The Conceptual Intricacy of Toleration

Toleration is a key virtue in most religions and cultures which has received increasing attention from researchers in the past one hundred years. Despite massive efforts to clarify its conceptual meaning, it seems that no satisfactory result has obtained yet. Application of this term in different methodologies, views, schools of thought, and approaches by different people as well as its use in different scientific fields such as philosophy, ethics, religion, social sciences, politics, psychology, and history on one hand and its imprecise and indiscriminate application in the linguistics domain in the form of equivocation and content participation on the other hand have brought about ambiguity in its meaning and transmission, in a way that some have suggested that the term is paradoxical. Nonetheless, as a major concept, toleration presents a spectrum of methods of behaving against the opposite thoughts. It starts from endurance and leads to permissivism in the mystic knowledge domain. In other words, the relationship between toleration and permissivism is that of general to specific rather than equality or distinction. The religious outcomes of this study include the conceptual clarification of the two foregoing terms and familiarity with the conditions and problems that exist in them in the traditional and modern paradigms. Moreover, the study will set the grounds for classification and categorization of the toleration-oriented and permissivism-oriented teachings in the Islamic mysticism.