Einleitung

Interestingly enough, the Religious Studies-debates on the interdependencies between religion and politics have largely neglected the study of political and religious parties or factions and the interdependencies between such parties and fractions. The authors propose to include the term “fraction” (“Parteiung”) as a basic concept (keyterm) in the Study of Religions for all forms of group formation in opinion- and power-forming processes. They suggest to use such a concept to an-alyze group- and opinion-forming processes in pre-modern as well as non-Western contexts.