Many negative stereotypes of Muslims can be traced to the clashes between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe in the Middle Ages. Paula Sutter Fichtner explores here the particular dynamics between the Ottoman and Austrian Habsburg empires and chronicles the evolution of a political relationship that shifted from hatred to understanding. In the fourteenth century, Ottoman armies swept westward across the Danube Valley before confronting the Habsburgs, who ruled central and eastern Europe, and in Terror and Toleration, Fichtner charts the religious and political conflicts that fueled 300 years of war. She reveals how ruling powers in Vienna and the church spread propaganda about Muslims that still lingers today. But the Habsburgs dramatically reversed their attitudes toward Muslims in the seventeenth century, and through this story, Fichtner explains how one can recognize an enemy while adjusting one’s views about them. A fascinating read, Terror and Toleration sheds new light on the deep roots of the often contentious relationship between Islam and the West.

Civil war and conflict within countries is the most prevalent threat to peace and security in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. A pivotal factor in the escalation of tensions to open conflict is the role of elites in exacerbating tensions along identity lines by giving the ideological justification, moral reasoning, and call to violence. Between Terror and Tolerance examines the varied roles of religious leaders in societies deeply divided by ethnic, racial, or religious conflict. The chapters in this book explore cases when religious leaders have justified or catalyzed violence along identity lines, and other instances when religious elites have played a critical role in easing tensions or even laying the foundation for peace and reconciliation. This volume features thematic chapters on the linkages between religion, nationalism, and intolerance, transnational intra-faith conflict in the Shi’a-Sunni divide, and country case studies of societal divisions or conflicts in Egypt, Israel and Palestine, Kashmir, Lebanon, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Tajikistan. The concluding chapter explores the findings and their implications for policies and programs of international non-governmental organizations that seek to encourage and enhance the capacity of religious leaders to play a constructive role in conflict resolution.

In this book, Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama tackle the question: how does religious liberty develop?

Tolerance is generally regarded as an unqualified achievement of the modern West. Emerging in early modern Europe to defuse violent religious conflict and reduce persecution, tolerance today is hailed as a key to decreasing conflict across a wide range of other dividing lines-- cultural, racial, ethnic, and sexual. But, as political theorist Wendy Brown argues in Regulating Aversion, tolerance also has dark and troubling undercurrents. Dislike, disapproval, and regulation lurk at the heart of tolerance. To tolerate is not to affirm but to conditionally allow what is unwanted or deviant. And, although presented as an alternative to violence, tolerance can play a part in justifying violence--dramatically so in the war in Iraq and the War on Terror. Wielded, especially since 9/11, as a way of distinguishing a civilized West from a barbaric Islam, tolerance is paradoxically underwriting Western imperialism. Brown's analysis of the history and contemporary life of tolerance reveals it in a startlingly unfamiliar guise. Heavy with norms and consolidating the dominance of the powerful, tolerance sustains the abjection of the tolerated and equates the intolerant with the barbaric. Examining the operation of tolerance in contexts as different as the War on Terror, campaigns for gay rights, and the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance, Brown traces the operation of tolerance in contemporary struggles over identity, citizenship, and civilization.

Exploring the work of Locke, Mill and Rawls, and taking a closer look at contemporary debates, such as artistic freedom and holocaust denial, Catriona McKinnon presents an accessible introduction to toleration.

Political disputes over toleration are endemic, while toleration as a political value seems opposed to those of civic equality, neutrality and sometimes democracy. Toleration in Political Conflict sets out to understand toleration as both politically awkward and indispensable. The book exposes the incoherence of Rawlsian reasonable pluralist justifications of toleration, and shows that toleration cannot be fully reconciled with liberal political values. While raison d'état concerns very often overshadow debates over toleration, these debates – for example about terrorism – need not be framed as a conflict between toleration and security. Framing them in this way tends to obscure objectionable behaviour by tolerators themselves, and their reliance on asymmetric power. Glen Newey concludes by sketching a picture of politics as dependent on free speech which, he argues, is entailed by the demands of free association. That in turn suggests that questions of toleration are inescapable within the conditions of politics itself.

The diverse make-up of modern societies has long been a major preoccupation of political philosophy. It has also been a prominent focus for public policy. How should a society provide for the differences exhibited by its population? Should it view them with indifference, or seek to diminish them in the interest of social cohesion, or view them as positive goods that it should facilitate or promote? The answer cannot be simple, partly because the differences captured by the terms 'difference' or 'diversity' are themselves so diverse. The essays brought together in this volume focus on one sort of response to difference: toleration. They were written at different times and deal with different aspects of toleration, but they are characterised by a number of common themes.