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Cultural Pluralism and Religious Life

ISLAM HAS universalist and particularist voices, just like Judaism and Christianity. It is wrong to think that liberals in mainline religious institutions, those who eschew fundamentalist views of Scripture, are the only true cultural pluralists in a society. Liberal churches, synagogues, and Islamic communities have more at stake in promoting tolerance and even cultural pluralism, as their members normally also have a strong structure of interreligious interaction in their everyday life-including business and trade and sometimes even social relationships. But there are also many examples of conservative religious communities where tolerance and pluralism are valued.

Where the cultural conditions exist for these interactions, we can expect notions of toleration and even multiculturalism to emerge. For example, one thinks immediately of medieval Moorish Spain and Moghul India as two places where Islam was the protector of multicultural societies. It is important not to idealize these societies; they contained many episodes of intolerance and frequent patronization as well as very high degrees of toleration for the medieval period.

One thing they shared is lack of emphasis on traditional notions of conversion. We have already noted that religions which seek converts very often are quite articulate on the horrors awaiting sinners in the afterlife, as well as the pleasures awaiting the faithful. In both Moorish Spain and Moghul India, there was often a kind of moratorium on missionary activity. The conditions that produced the moratorium were partly similar and partly different. In both Moorish Spain and Moghul India, Muslim rulers found themselves ruling a large population of non-Muslims who had considerable relations with coreligionists in neighboring populations. Similarly the Moors had to rule amidst continuously changing political situations with large subject populations of Christians and Jews. The Moors were sometimes able to encounter Jews and Christians with significant degrees of sympathy and tolerance.

The notion of the afterlife adjusted to these social circumstances. In Muslim Spain, the high philosophical tradition covertly admitted that the universalists, the true philosophers of all religions, all had a place in eternity. Indeed Aristotelianism even banished personal afterlife as a logical possibility. It is hard not to think that the expression of these notions, if not their dominance in the society, was parallel to the toleration that sometimes developed in Moorish Spain.

In Moghul India, which had a different kind of problem because Hindus were not obviously categorizable to Islam as “a people of the book,” notions of the afterlife began to fade in importance completely. For instance, Babur, founder of the Moghul Dynasty and legendarily the descendant of Tamerlane the Conqueror, wrote a Persian poetic couplet in which he stated that the faithful should enjoy the pleasures of this world for another world does not exist. Also Sufi mystics were active in the area, explicitly linking their mystic experience with that achieved by Hindus. This discussion of the afterlife fits a society that needs to develop toleration for its fellow members of different religions.

The Afterlife and Cultural Pluralism

THE VERY economic lack of development that causes Arabs to migrate to the West also contains some promising innovations. Islam is truly a world religion, fully as much as Christianity. It is the majority religion in the Arab world and its immediate neighbors but it is also a significant minority in India and a number of South Asian countries, as well as a growing vocal minority in Europe and the United states.91 Styles of tolerant Islam have reemerged in some European countries, an Islam better equipped to deal with a more culturally plural world. Tariq Ramadan, for example, outlines new theological developments that emerge in Islam as it lives in Western countries.92 A new book called Taking Back Islam asks why