and Delphi were central to its practice. (1)Origin AccountAllAncient Egyptian religion developed over three millennia without a single founder, from the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt around 3100 BCE to the religion's gradual eclipse under Roman era Christianisation. (1)Christianity traces its origin to the life, teaching, crucifixion and, in the faith of its adherents, resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in Roman Judea in the first century. (1)Greek religion developed from Bronze Age Mycenaean and, further back, Indo-European antecedents, without a single founder or founding revelation. (1)Islam traces its origin to the revelations received by the prophet Muhammad in Mecca and Medina in the early seventh century, collected as the Quran. (1)Jewish tradition traces its origin to God's covenant with Abraham and, most definitively, to the covenant given to Moses and the people of Israel at Sinai after the exodus from Egypt. (1)Mandaeism traces its origins to followers of John the Baptist and preserves a distinct Gnostic theology centred on a realm of light opposed to the material world, expressed in its own Aramaic dialect and script. (1)Manichaeism presented itself as a universal religion superseding and completing earlier revelations, and its scriptures were originally composed in Aramaic and Middle Persian before being translated across the many regions that the religion reached. (1)Mesopotamian religion developed across Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations over some three thousand years, without a single founder, and is known through cuneiform temple archives and myth texts such as the Enuma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh. (1)Samaritans trace their religious identity to the northern Israelite tribes and regard Mount Gerizim, rather than Jerusalem, as the true site chosen by God for the Temple, a divergence that has separated Samaritan and Jewish tradition for over two thousand years. (1)Zoroastrianism traces its origin to the teaching of Zarathushtra, whose date remains genuinely unsettled among scholars. A linguistic case built on the archaic language of his own hymns, the Gathas, places him roughly between 1500 and 1000 BCE in greater Iran or Central Asia, while Zoroastrian tradition and the Greek writers who preserved reports of him place him around the sixth century BCE. Neither dating rests on independent, externally verifiable evidence, and the two positions have not been reconciled. (1)Origin PeriodAllJudaism proper takes shape after the Babylonian exile (1)The community's own origin narrative and the scholarly one differ (1)The Gerizim temple dates to the 5th century BCE (1)The Panhellenic system is in place by the 8th century BCE (1)Origin Period End YearAll3000 BCE (2)1650 BCE (1)700 BCE (1)600 BCE (1)400 BCE (1)300 BCE (1)50 (1)277 (1)300 (1)632 (1)1200 (1)Origin Period Start YearAll3500 BCE (1)3300 BCE (1)1750 BCE (1)1500 BCE (1)1400 BCE (1)586 BCE (1)450 BCE (1)1 (1)30 (1)240 (1)610 (1)1100 (1)Place of OriginAllAnatolia, centred on Hattusa (1)Mainland Greece, the Aegean islands and the Greek colonies (1)Mesopotamia and the lower Tigris and Euphrates (1)Mount Gerizim and Samaria, in the central Levantine highlands (1)Roman Judaea and Galilee, spreading through the eastern Mediterranean (1)Sasanian Mesopotamia (1)Southern Mesopotamia (Sumer), and later Babylonia and Assyria (1)The eastern Iranian world, in Central Asia or eastern Iran (1)The Hijaz, in western Arabia: Mecca and Medina (1)The Kurdish highlands of northern Iraq, centred on Lalish (1)The Nile valley (1)The North and South Caucasus highlands, particularly the mountainous interior of historic Circassia, Ossetia, Abkhazia and highland Georgia (Pshav-Khevsureti and Svaneti). (1)The southern Levant: the highlands of Israel and Judah (1)Position on MarriageAllMarriage may licitly be polygynous (1)Position on SexualityAllSame-sex orientation or practice is held to bar full membership or participation (1)The body holds no single settled position; the question is actively and openly contested within it (2)Position on UsuryAllInterest is permitted but bound by ethical constraints against exploiting the poor (1)Interest of any kind on a loan is forbidden (1)Practice StatusAllDiscontinued as a state religion (5)Living, and practised in varied local forms (1)Partly restricted: some elements are closed to outsiders (6)Sexuality Position DetailAllChristianity is governed by no single worldwide teaching authority, and its major bodies read at every point on this question today. The Roman Catholic Church's Catechism of the Catholic Church holds that homosexual acts are contrary to natural law while insisting that persons with homosexual tendencies must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity, and reserves marriage to a man and a woman. The Russian Orthodox Church's Basis of the Social Concept, adopted at its Jubilee Bishops Council in August 2000, names homosexuality a sinful distortion of human nature and bars anyone who promotes it as a norm from work with children or youth or from military or reformatory positions, reaching beyond ordination. The United Methodist Church, one of the tradition's largest global bodies, ended its forty-year ban on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage at its 2024 General Conference. The Anglican Communion, in its own 2022 Lambeth Conference Call on Human Dignity, states that its forty-two member provinces hold differing convictions and pastoral practices on this question, some blessing same-sex unions and others continuing to hold that marriage is exclusively the lifelong union of a man and a woman. No statement speaks for Christianity as a whole. (1)Classical Islamic jurisprudence treats homosexual acts, generally termed liwat in the legal literature, as unlawful across all four Sunni schools, though the schools differ on the exact legal category and punishment. The Shafi'i, Hanbali and main Maliki position hold the punishment mirrors that for zina under the hadd category, a fixed penalty applied only under strict evidentiary conditions such as four eyewitnesses or a clear confession; the Maliki school's own harshest reading holds both parties subject to execution regardless of marital status; the Hanafi school instead leans toward a discretionary punishment, ta'zir, set by a judge rather than a fixed hadd penalty, on the reasoning that the specific evidentiary threshold hadd requires was not met by the available textual evidence. Across all four schools, the same-sex attraction itself is treated as distinct from the act and is not, on its own, held to be sinful; the legal rulings address conduct. (1)Judaism is governed by no single worldwide teaching authority, and its recognized movements read at every point on this question today. The Reform movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis authorized rabbis to officiate at same-sex ceremonies in 2000 and, in a 2014 responsum, held that a same-sex union may constitute Jewish marriage, kiddushin, in the full sense. The Reconstructionist and Humanistic movements likewise affirm same-sex marriage and ordain LGBTQ clergy. The Conservative movement's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards issued a combined responsum in 2006 that itself left the question unsettled, approving some liberalizing opinions on ordination and commitment ceremonies alongside others that retained the traditional prohibition, so both readings stand as valid within the movement. Orthodox Judaism, including its Modern Orthodox and Haredi streams, holds that the Torah forbids homosexual acts and sanctions only the marriage of a man and a woman, generally without denying a gay Jew ordinary synagogue membership. No statement speaks for Judaism as a whole. (1)Standard Rate ExpectedAllTen percent. (1)Two and a half percent. (1)Standing Giving ExpectationAllMa'aser kesafim, giving one tenth of income to charitable causes (tzedakah), is a widely practiced Jewish norm modeled on the Torah's agricultural tithes. Most halachic authorities today hold that it is not itself a biblical or rabbinic commandment but a minhag, a custom, though a small number of authorities have argued it carries binding force; the debate itself is long standing and unsettled rather than resolved in either direction. (1)Zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam, obliges a Muslim whose accumulated wealth exceeds a minimum threshold (nisab) to give 2.5 percent of that qualifying wealth annually. The Quran (9:60) names eight categories of recipients. In several Muslim-majority countries zakat is collected by the state itself rather than left to the individual, giving the obligation a legal as well as a religious force there; elsewhere it is a personal duty of conscience understood to be as central to Islamic practice as prayer and fasting. (1)Status TodayAllHistorical; not practised continuously (5)Living tradition, practised today (7)Supreme BeingAllAllah, God, held to be one and without partner or equal. (1)Ancient Greek religion recognised no single supreme being; Zeus held authority as king of the gods among the Olympians without being their sole creator or an object of exclusive worship. (1)Hittite religion recognised a vast pantheon sometimes described in its own texts as the thousand gods of Hatti, headed by the storm god of Hatti and the sun goddess of Arinna. (1)Mandaean theology centres on a supreme being of light, sometimes called Hayyi Rabbi, Great Life, from whom lesser beings and the material cosmos are held to have emanated. (1)The God of Israel, understood as one, without partner or physical form, referred to in the Hebrew Bible by the name written as the tetragrammaton. (1)The triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one being in three persons. (1)TheologyAllDualist: two opposed cosmic principles (3)Monotheistic: one God (7)Polytheistic: many gods (5)Transgression CategoryAllAkl mal al-yatim: consuming the wealth of an orphan. (1)Al-tawalli yawm al-zahf: fleeing from the battlefield. (1)Avon: iniquity, a sin arising from desire or moral failure, held more culpable than chet. (1)Chet: an unintentional sin, literally a missing of the mark, wrongdoing through error rather than intent. (1)Pesha: transgression, a willful rebellion against God, the most severe of the three, an intentional defiance rather than a lapse. (1)Qadhf: slandering chaste, believing women with unchastity. (1)Qatl al-nafs: killing a soul that Allah has forbidden, except by right. (1)Riba: consuming usury or interest. (1)Shirk: associating partners with Allah, the first and gravest of the Seven Destructive Sins (as-sab al-mubiqat). (1)Sihr: magic or sorcery. (1)Sin, understood as thought, word, deed or omission contrary to the will of God, ranging in Catholic moral theology from venial to mortal sin. (1)Usury Position DetailAllThe heter iska, literally a permit for a joint venture, restructures what would otherwise be an interest bearing loan between Jews into a shared business investment: the party supplying the capital and the party using it become partners sharing profit and loss rather than creditor and debtor, so any return the capital earns is a business profit, not loan interest, and the Torah's prohibition on taking interest from a fellow Jew (Exodus 22:24, Leviticus 25:36-37, Deuteronomy 23:19) is honestly not triggered rather than evaded on paper. The mechanism's formalization is credited to named medieval authorities, Rabbi Baruch ben Isaac's Sefer Ha-Terumah and Rabbi Yisrael Isserlin's Terumat Ha-Deshen among them, developed across the medieval period rather than at a single settled date. It remains in common use today, including for interest bearing accounts at banks under rabbinical supervision. (1)The Quran's treatment of riba came in stages rather than all at once. An early Meccan verse, Surah Al-Rum 30:39, contrasted interest unfavorably with charity as moral guidance, without yet imposing a legal ban. After the migration to Medina the tone sharpened: Surah Al-Nisa 4:161 rebukes an earlier community for taking interest despite being forbidden it, and Surah Al-Imran 3:130, revealed after the Battle of Uhud, specifically condemns compounding interest. The final and complete prohibition, covering interest of any kind, came in Surah Al-Baqarah 2:275-281, revealed near the end of the Prophet's life and describing persistence in the practice as tantamount to war against God and His messenger. This is why contemporary Islamic finance avoids interest bearing loans altogether, structuring transactions instead as profit and loss sharing partnerships or cost-plus sales. (1)BrowseCompareAncient Egyptian ReligionPrincipal Tradition Of1 entryAncient Greek ReligionPrincipal Tradition Of1 entryCaucasian Native ReligionPrincipal Tradition Of1 entryChristianityPrincipal Tradition Of10 entriesHittite ReligionPrincipal Tradition Of1 entryIslamPrincipal Tradition Of12 entriesJudaismPrincipal Tradition Of8 entriesMandaeismPrincipal Tradition Of3 entriesManichaeismPrincipal Tradition Of1 entryMesopotamian ReligionPrincipal Tradition Of1 entrySamaritanismPrincipal Tradition Of3 entriesYazidismPrincipal Tradition Of1 entryZoroastrianismPrincipal Tradition Of2 entriesSources1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category TreeComments (0)No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.Sign in to join the discussion.Reader Challenges (0)No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.