Andræ was born at Vena parish in Hultsfred Municipality in Kalmar County, Sweden. He came from a clerical family. He was the son of pastor Anders Johan Andræ and Ida Nilsson. He studied theology at Uppsala University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1917. As a historian of religion, his particular interest lay in the early history of Islam, particularly its Jewish and Christian origins, and in the psychology of religion, but he also combined these interests in the study of early Islamic mysticism.[2]
In 1985, Annemarie Schimmel remarked that until then only one study had "tried specifically to depict Muhammad's role in Islamic piety. Even today Tor Andrae's Die person Muhammeds in lehre und glaube seiner Gemeinde (1918) remains the standard work in this area, unsuperseded by any other major study, though complemented by random remarks in numerous modern work on Sufism. It is, however, unfortunately too little known even among Islamicists."[4][5]
References
^"Andræ, Tor Julius Efraim". Biografisk matrikel över Svenska kyrkans prästerskap. 1934. Retrieved 1 April 2020.
^Tor Andrae, Mohammed. The man and his faith (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons 1936; reprint: Barnes and Noble, New York 1955), translated by Theophil Menzel from a 1932 German edition.
