The Place of Tolerance in Islam

by Khaled Abou El Fadl, Joshua Cohen (Editor), Ian Lague (Editor)

Khaled Abou El Fadl, a prominent critic of Islamic puritanism, leads off this lively debate by arguing that Islam is a deeply tolerant religion. Injunctions to violence against nonbelievers stem from misreadings of the Qur'an, he claims, and even jihad, or so-called holy war, has no basis in Qur'anic text or Muslim theology but instead grew out of social and political conflict.

Many of Abou El Fadl's respondents think differently. Some contend that his brand of Islam will only appeal to Westerners and students in "liberal divinity schools" and that serious religious dialogue in the Muslim world requires dramatic political reforms. Other respondents argue that theological debates are irrelevant and that our focus should be on Western sabotage of such reforms. Still others argue that calls for Islamic "tolerance" betray the Qur'anic injunction for Muslims to struggle against their oppressors.

The debate underscores an enduring challenge posed by religious morality in a pluralistic how can we preserve deep religious conviction while participating in what Abou El Fadl calls "a collective enterprise of goodness" that cuts across confessional differences?

With contributions from Tariq Ali, Milton Viorst, and John Esposito, and others.

Genres: Islam, Religion, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Philosophy

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl is the most important and influential Islamic thinker in the modern age. An accomplished Islamic jurist and scholar, he is Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law where he teaches Islamic law, Immigration, Human Rights, International and National Security Law. Dr. Abou El Fadl previously taught Islamic law at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, Yale Law School, and Princeton University. He holds degrees from Yale University (B.A.), University of Pennsylvania Law School (J.D.) and Princeton University (M.A./Ph.D.).

A high-ranking shaykh, Dr. Abou El Fadl also received formal training in Islamic jurisprudence in Egypt and Kuwait.

Dr. Abou El Fadl is a world-renowned expert in Islamic law and an American lawyer, offering a unique and seasoned perspective on the current state of Islam and the West. He is a strong proponent of human rights and is the 2007 recipient of the University of Oslo Human Rights Award, the Lisl and Leo Eitinger Prize. He was also named a Carnegie Scholar in Islam for 2005. He serves on the Advisory Board of Middle East Watch and was previously on the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch. He was also previously appointed by President George W. Bush as a commissioner on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. He regularly provides expert testimony in a wide variety of cases ranging from human rights and political asylum to terrorism, national security, and international and commercial law.

Dr. Abou El Fadl is a prolific author and prominent public intellectual on Islamic law and Islam, most noted for his scholarly approach to Islam from a moral point of view. He writes extensively on universal themes of morality and humanity, and the notion of beauty as a moral value. Dr. Abou El Fadl is a staunch advocate and defender of women's rights and focuses much of his written attention on issues related to women. As the most critical and powerful voice against puritan and Wahhabi Islam today, he regularly appears on national and international television and radio including CNN, NBC, PBS, NPR, and Voice of America (broadcast throughout the Middle East). His most recent work focuses on issues of authority, terrorism, tolerance, Islam and Islamic law.

He is the author of ten books and over fifty articles on Islamic law and Islam. His recent books include: The Search for Beauty in Islam: A Conference of the Books (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005); Islam and the Challenge of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2004); The Place of Tolerance in Islam (Beacon Press, 2002); Conference of the Books: The Search for Beauty in Islam (University Press of America/Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); And God Knows the Soldiers: The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses (UPA/Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); Speaking in God's Name: Islamic law, Authority and Women (Oneworld Press, Oxford, 2001) and Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Reviews

[Cara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really, really liked this book. It is essentially a debate between the primary author, Khaled Abou El Fadl, who writes the first essay, and several others who respond to him, and then his response to that. Kind of a weird format, but I loved it and I wish more books were like that. I also with I could find more books by Khaled Abou El Fadl, because they all seem to be both very expensive and unavailable at my local library.

Here's a good quote from this book:

If Americans allow the attacks of September to alienate them from their moral values and from the civil liberties won in countless battles over two hundred years, then the terrorists have won. Similarly, if the Muslim response to the state terror inflicted upon them by Israel and other countries is to become alienated from their religious morality, then Muslims have lost something that is far more important than the political struggle - they have lost their moral grounding.

[YouMo Mi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Written in the aftermath of 9/11, this short book confronts, according to eminent Islamic legal scholar and UCLA Professor Khaled Abou el-Fadl, whether "the bin Ladens of the Muslim word actually find justification for the ugliness that they perpetuate in any interpretive tradition in Islam? Does this level of intolerance and criminality find support, regardless of how flimsy or absurd, in some of the traditional interpretations?".

What follows from Abou el-Fadl's opening essay defending the "moral humanistic" imperative of the classical Islamic tradition are a collection of responses from journalists, theologians, historians, and sociologists, each bringing his/her take on what they agree or disagree with.

I recall after 9/11 (when I was a senior in HS) the never-ending debates on Islam as a religion and its relevance to understanding and (key point) responding to terrorism. The urge to push back against the intolerance and bigotry (largely based on stupidity) against what it is people thought Muslims believed was natural, even if not really helpful to disassociate Islam from 9/11.

Picking up this book two decades later, it's even more apparent that this book falls into the same trap of being well-meaning but misguided. Abou el-Fadl (whose views and voice I respect immensely) is conflating two very different modern developments whose relationship is far from clear: (i) the waning and "anarchy" of an authentic Islamic religious voice and authority in the 20th century and (ii) the rise of modern violent organizations such as Al-Qaeda who use Islamic notions of authenticity to justify their actions and appeal to the masses. Abou el-Fadl's thesis rests on whether you believe the former is the proximate cause for the latter.

Several essayists, like Tariq Ali, Stanley Kurtz, and Mashhood Rizvi, point to socio-economic and political factors, not theology, as a far more pertinent explanation of why a 9/11 happened, and, more importantly, that any policy being developed to "solve" for acts of terrorism would be wasting a lot of time and resources focusing on dissecting medieval commentaries on the Qur'an or engaging with Al-Qaeda in a religious debate. Some essayists like Abid Ullah Jan go further in saying such attempts to pacify legitimate Muslim resistance against oppression are hypocritical and reminiscent of oppressive tactics employed by former colonial masters. The remaining essayists do believe some form of religious engagement is needed to either reform or reframe how the Qur'an is interpreted if Islamic extremism is to be defeated as an ideology.

I tend to agree with the first group. Abou el-Fadl's own arguments focus on the readers (Muslims) of the Qur'an as the key factor in the extremist equation: "the Qur'anic text assumes that readers will bring a preexisting, innate moral sense to the text. Hence, the text will morally enrich the reader, but only if the reader will morally enrich the text...So if the reader approaches the text without moral commitments, it will almost inevitably yield nothing but discrete, legalistic, technical insights." In other words, the Qur'anic text is not the driver of extremism in Abou el-Fadl's eyes -- it's Muslim themselves and the lives they've lived, values and education they have (or have not) been imparted, and how much freedom such Muslims have to express and live their lives on their own terms. In his closing essay, Abou el-Fadl again acknowledges that "such dogmatists consistently seem to evaluate terrorism through the prism of international politics and nationalist aspirations, and not through the prism of Islamic moral thought. From the dogmatic perspective, injustices and immoralities committed by the like of the Taliban or bin Laden are not seen as fundamental violation against Islam's moral traditions...in light of the struggle for higher political goals."

So what is exactly driving Abou el-Fadl to even bring up religion if he acknowledges political and material considerations, not religion, are the cause (and ultimately the solution to) terrorism? Because he does not believe "theology is useless" to the conversation as Tariq Ali posits. Millions of Muslims, "justifiably in [his] opinion, acknowledge God as part of their moral and material universe...If theology does not matter, then they do not matter, and, ultimately, I do not matter either. It would seem to me to be both unwise and immoral to imply that the perspective of people whose theology is inseparable from their very existence simply do not matter."

Huh? This was unpersuasive in my view. I think the last two decades have shown, especially the refugee crisis precipitated by the Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan wars, that most people just want to live their lives in freedom, peace, and prosperity, not that different than everyone else living on this planet. Ask an average well-educated Iranian, Indonesian, Pakistani, Turkish, or Egyptian Muslim what their frustrations are --- it's not a lack of Islam present in their societies.

Abou el-Fadl is also touching on something that our increasingly interconnected world is leading to: skepticism, doubt and the demise of traditional forms of religiosity. As a believing Muslim, I welcome this. People have traditionally not been given freedom to choice on matters of religion. I agree conventional interpretations of the religion mask the actual freedom to doubt and question that (IMHO) the Qur'an encourages, but that is beside the point (much of this book also presumes a textual primacy theory of Islam). It doesn't matter if the Qur'an does or does not -- people's rights should not be derived from what religion says.

I sympathize with Abou el-Fadl's opinions because many of them align or overlap with my own on a personal level. But from a policy perspective, if the goal is to improve the moral condition of Muslims (informed by access to secular education, opportunities to prosper and societies based on freedom to even hate Islam), I would have preferred he not use his influential voice to propose a questionable thesis to distract Westerners from looking at Muslims as fellow human beings with their own flaws and experiences. Rather, his framework reduces Muslims to little more than conduits of a tradition, self-appointed guardians of theology whose admittedly vast and rich historical legacy is not what the lay Muslim knows or actually cares about.

A useful book to get a sense of conversations on Islam after 9/11, but otherwise, disappointing. If you're looking for a more scholarly work on the breadth of Qur'anic interpretations, Massimo Campanini's "The Qur'an: Modern Muslim Interpretations" is great.

[Ahmed · Rating 5 out of 5]

The "Place of Tolerance in Islam" is a SERIOUSLY underrated book on the issues facing contemporary Islam.

The book takes on the form of a series of essays written by a diversity of authors tackling the vital questions: "Why is the Islamic community witnessing an emergence of extremism today?" and more importantly "What must be done to pull the 'tolerant' Islam back into the forefront of the faith?" Though the book's title suggests a lightweight read on "kumbaya-Islam", in reality, the book ends up being a deeply intellectual set of essays on the overall state of Islam and modernity.

I can't stress enough how excellent the diversity of thought is here. For instance, a chapter written by an Islamopolitical-apologist bemoaning the "West's" residually colonial treatment of "Muslims as second-rate people" is immediately followed by the writing of an American conservative, sheepishly pointing to Max Weber's belief that "in times of social crisis, a religion's characteristic modes of action would be 'switched on'". Authors range from Jon Esposito and Amina Wadud to Tariq Ali and Akeel Bilgrami--and I can honestly say that I appreciated the exposure to such insightful thought leaders who I had not been exposed to prior.

Each of the writers is incredibly incisive and expresses their views eloquently. Though it takes someone familiar with the nuances in Islamic theology, contemporary Islamic history, modern political movements in the middle-east, and the "vibe" of the community to truly appreciate the observations being espoused here--nonetheless, the set of essays, at the very least, introduces readers to the simple fact that the community is as dynamic as it is vast. The challenges and opportunities that exist within the faith community prevent any simple reductive conclusions that the cause for Islam's "socal crisis" is singular, that its implications are simple, or that even a "social crisis" exists.

---

I picked up this book after meeting Eboo Patel at an interfaith event. He recommended this to me twice... and I have to say it did not disappoint. Ultimately, this is one book I am definitely going to recommend to friends.

[Sarah Lameche · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well I dragged myself out of bed to write this review (didn't want to forget), so apologies if it's rather short.
First of all I want to say I rarely find time to read these days so this was read over the past few weeks. I am sure there is a lot more I wanted to say about it than I will, however here goes.
This book was written not long after the twin towers were destroyed. Khaled Abou El Fadl and various others debate the reasons they feel extremists/fundamentalists etc do what they do. Is it because Islam says so? Is it political? Is it something else? Now I recently had my 17 year anniversary of reverting to Islam. In those years I have seen a dramatic change in where I live in regards to the Muslim community, integration (or lack thereof), segregation commonplace, gentleness replaced by harshness. I could go on. To be frank if this were how the Muslims were back in the day, I would never had reverted because the dawah I got was from males not females. Anyway the point I am making is the change around me saddens me. I reverted for the love of Allah but all I hear now is fear Allah. Yet every time I have troubled thoughts (am I the only Muslim who feels this way?), subhanAllah a person or book arrives at my door that shows me i'm not. This is one of those books. I must have most of Khaled Abou El Fadls books now and I devour them eagerly. This one has many differences in thoughts and opinions and that's what makes it so good. I cannot say I agree 100% with any of the authors here but I can say that I agree with a lot. What's ironic is that this book could have been written after the rise of Daesh. Sadly nothing has changed, or rather it has just got worse. This book is definitely one I would read again and recommend to everyone.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this short book of essays on the place of tolerance in Islam post-9/11. A few of the essays seemed to get off topic, but others were very strong and they all enriched my understanding of either Islam or how different people and groups in the world view Islam and its practitioners. If you read this, ask someone else to do so as well so that you can talk about it - my mom's going to read it soon so that we can share our thoughts.

[zaki]

Simply astounding collection of essays from many, many viewpoints. Abou El Fadl presents the initial thesis, but thinkers and stinkers from all over the place weigh in the debate; including stud-muffin John Esposito and hijabi-gone-wild Amina Wadud. Put at the top of your list.

[Sameem Ahmadzai · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excerpt from a brief paper I wrote putting this book into conversation with a book by Wendy Brown:

As Joseph Massad marks out for us, “Islam” has become a site at which several expulsions, projections, and displacements meet, ultimately revealing more about Western liberalism than it does about Islam in itself. Writing shortly after the events of 9/11, Khaled Abou El Fadl is largely aware of this, characterizing Western engagements with Islam as moving through a series of strict caricatures—all of which produce something unrecognizable to an adherent of Islam. The Place of Tolerance in Islam, then, is Abou El Fadl’s attempt to fashion together an account from within Islam—something he believes and recognizes to be sorely lacking. In this text, he argues that contemporary Islam faces a crisis of religious authority, that the historical emergence of particularly damaging strains of Wahhabism and Salafism, joined with the metastasizing growth of the State, have produced the very conditions through which ‘puritanism’ and ‘fundamentalism’ emerge. From this, the thick of Abou El Fadl’s initial essay is focused on disavowing these so-called puritans, explaining why their beliefs not only contradict universal human values but Islam itself, while also arguing that there is ripe ground for tolerance in Quranic discourse. Four years after this release, Wendy Brown published Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. In this text, Brown engages in a discursive analysis of tolerance, displacing the term from its otherwise accepted place of universality and transcendence, instead clarifying it as a tool of governmentality and subject construction. Here, we come to understand tolerance discourse as a mode of regulation—one that depends upon normative structures and power relations. These very power relations scaffold the way the tolerant are ascribed universality and thus granted normalcy while the tolerated are steeped in their own particularity. These dynamics coalesce to not only essentialize difference but render it depoliticized, casting group identities—that would otherwise be seen as toxic and immediately threatening to the liberal civic body—as tolerable insofar as they make no political claims and enjoy their group identities in private. Most of all, Brown comes into conversation with Abou El Fadl, presenting an appreciably thick analysis of tolerance discourse that troubles the otherwise good intentions Abou El Fadl came into his text with.

The point(s) of friction between these authors begin here: throughout The Place of Tolerance in Islam, Abou El Fadl clarifies that he is ultimately interested in “reclaim[ing] the “moral trust” of Islam” (5), which is to say that his focus is an inward-facing one. In this respect, his audience, at least from his most explicit signals, are Muslims themselves. Taken at his word, Abou El Fadl is attempting to provide the Muslim laity with the language and exegetical reasoning to disavow puritanism. What goes unseen, at least until we encounter Wendy Brown’s account of tolerance discourse, is the way Abou El Fadl’s invocation of tolerance and universal human principles serve as “instrument[s] of governance that [regulate] vulnerability according to a variety of governmental aims” (188). Put differently, if Abou El Fadl was writing mere months after the events of 9/11, then the secondary audience to his text was a Western one—one that was steeped in structural anxieties about the supposed dangers that Muslims and Islam purportedly posed. Thus, his insistence that “the real danger is that extremist interpretive modalities transform Islam into the outcast or the “other” that perhaps may be explained or interpreted, but not seriously engaged” (76) goes beyond asking Muslims to take internal initiative, instead sending signals to the Western, particulary American audience anxiously reading his arguments that it is not Western liberalism or imperialism that others Islam but Muslims themselves who carry out the task. I can appreciate what work he might be interested in accomplishing—something akin to managing a deeply distorted image of Islam while inspiring Muslims to do away with the puritanism he believes to be damaging the faith tradition—but I believe his analysis casts aside imperialism so strongly that it ends up reproducing the very logics of depolicitization that Brown elaborates on in her book. Taking on such a project of managing, perhaps even repairing, the moral image of Islam assumes that such a move is possible in the face of the logics of Western liberalism and imperialism—something Abou El Fadl fails to prove. I worry that those who brought up imperialism (such as Abid Ullah Jan) did so while flattening differences between forms of resistance and relying on exegetical tools like abrogation—two moves which Abou El Fadl was able to take advantage of. What renders such an analysis as doubly shortsighted is the broad prescription that Abou El Fadl makes at the end—that the onus of change falls onto “contemporary Muslim interpreters.” Casting aside what such a term really means or what kinds of action it really inspires, this suggestion is rooted in an analysis that does not begin where violence and oppression begin. My impression is that one can present theological analyses and disavowals of forms of ‘puritanism’ while also recognizing the histories of Western imperialism that ultimately produce the puritans in question and reproduce the othering of Islam that we continue to see today.

[Muhamed · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has the most amazing format. It opens with an Essay by Khaled Abou El Fadl "The Place of Tolerance in Islam". This essay is then followed by the reviews of the essay by 11 thinkers and scholars. While some find Khaled Abou El Fadl's essay honest, genuine, and a positive step some find the essay irrelevant despite its author's genuine's intentions. One also goes so far as calling Khaled opportunistic and worse. What is amazing is that Khaled includes all of these in the book allowing to reader to go through different arguments and reach their own conclusion. His remarkes at the end of the book titles "Reply" are among the best I have ever seen by Muslim scholars.
"was not to investigate the traditions of the non-Muslim West or to seek comfort in escapist latitudes of victimization or the destructiveness of angry self-pity." What he tries to achieve, instead, is to emphasise the moral integrity of the Islamic tradition and not to allow "the tradition to become nothing more than a rubber stamp for whatever contemporary Muslims deem to be politically expedient" devoid of any moral imperative.

[David F. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl has been described as "the most important and influential Islamic thinker in the modern age." An accomplished Islamic jurist and scholar, he received formal training in Islamic jurisprudence in Egypt and Kuwait as well as holding degrees from Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. He is currently the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Fellow in Islamic Law at the UCLA School of Law. Before joining the faculty at UCLA, he taught Islamic law at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, Yale Law School and Princeton University.

In the extended essay that begins this slim book, Dr. Abou El Fadl argues that the post-September 11th image of Islam as a reactionary, intolerant, and violent religion does not accurately represent the real traditional belief of Muslims. To the contrary, he declares his "unwavering conviction that I belong to a great moral humanistic tradition." Traditional Islamic jurists, he writes, "tolerated and even celebrated divergent opinions and schools of thought."

During the first centuries of Islam, clerics underwent a lengthy and intellectually demanding training that included an open discussion of differing viewpoints and interpretations. This training prepared them to be community leaders and judges in disputes between their coreligionists. As the secular authority in Muslim states grew increasingly powerful, centralized, and autocratic, Muslim clergy lost much of their authority, producing "a profound vacuum in religious authority" and "a state of virtual anarchy in modern Islam."

As the Muslim clergy were increasingly marginalized, the great centers of learning at which they were trained became equally marginalized and more and more clerics were self-declared holy men with little or no formmal training. Consequently, amateurish interpretations of Islam, exemplified by those of Osama bin Laden, gained sway over theologically illiterate Muslims justifiably angry at the poverty and powerlessness they experienced in comparison to citizens of the U.S. and other Western nations.

Dr. Abou El Fadl is particularly critical of Wahhabism -- a puritanical revision of Islam propagated by the Saudi monarchy. While Wahhabism claims to be the "straight path" of Islam, it is, according to Abou El Fadl, an abberant form of Islam, forged in the 18th-century slaughter of Muslims and non-Muslims alike. To call it "fundamentalist," he asserts, is misleading, since it flouts fundamental Islamic truths and distorts Islam by rejecting "any attempt to interpret the divine law historically or contextually."

He quotes specific passages to show that the Quran declares diversity among peoples to be Allah's divine intent. Further, contrary to what you may have been taught in a high school history class, the Quran opposes forced conversion of others to Islam, as practiced by the Taliban. In fact, the Quran explicitly states that Jews and Christians as well as Muslimswill go to Heaven.

Interpretations of the Quran that urge violence against innocents, he argues, require poorly informed, out of context readings of a line here/ a line there in my view, not unlike the practice of many Christian Fundamentalists. To show that, he cites the ambiguous verses by which Muslim extremists justify their acts, and their deceitful disregard of everything Quranic that prohibits their acts. He insists that any valid Quranic interpretation must square with the holy book's "general moral imperatives such as mercy, justice, kindness." "If the reader is intolerant, hateful, or oppressive," he concludes, "so will be the interpretation."

Far from sanctioning "holy war," Abou El Fadl reports, the Quran does not even contain the phrase. The entire concept of jihad as holy war was a later development rooted more in political and economic conflict than in religious difference. Moreover, far from supporting the "get even" (for Israel, for economic imperialism, etc) justification for terrorism, the Quran warns Muslims that the injustice of others does not permit them to be unjust in return. Furthermore, warriors who attacked innocent civilians were regarded by classic Muslim jurists to be "corrupters of the earth and criminals" -- guilty of "especially heinous crimes."

The eleven reactions to Abou El Fadl's essay add further depth to the debate. Milton Viorst, Middle East correspondent for The New Yorker, praises it as a "brilliant" explanation of why Muslims are "on the brink of becoming a permanent global underclass." Sohail Hashmi, who teaches international relations at Mount Holyoke College, agrees that politically motivated Quranic interpreters, not the Quran itself, feed the us-against-them mentality of violent Muslims. British culture critic Tariq Ali laments that "there was more dissent and skepticism in Islam during the 11th and 12th centuries than there is today." On the other hand, Abid Ullah Jan, a political analyst from Pakistan, blames all debates about Islam on "efforts by the United States and its allies to achieve economic and cultural hegemony by dominating or destroying all opposition." He denounces the essay as "an attempt to please Islam-bashers."

Abou El Fadl's response to the commentaries asserts that the extremists false fundamentalism threatens to turn Islam into "an idiosyncracy -- a moral and social oddity that is incapable of finding common ground with the rest of human society." His motivation for engaging in debate against extremists, he says, is "to deny such groups their Islamic banner." In his view, the ultimate issue for all Muslims ought to be the extremists' degradation of "the moral integrity of the Islamic tradition."

[Shirin Abdel Rahman · Rating 1 out of 5]

كلام جميل على الورق لكن لا يمت للواقع بصلة

[Isabelle Domingos · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating debate that accentuates the fundamental role of tolerance in Islamic thought. Highly recommend!

[Fred Kohn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow! What an interesting book! I chose this because of having previously read The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremistsand I wanted more from this author. Unfortunately not many ideas in this book were new to me. Instead, it consisted of a series of essays: an initial essay by Khaled Abou El Fadlwhich was essentially a very brief presentation of the ideas in the aforementioned book, followed by a series of responses by various authors, and a final reply by the author. What was most interesting and disappointing was the way the responses lined up: the Western commenters were monolithically sympathetic and the Eastern commenters critical. What pleased me most was to discover Tariq Ali; I felt he gave the most incisive and thought provoking response. I was glad to see that my local library has many of his books. I will definitely be checking them out!

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Abou El Fadl argues that Islam is a deeply tolerant religion and the rest of the book is contentious debate about the thesis. Responses from Tariq Ali, Milton Viorst, R. Scott Appleby and John Esposito, and others. Abou El Fadl claims that non-Muslims focus “on the bottom line of the functionality of Muslims—their utility or disutility—are Muslims dangerous or not? …Muslims are among the most powerless, dominated and abused people in the world… In contemporary Islam, the problem is not the text, but the reader… the morality of the Qur’an exceeds the morality of its interpreters… the challenge confronting Muslim intellectuals is how to critically engage the interpretive traditions of the past without falling into the intellectually arrogant and historically myopic view that anything produced in modernity is necessarily morally superior to anything produced in the past.”

[hoda · Rating 3 out of 5]

translated by : mohammad taghi delforooz

[Jefferson]

This was a Christmas gift from my brother-in-law, who recently returned from his second tour in Iraq...

[Keith Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting collection of essays on tolerance in Islam.

[Mindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

An easy read - but more importantly, an enlightening one. El Fadl's essay and the responses to it help the uninformed understand the debate within Islam concerning religious tolerance.