HOW CAN PEOPLE of diverse religious, historical, ethnic, and linguistic allegiances and identities live together? And that means: without violence and without the domination of some by others, without inflicting suffering on each other? This is certainly one of our major preoccupations today. But it has recurrently preoccupied people and societies throughout history. Even when domination of some by others was considered normal and inevitable, rulers often tried to avoid its more brutal forms.
To help us begin our reconsideration of toleration in the widest possible way, we invited Salman Rushdie, the Booker Prize–winning novelist of
Midnight’s Children, to inaugurate our deliberations. Rushdie has lived with, and thought profoundly about, religion and the boundaries that demarcate intolerance from tolerance, and even those that cross over beyond tolerance, to mutual respect. Though condemned to death for apostasy by Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa for his novel
Satanic Verses, Rushdie reflects broadly and beautifully over his childhood visits to the mutually tolerant Sufi-Hindu culture of Kashmir and the fact that his father chose the surname Rushdie after Ibn Rush’d, the brilliant twelfth-century scholar known in the West as Averroës, who pioneered nonliteralist interpretations of the Qur’an. Rushdie analyzes why this tradition is now under great attack and suggests how it might be recovered. He uses poetic reflections to illuminate how the great Mughal leader Akbar created a culture of tolerance, and finally mutual respect, that transcended much of his despotic origins. This and much more. Read, enjoy, and reflect.
In the rest of this volume a series of distinguished philosophers, historians, sociologists, and political scientists take up Rushdie’s suggestive challenges. The question they all address is how can people of diverse allegiances and identities live together.
The language in which these questions were thought out in the classical literature of Western civilization was that of toleration. The milestones in what we in the West understand as our progress toward a better form of society, our liberal democracy, were marked by edicts of toleration, by Locke’s Letter on Toleration, by appeals to toleration. This was part of the natural language of human discourse in the West from the sixteenth century onward.
But, recently, the term toleration has come under attack. Many people want to argue, in our multicultural societies today, that we have gone beyond toleration, and that there is something demeaning to the beneficiaries in talk of tolerating this or that group.
In this volume a number of us recognize that the classical argument for toleration implies that the very act of proposing to tolerate a group, or a practice, or a way of life was already to presuppose that there was some problem with this group: they were dangerous or disturbing to social peace or unpleasant or distasteful. Normally, states would take measures to counteract these negative features, perhaps expelling the group or isolating it or forbidding or limiting some of their group practices. However, the state may have decided to forbear from applying these measures, at least to the full extent. Such forbearance is a key part of this literature on toleration.
The possible motives for states and individuals of such toleration are many and multilayered. We may think that forbearance leads to greater social harmony, that it will arouse less conflict, less mutual hostility than taking the road to repression. Or some may argue that a given group is not as dangerous as had been assumed—see Locke’s argument for tolerating dissenters (although not atheists and Catholics). Alternatively, we may tolerate out of compassion or humanitarian feeling.
But in all these cases we are still admitting that there is something wrong with the target group or practice, something which would normally call down on them some negative measures, even though we find reasons to suspend or mitigate these. We can see why the word
toleration can offend today, since many of us would like to see ourselves as part of a multicultural, liberal society, where (a) differences—of culture, of religion, of sexual orientation, etc.—are not seen as threats to good order or good taste, but on the contrary as potential enrichment; and thus (b) where immunity to special negative treatment is secured not by arguments mitigating deserved discrimination, but by rights. Measures securing individual rights and forbidding discrimination are inscribed in all the charters that are a fundamental component of contemporary democratic constitution building.
It is clear that the logic of toleration, and that of multicultural rights entrenchment, are quite different from each other. How can anyone say that I am receiving as a fruit of toleration something that I have a right to? We would probably also agree that a politics of rights is a more satisfactory arrangement than a politics of tolerance. It is more in keeping with human dignity when we are insured against special negative treatment by right, rather than by the wisdom of governments or majorities who may see good reasons to mitigate this treatment in our case. In that sense, rights take us “beyond toleration.” However, even though we are happy to analyze politics beyond toleration, we believe that the concept and practice of toleration are both still essential.
Essential, because we can raise the serious question whether we have really succeeded in transcending altogether the logic of toleration, and whether banning the word may not blind us to the case for forbearance in certain situations that still recur. There is a liberal zealotry which can be as short-sighted and inhumane as the other modes—religious, national, ethnic—that we see in history; and many of these older modes can hide themselves in liberal garb. The present wave of Islamophobia spreading in the Western world is a good case in point: xenophobic and exclusionary sentiments that give themselves what seem impeccable liberal and feminist credentials can be unleashed without restraint.
These are among the questions that will be discussed in this book. We want both to explore the issues and forms of toleration in different contexts and the real possibilities of going beyond toleration in certain circumstances.
Part 1, “Classical Western Approaches to Toleration,” examines conceptual debates about toleration mainly in the classical Western context.
Part 2, “Before and Beyond Classical Approaches to Toleration,” documents some largely unexplored variants of toleration in non-Western cultures, some of which predate classical Western arguments about toleration and some of which go beyond toleration to mutual respect practiced well before the creation of modern multiculturalism in the West.
Part 1 opens with a penetrating study by Ira Katznelson, called “A Form of Liberty and Indulgence: Toleration as a Layered Institution,” of the logic of toleration and of the different sites and configurations that it has assumed in Western history. It also contains a warning against too quickly assuming that we have transcended the need for such tolerance. The next two chapters are a debate about secularism and its relationship to toleration between Charles Taylor and Akeel Bilgrami. Charles Taylor, in his chapter “How to Define Secularism,” offers a reconceptualization of secularism for the new era of multiculturalism, that is, for societies which contain major religious and cultural differences, but which claim to go beyond toleration in their management of these differences. Akeel Bilgrami follows with “Secularism: Its Content and Context,” which argues that Taylor’s new definition accommodates multiculturalism so much that it might make it difficult to utilize secularism to condemn, and, indeed, make illegal, some dangerous forms of intolerance. In the final essay in
part 1, “Half-Toleration: Concordia and the Limits of Dialogue,” Nadia Urbinati presents a fascinating historical study of a road not taken. She describes the early post-Reformation notion of “Concordia Christiana,” which offered a formula for the harmonious coexistence of Christian confessions that did not appeal to toleration, but rather to a humanist ideal of concord drawn from Cicero. Her chapter explains how Concordia did not succeed and why the route out of discord and conflict in the modern European tradition turned out to be that of developing toleration.
Our choice in this volume to look at the world history of toleration in
part 2 helps make it absolutely clear that arguments for the use of toleration and its analogues were not, as is often argued, developed first in Western Europe and only then diffused to non-Western cultures. Rajeev Bhargava in his “Beyond Toleration: Civility and Principled Coexistence in Asokan Edicts” argues that Emperor Asoka, who ruled much of India from 269–232
B.C.E., during a period of internecine religious conflict, helped reduce such sectarian slaughter by installing, in thirty different locations throughout the Indian subcontinent, stone pillars to advance arguments against intolerance and for civility and principled coexistence. For example, Asoka’s Rock Edict VII argues that he “wishes members of all faiths to live everywhere in his kingdom. For they all seek mastery of the senses and purity of mind.” Rock Edict XII goes beyond the boundaries of seventeenth-century Western ideas of toleration, which imply that a group should be tolerated despite being disliked, by asserting that King Asoka “honours men of all faiths.” He argues that all faiths deserve respect and that everyone should guard “one’s speech to avoid extolling one’s own faith and disparaging the faith of others. . . . . The faiths of others all deserve to be honoured…. Concord alone is commendable, for through concord men may learn and respect the conception of Dharma [faith] accepted by others.”
A major task that must be done before toleration can become a powerful conceptual variable in the social sciences is the creation of better analytic categories concerning the boundaries of toleration. The chapter by Karen Barkey, “Empire and Toleration: A Comparative Sociology of Toleration Within Empire,” pays particular attention to the boundaries between intolerance and tolerance and develops analytic categories of what factors contribute to boundary changes. Barkey poses, and convincingly answers, a fascinating comparative question. Why and how did the Ottoman Empire, which started with greater ideological arguments and governmental mechanisms for toleration of diversity than the Habsburg Empire, with its confessional absolutism, cross paths with the Habsburgs in the eighteenth century, when the Ottomans embarked on a route of intolerance and persecution of the very groups they had gladly tolerated while the Habsburgs declared an Edict of Tolerance?
Sudipta Kaviraj’s chapter, “Modernity, State, and Toleration: Exploring Accommodations and Partitions,” strongly contests what he considers modern social science’s tendency to view the question of toleration through a simple linear narrative. He also contests the dominant views of many modernist Indian nationalist historians who see Indian history as a chronicle of unceasing religious tension. Kaviraj offers a fundamentally new, nonlinear, history of religious conflict, accommodation, and intermittent periods of tolerance and intolerance over twenty-five hundred years.
In the concluding chapter of the volume, “Muslims and Toleration: Unexamined Contributions to the Multiple Secularisms of Modern Democracies,” Alfred Stepan subjects the widespread assumption of a democratic deficit in the Muslim world to close empirical examination. He documents that over 400 million Muslims outside of the West actually live in countries normally classified as democracies by both of the two most authoritative annual surveys of democracies in the world. He examines how and why Muslims in Indonesia, Senegal, as well as the 180 million Muslims in democratic India, rejected any early Rawlsian idea of keeping religion out of the political arena. Rather, in a form of cocelebration of all religions, and policy cooperation with secular authorities, Muslims helped craft new forms of democracy and toleration, adding to the repertoire of the modern world’s multiple democratic secularisms. In Indonesia these practices have led to 97 percent of boys between the ages of thirteen and eighteen being literate and 96 percent of the girls. In India, in a survey of 27,000 respondents, 71 percent of Hindus and 71 percent of Muslims affirmed that “democracy is always preferable.” The same survey documented the counterintuitive finding that, for Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, “the greater the intensity of religious practice, the greater the intensity of support for democracy.” Fortunately, there are more routes out of intolerance and toward toleration and democracy than standard accounts of secularism normally recognize.