Particularist Universalism: A Response to Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im

Rather than respond to Professor An-Na'im's article, with whose general direction I fully agree, I would like to tease out some problematic aspects of the project he is advocating. An-Na'im joined the Islamic reform movement of Mahmoud Muhammad Taha in 1968 and continued to work in that context until fundamentalists came to power in Sudan and suppressed the movement in December 1984. An-Na'im went into self-exile in April 1985, and has since labored for what he terms an "Islamic Reformation."¹ His main concern is thus naturally for results, for what can be done to bring Islam into harmony with global standards of human rights. The method that An-Na'im recommends to achieve this aim is one that demands that local sources be found for whatever standards are proposed globally—an approach that might be termed "particularist universalism." The article following mine, by Tova Hartman, takes a similar approach to An-Na'im's. And it is perhaps a hopeful sign that a variety of scholars and organizations are now working experimentally and quietly in this vein. Perhaps too quietly: the scholarly public seems mostly unaware of these recent attempts to negotiate, with all due reticence and care, between the universal and the local on behalf of toleration, human rights, and peace. These efforts are examples of what, I take it, Common Knowledge has been supporting for some years: the participation of scholars as scholars in concluding enmities too ancient and complex to be handled by politicians or even diplomats on their own.² For these problems are less about borders or even armaments than they are about history and about philosophical vocabularies. In response and in tribute to Professor An-Na'im's article, I would like to examine one aspect of this negotiation between the particular and the universal as it concerns toleration and the acceptance of difference.

The Improbability of Toleration

Toleration, as Bernard Williams once remarked, is an "impossible virtue."³ After all, the issue of toleration arises only when a stance, act, or practice is deemed intolerable. We are obliged to bear what we deem unbearable—to accept, abide, or accommodate views or practices that we reject or even despise. Hence, toleration proposes the maintenance of contradiction as an aim, obliging us to live with cognitive dissonance. Viewed from that perspective, toleration of the intolerable is virtually an offense against logic. Still, from another perspective, toleration—however difficult or near to impossibility—is an insufficient virtue. Even its advocates deem it too feeble (thin is a word often used) to serve as a basis of civil order in a world of radically divergent behaviors and beliefs. Moreover, given its historical associations ("suffering the presence" of hateful religions), toleration is often regarded as tainted. Pluralism—the celebration of otherness and difference—is promoted by those desiring a more robust and less sullied alternative.

Whether we view toleration as desirable, inadequate, or impossible, almost everyone today agrees that there are actions that are absolutely intolerable. Many horrors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—they hardly need naming—fall under this rubric. Beyond that short list of atrocities, however, we do not even possess generally shared criteria for determining what can and cannot be tolerated. A part of the problem is that what passes for toleration in Western and modernized societies is actually a mixture of indifference, realpolitik, and the denial of difference. Difference is often taken either as a failure to achieve sameness or as perversity. In modern societies, differences are most often denied by aestheticizing the category. Difference is viewed as a matter of taste, not morals; and as there is no accounting for taste, no genuine toleration of difference is called for; instead, what is required is a recognition of the individual's "right" to an opinion. Aesthetization in this context generally means trivialization: the differences or arenas of difference in question are not regarded as important enough to merit principled toleration. Your rather poor taste in neckties does not demand of me a tolerant...