Islam : Beyond “tolerance”

Since September 11, 2001, we have been told time and again that our task as global citizens is to increase tolerance towards one another and to achieve a more tolerant society. Many Muslims have also emphasized that there are great strands of tolerance in Islam that must be articulated more clearly.

Let us beg to differ here. We need not be interested in teaching or preaching “tolerance.” But also we don’t want to see us kill and oppress each other. But words are powerful vehicles in shaping our thoughts, and there are often many layers of meaning embedded in words. The connotations of “tolerance” are deeply problematic. The root of the term “tolerance” comes from medieval toxicology and pharmacology, marking how much poison a body could “tolerate” before it would succumb to death.

Is this the best that we can do? Is our task to figure out how many “others” (be they Muslims, Jews, blacks, Hindus, homosexuals, non-English speakers, Asians, etc.) we can tolerate before it really kills us? Is this the most sublime height of pluralism that we can aspire to? We don’t want to “tolerate” fellow human beings, but rather to engage them at the deepest level of what makes us human, through both our phenomenal commonality and our dazzling cultural differences. If we are to have any hope of achieving anything resembling a just peace in the future, that examination needs to include both the greatest accomplishments of all civilizations, and also a painful scrutiny of ways in which the place of privilege has come at a great cost to others. That goes equally for both the Islamic civilization and for the Western powers of today.

In short, we Muslims do not wish for a “tolerant” Islam, any more than we long for a “tolerant” American or European society. Rather, we seek to bring about a pluralistic society in which we honor and engage each other through our differences and our commonalities.