Taylor Charles - Boundaries of toleration

BOUNDARIES OF TOLERATION

RELIGION, CULTURE, AND PUBLIC LIFE

SERIES EDITORS

Alfred Stepan and Mark C. Taylor

THE RESURGENCE OF RELIGION calls for careful analysis and constructive criticism of new forms of intolerance, as well as new approaches to tolerance, respect, mutual understanding, and accommodation. In order to promote serious scholarship and informed debate, the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life and Columbia University Press are sponsoring a book series devoted to the investigation of the role of religion in society and culture today. This series includes works by scholars in religious studies, political science, history, cultural anthropology, economics, social psychology, and other allied fields whose work sustains multidisciplinary and comparative as well as transnational analyses of historical and contemporary issues. The series focuses on issues related to questions of difference, identity, and practice within local, national, and international contexts. Special attention is paid to the ways in which religious traditions encourage conflict, violence, and intolerance and also support human rights, ecumenical values, and mutual understanding. By mediating alternative methodologies and different religious, social, and cultural traditions, books published in this series will open channels of communication that facilitate critical analysis.

After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement, edited by Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen

Religion and International Relations Theory, edited by Jack Snyder

Religion in America: A Political History, Denis Lacorne

Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey, edited by Ahmet T. Kuru and Alfred Stepan

Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, Mark C. Taylor

Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal, edited by Mamadou Diouf

Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo, Mark C. Taylor

Democracy and Islam in Indonesia, edited by Mirjam Knkler and Alfred Stepan

Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference, edited by Linell E. Cady and Tracy Fessenden

Recovering Place: Reflections on Stone Hill, Mark C. Taylor

BOUNDARIES OF TOLERATION

Edited by

ALFRED STEPAN

and

CHARLES TAYLOR

Columbia University Press

New York

To Mark Kingdon, who made these conversations possible.

CONTENTS

H OW 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 Prizewinning novelist of Midnights 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 Khomeinis 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 Rushd, the brilliant twelfth-century scholar known in the West as Averros, who pioneered nonliteralist interpretations of the Quran. 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 Rushdies 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 Lockes 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 assumedsee Lockes 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