Including Islam within the fold of traditional western religious tolerance is not business-as-usual. It is an experiment. Our Lockean ideas of religious tolerance had their origins in the 16th century (the peace of Augsburg) and the 17th (the peace of Westphalia).
In other words, "our Lockean ideas of religious tolerance" coincided with the emergence of an institution that would displace religion at center stage in human affairs. For example, Judeo-Christian orthodoxy became a lot less important to people when industrialists began scheduling work on Sundays. Given the choice between sustenance and faith, human beings become much more flexible about faith!
The purported conflict between "Islam" and "the West" is really just a conflict between the contending forms of economic organization these terms can imply. The same held for "communism" and "free-market enterprise" -- that is, until communism proved amenable to the latter, as in the contemporary case of China.
Western investors are enormously "tolerant" of anything that makes them richer, just as they display the most principled objections to anything that does not. In this way, identifying our friends and foes on the world stage is more readily accomplished than by employing any other criteria.
2 comments:
The purported conflict between "Islam" and "the West" is really just a conflict between the contending forms of economic organization these terms can imply.
In what way is Islam hostile to business? I'm sorry, this claim is hard to believe without more evidence and more extensive argument. It certainly isn't self-evident.
Hey DBake,
I certainly agree it isn't self-evident. That's why I don't make that claim.
What is wrongly attributed to "Islam" is the hostility of local communities to a particular form of economic integration advanced on behalf of investors and their "rights."
This is posed as a "problem of Islam" insofar as Muslim communities in whatever way resist such integration.
But it's not about "Islamic religious tolerance" or anything else. This is evidenced in the warm US relations with Islamic regimes that fulfill business requirements, while remaining socially repressive. The same goes for "communism."
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