Learning tolerance ...

During a second session at the Crime & Justice Festival in Melbourne, I managed to find time to discuss tolerance with a young local philosopher named Damon. I can’t quite remember what we spoke about but there was a fair degree of laughter. I know I probably didn’t get a chance to discuss the matters I’d written down beforehand, which I’ve summarised below. All bracketed page references are from the book.

[01] Sheik Hilaly was an example of both tolerance and intolerance. He showed us his tolerant side in his lack of sectarianism between Sunnis and Shias at a time when this kind of stuff was rife. He also showed us his tolerance in the way he handled the woman dressed in a bikini at our campsite in 1990 (pp 264-265). However, his intolerance toward Jews during a speech in 1988 wasn’t the best example of tolerance.

[02] The young man Hilmi whom I met during my last days at Macquarie University showed enormous tolerance toward violent intolerance. He introduced me to the magazine Nida’ul Islam, a magazine which was published in both Arabic and English. I occasionally wrote for the English section, and like probably most of the magazine’s readers, I didn’t have much of a clue about what the Arabic section actually said. Hilmi seemed to think that killing civilians who didn’t belong to your faction was OK. At least that is how he justified the actions of the so-called “Armed Islamic Group” in Algeria (pp 270-271).

[03] I rely on Martha Nussbaum’s explanation of the “clash within societies” (her alternative to Huntington’s “clash of civilisations”) to define fascism (pp 299-300).

[04] We need to be able to work for justice even with people we otherwise disagree with. I learned this (pp 283) from the example of Muhammad’s establishment of the Hilf al-Fudul (Alliance of Virtue) and from the Indian sufi scholar Ahmad Sirhindhi’s notion of khidma (service) being the highest stage of one’s journey to God, even higher than feeling totally immersed in God (wahdat ash-shuhood).

And now for an illustration of the kind of thing my mum would never wear now even if you paid her a few million rupees.