Confessional cousins and the rest: The structure of Islamic toleration

Abstract

This article is an expanded version of a paper given on 22 November 2003 in a session of the American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings in Chicago, organized by Vinson Sutlive in honour of George and Laura Appell, entitled ‘Human rights and cultural preservation in the interest of peace’. I am grateful to the RAI for inviting me to represent it at the AAA meeting, to Jean La Fontaine for her comments on an earlier draft, and to a number of extremely helpful anonymous referees. 1 Another historical example may be the pagan Vikings who appeared on the Spanish and Moroccan coasts in the ninth century and were called Mājūs, that is Magians or Zoroastrians, not because they were thought to be Persians but because as a people recognized by law they did not have to be fought, and were eligible for a truce for the purposes of trade (Brunschvig 1986, Brett and Fentress 1996). However, this is disputed (Melvinger 1986). 2 From the National Democratic Alliance's Resolution on the Issue of Religion and Politics in the Sudan, passed at a conference in Asmara, capital of the state of Eritrea, in June 1993 (Wondu and Lesch 2000: 234). I am grateful to Alex de Waal for drawing this to my attention. 3 Since this article was written, a polemical correspondence has been published in the Times Literary Supplement, beginning with the criticism that certain current evocations of the ambience of toleration in medieval Moorish Spain (al-Andalus) are excessively romanticized (see: ‘Tolerance, Islam and al- Andalus’, 23 July and 30 July 2004, in response to a review of a book by William Dalrymple). This leads inevitably to an argument as to what constitutes real toleration and as to the respective achievements and failings of Christian and Islamic civilization in this regard – a highly emotive topic today. I have tried in this article to explore the differences in the two historical traditions without making the unscholarly assumption that one of the two is superior, and conclude that discussion of the topic would benefit from an understanding of the more hierarchic character of Islamic toleration.