A Comparative Study of Tolerance in Islam and Christianity

This paper examines the Islamic view of "tolerance" and compares it with "tolerance" in the view of modern Christianity. The present view of Christian tolerance dates back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and is the result of the changes brought by the religious reform movement after the officialization of Christianity by Constantine, setting up the courts of doctrinal inquisition, taking a rigid attitude towards critics and assassinating many intellectuals. Accordingly, Christian tolerance was used in this sense of “on religion", not "in religion", i.e. outside the realm of Christianity and the result of social and political necessity. In contrast, the idea of tolerance in Islam has its roots in the Quran, Sunna and the hadiths of the infallible Imams. Most Islamic schools offer a different interpretation of tolerance from that of Western tolerance or its universal ideas. The present paper seeks to establish the fact that the origin and levels of tolerance in Islam are fundamentally different from those of Christianity, and the issue of tolerance is not interpreted as on religion (casual) but as in religion (inherent character of religion).