Conclusion
This trawl through texts by Ernest Renan on the one hand and Al Afghani and his disciples on the other shows that the issue of compatibility between science and religion was of equal concern to thinkers both north and south of the Mediterranean Sea. It confronted them to numerous theoretical problems, considerably more, at any rate than the exchange in the Journal des débats would suggest. The latter bears witness to the respect, evidenced elsewhere in their writings, the two thinkers showed each other and which was founded in an unspoken agreement on the possibility to overcome their contemporaries' frontal antagonism attributable among other things to failings in those speaking in the name of religion. And yet the reasons behind both men's adoption of this position, as well as the way they arrived at it are fundamentally different. Al-Afghani sees science as a political tool “the West” (al-gharb) is wielding for no purpose other than the annihilation of “Islamic values”, which he sought to demonstrate through the Indian example. This is not the case for Ernest Renan however: for him colonial stakes are not relevant to the relation between science and religion. He personally admits to a strictly humanist interpretation of Christianity but never would he subordinate science to any religion whatsoever.
