Introduction [The Sage Encyclopaedia of the Sociology of Religion]

Religion, understood as a Eurocentric concept, has been central to humanity since systematic and organised concerns about the non-visible and the afterlife started to develop. The sociology of religion, on the other hand, is more recent and started at the beginning of modernity with the late 19thand early-20th-century works of the likes of Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and William E. B. DuBois. There were some precursors to this discipline going back to early 19thcentury thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Henri de Saint-Simon, and even further back during the Middle Ages and away from Europe with Al-Biruni and Ibn-Khaldun.