Religious Liberty and the Muslim Question
This essay intervenes in a cultural war that has taken place in the West between “Islamopluralists” and “Islamoskeptics.” It looks at the forty-seven Muslim-majority countries in the world and assesses the condition of religious freedom there. These count
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Religious Liberty and the Muslim Question Daniel Philpott
11.1 Introduction At least as far back as the attacks of September 11, 2001, a contretemps over the character of Islam has raged in the West. The debate carries all the marks of a culture war—it is polarized, polemical, and public—and recurs every time Muslims commit acts of violence: Paris, Madrid, London, Berlin, Orlando, Benghazi, San Bernardino, Fort Hood, and so on. It takes place on the internet and cable news shows, on the op-ed pages and talk radio, and while it is expressed crudely at times, it finds intellectually sophisticated parallels in higher brow publications like The Weekly Standard and The New York Review of Books. At the epicenter of the debate is a question directly relevant to this volume’s central theme. The question is: Is Islam tolerant?1
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This essay is based on Philpott, Religious Freedom In Islam.
D. Philpott (*) Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 V. Karpov, M. Svensson (eds.), Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54046-3_11
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One on side of this “Muslim Question”2 can be found “Islamoskeptics” who hold that violence and repression are hard-wired into Islam’s texts and traditions; that Islam is inhospitable to liberal democracy; and that the West should gird up for ongoing conflict with the Muslim world. The opposite pole consists of “Islamopluralists” who counter that Islam is diverse in its teachings and traditions; that its political expression varies across history and circumstances; that it is welcoming to liberal democracy; and that the West ought to pursue dialogue with Muslims, find common ground, and own up to the past injustices through which it contributed to Islam’s violent side. This essay will assess the Muslim Question according to the criterion of the human right of religious freedom, which is broadly the civil right of persons and religious communities to practice, express, change, renounce, or spread their religion. The essay presupposes that religious freedom is a universal principle both in the sense that it is rooted in human nature and common morality and in the sense that is articulated in major human rights conventions.3 Religious freedom is a strong criterion for judging whether a religious tradition is tolerant. It calls for not merely the kind of tolerance that amounts to a truce or restraint from the use of force but also an enduring and principled respect for the full citizenship rights—consistent with international human rights standards—of people who espouse profoundly different answers to the most ultimate questions of human life. Religious freedom is also more demanding than popular democracy, which involves elections and representation but is compatible with gross mistreatment of minorities. The religious freedom criterion indeed addresses much of what the Muslim Question is all about. Will Muslims respect the rights of the members
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