Tolerance, and a call to arms

By David Simmons

Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Qandil wants the US and, I suppose by extension, the civilized world to “take the necessary measures to ensure insulting billions of people – one and a half billion people – and their beliefs does not happen”. This was one of the more reasoned responses in the Islamic world to the film Innocence of Muslims, a clip of which appeared on YouTube.

By “reasoned” I mean that to our knowledge, Qandil did not set fire to any buildings or kill any ambassadors.

I haven’t seen the clip but accept the word of those who have that it was deliberately offensive to Muslims, not to mention those who value good production techniques. But how exactly is a culture founded – unlike Islam – on freedom of expression to follow Qandil’s advice? How does a secular society avoid “insulting” Islam, or any superstition for that matter? The fact that the other four and a half billion of us get on perfectly well without bowing and scraping to some Arab who died nearly 14 centuries ago is itself insulting to those who cannot, isn’t it?

So what we have here is the most intolerant of the world’s major religions pleading for tolerance. To stress that point, The Onion published a cartoon designed to be extremely offensive to the four other major religions, then reported, under the headline No one murdered because of this image: “Though some members of the Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist faiths were reportedly offended by the image, sources confirmed that upon seeing it, they simply shook their heads, rolled their eyes, and continued on with their day.”

By screaming for tolerance while themselves being intolerant to the point of murdering people such as Ambassador Christopher Stephens, whose only crime was holding the same citizenship as the makers of Innocence of Muslims, these representatives of Islam are making impossible demands on the rest of us, probably knowingly. Why not? If one’s religion makes tolerance a sin, surely it is the duty of the faithful to create pain for those who practise it.

This ploy is not the monopoly of extremists. Prime Minister Qandil does the same thing, but to even greater effect because he commands respect, unlike the mob, who command only contempt. His call for not merely the common-sense restraint most right-thinking people carry out as a matter of course, as a necessary tool for surviving in and contributing to a community, but for legislation prohibiting offence against a particular set of superstitions to which he subscribes and most others do not, is a logical impossibility, and he knows it.

The reason is that even within Islam itself, there are hugely differing views not only on what is acceptable behaviour, but what constitutes holiness. Some believe the thugs who killed Ambassador Stephens were practising jihad, holy war. Some believe the hijackers who flew jetliners into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were even holier. If we disagree with them, we are of course insulting a segment of Islam, and if Qandil had his way, we would presumably be punished for it.

Yet shrugging off Qandil’s pleas as nonsense doesn’t get us off the hook. Most of the civilized world has bought into the idea of tolerance as a general principle, though of course exceptions abound – most of us don’t tolerate theft or murder or child abuse, and there are grey areas such as abortion, or voting Conservative. So we cherry-pick as well, just like “moderate” Muslims.

Maybe we should take another look at the principle of tolerance and be more careful how we use the word. It comes from the Latin tolerare, “to endure”. Is that really how we want to live in our communities, simply “enduring”?

If so, life becomes quite a chore. For life is full of annoyances; the human ones alone now number about 6 billion, and on top of this we have biting insects, ill-timed rain showers, incontinent soi dogs and the occasional errant meteorite (left).

Endurance has its place, but it should not be a guiding principle. Another word comes to mind: “embrace”, derived from the Latin bracchium, “arm”. By a happy coincidence, in English the word “arm” has two completely different meanings, the first – the appendage we put around those we love, or extend in friendship, derived from Anglo-Saxon – and the other, from Latin again, in the sense of the hard and unyielding stuff knights used to don, or in modern times clads military personnel carriers, tanks, and the Brink’s vehicles delivering each day’s pillage to the one per cent.

To take this analogy just a tiny bit too far, we can argue that embracing our fellow human beings, figuratively or otherwise, is the best way of arming ourselves against evil and despair.