The training in research and through research on religions proposed by the ITI HiSAAR, being based on the critical approach of religions through the prism of several disciplines and the complementary perspectives of the five axes, embracing most of the great questions on religions, is defined as the accomplishment of all the interdisciplinary courses conducted at the University of Strasbourg in more or less explicit relation with this field, inserting them in an organic research dimension which is currently absent, and not only in the local panorama. The doctoral schools in the humanities and social sciences, to which the masters concerned by the ITI are attached, provide - and it cannot be otherwise - a training in research that is rather generic and transversal, and this training received cannot really be used for the construction of a specific and professionalizing research profile on the side of the religious phenomenon or of inter-religious relations, lacking an interaction that can coordinate all the complex competences to be possessed in order to achieve a scientifically reliable and complete framework in this field.
The construction, therefore, of this ITI will constitute a point of reference for all those who, in master's and doctoral programs, currently scattered in different units, deal with religions. For the first time in the history of the University of Strasbourg, those who work on the history and sociology of religions, already based on interdisciplinarity through its common seminars in the Master's degree "Religions, History and Society" (History major) and the Master's degree "Religions, Society and Public Space" (Sociology major), on the religious worlds of Antiquity (MIMA) and the Middle Ages (MEMI), on inter-religious issues (the leaders of the European project Interreligio/Interreg, being among the teacher-researchers of this ITI), on Islamology and the Muslim worlds (History major), on Persian studies (LLCER major), on Oriental languages and worlds, on the history of theology and canon law, are associated together in a training/research institution, which makes them intersect with the inescapable epistemology of anthropology/ethnology (Master's degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology) and archaeology (Master's degree in Archaeology of the Ancient Worlds) This is certainly a step forward for the University of Strasbourg, and more broadly for France and Europe, in terms of training and research in the complex field of the study of religious systems.