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33 Tolerance and Pluralism in *

In 1985, Mohamed Talbi got the Lukas price at the University of Tūbingen in .The price is given annually to a personality internationally renowned for his or her work on mutual understanding between religions and civiliza- tions. In his generation, Talbi has been one of the leading figures among those who, on the Muslim side, propagated and practised religious dialogue. As early as 1972 he published Islam et dialogue, a lecture which he had given at Rome and which he had subtitled ‘Réflexions sur un thème d’actualité’,1 and recently he attracted considerable attention by soliciting Muslim jurists and govern- ments to openly abolish, on an international scale, the juridical status of what he liked to call ‘dhimmitude’. Only a few people have committed themselves to the cause of modern Islam to the extent that he did.2 But times have changed. Is dialogue still a ‘theme d’actualité’ and, if so, did we make any progress? Increas- ingly, conflicts are solved by means of violence rather than dialogue, by gov- ernments even more so, it seems, than by individuals. Dialogue has not only lost much of its vigour but also much of its credibility. German journalists feel free to use the expression ‘Dialoggequatsche’, dialogue blather. Is dialogue then merely the amusement of an unrealistic chattering class?

Christian-Muslim Dialogue

Christian-Muslim dialogue started at Bhamdoun in Lebanon in 1954, in a coun- try where both religions had been living together for centuries, never without tension but still in relative peace.3 In a way, the southern and eastern shores of

* This short preliminary essay was originally not intended for publication, but only meant to be an oral tribute to the friend and colleague honoured at Oxford. Most points need further elaboration, and the documentation has to be enlarged. 1 Maison Tunisienne d’Edition. . 2 Cf. his Plaidoyer pour un Islam moderne (, Desclée De Brouwer, 1998). The main issues of Talbi’s thinking are made clear in the recent appraisal by G. Jarczyk (ed.): Penseur libre en Islam. Un intellectuel musulman dans la Tunisie de Ben Ali. Entretiens avec Gwendoline Jarczyk (Paris: Albin Michel 2002). 3 Cf. J. Nasri Haddad, Déclarations communes Islamo-Chrétiennes 1954–1995. (Université Saint- Joseph, Institut d’Etudes Islamo-Chrétiennes. Beirut, 1997).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004336483_037 chapter 10: tolerance and pluralism in islam 473 the Mediterranean have always remained better grounds for such initiatives. In the encounters suffered from the fact that they ignored the agnostics and atheists who were so numerous in the West. In the long run, secularization turned out to be the decisive difference between both partners. This is why the dialogue between Muslims and Christians became a dialogue between the East and the West; what we finally got was a discussion about values. These values were passed off as Christian values, but in reality they had passed through secularization and had mostly been introduced in the Enlightenment, in opposition to Christianity or at least to the Christian churches. In the initial phase, we would still have been able to choose, as topics for our inter-faith | 34 discussions, values like humility, charity, altruism, equality, justice. But we chose instead human rights, tolerance, the emancipation of women. These were concepts which lent themselves to being exported with a certain feeling of superiority as an outcome of Western civilization; consequently they were universalized beyond their historical contingency, as ideals which, allegedly, had always been inherent in Western tradition. With such preconceptions in mind it was not easy to maintain an objective and balanced dialogue. There were not many Christians who protested against this unfortunate turn: the Western Churches had, though after long resistance and sometimes fierce opposition, finally complied with the new perspectives offered by a sec- ularized world.4 But the Muslims did not build up a counter-position either, and this was far more astonishing. There were, of course, those among them who simply turned away from dialogue; they became known, by a Western expression derived from American Protestantism, as ‘fundamentalists’.Reform- oriented Muslims, however, Sunni liberals as well as Shii revolutionaries, accepted the programme offered by the West. The main reason seems to have been, apart from occasional political considerations, that for them the value discussion was closely linked to a discussion about modernity. Since the 19th century the quest for modernity in Islam had propelled the attempts at reli- gious reform, and the modernity was the modernity achieved by Europe, a mix- ture of technical superiority and the freedom of the individual. The main lan- guage which transported Western thinking into the Orient in this early period (India excluded) was French. This is how tolerance entered the agenda. The way this topic developed, with all its political overtones, deserves some atten- tion.

4 One of the rare people who had his doubts and also expressed them was the present Pope. He did not object to dialogue, but practised it in a different style.