Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue.

• Author: Kumar, Nagothu Naresh
• Position: Book review

Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue

By Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz

USA: Harvard University Press, 2015, 138 pages, $17.95, ISBN: 9780674088702.

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AN AVOWED ATHEIST, Sam Harris, and Nawaz Maajid, former extremist, and founder of the organization Quilliam come together to take stock of Islam and a range of ancillary issues in Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue. The book is comprised of exchanges about Islamism, Muslim tribalism, interpretive latitude in the case of scriptures, and the need for secularism in the Muslim world.

Punctuated by candidness, civility, and enthusiasm to engage with a worldview other than one's own, these exchanges are sharp and cut through much of the ideological and conceptual clutter, leaving no room for obfuscation. The book is also marked, surprisingly, by agreement from both the interlocutors on a range of issues. Harris is adept at steering the discussion and raising thorny questions, while Maajid adds intellectual depth to the opinions he brings to the table. The dialogue incorporates the wider Muslim world and presents a semblance of accommodating a range of worldviews; it is remarkably suffused with an evangelistic desire to forge societies that are Western in model and tenor.

Keeping in mind the intricacies and complexity of the issues and actors involved, semantic and conceptual distinctions are furnished initially by Maajid. Distinguishing between Islamists and Jihadists, he states: "When I say "Islamism," I mean the desire to impose any given interpretation of Islam on society. When I say "jihadism," I mean the use of force to spread Islamism" (p. 18).

With these definitions in place, Maajid sets the tone of the book regarding Islamists--a tone that forms the sinew of the book with Harris in affirmation. In refusing to single out any particular political actor within the larger rubric of Islamism, Maajid repeatedly accuses Islamists as desirous of imposing a particular brand of Islam on the society. This anathema for Islamists of all hues is evident throughout the discussion.

While berating the Islamists for their contradictory approach to Western modernity wherein, on one hand they adapt to it by taking recourse to the ballot box while simultaneously railing against it, Maajid does not bring attention to the fact that the worldview, which he seeks to promote through his organization characterized by secularism in its Western model of separation between religion...