The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age [Rilegato]

This is a well-written book which draws on history to present the West's past history of religious intolerance, psychology and anthropology to examine why we are intolerant of "the other," and philosophy to provide the theoretical foundation for tolerance. Yet somehow Ms. Nussbaum misses the mark. Her book is too intellectual in its treatment of the context in which anti-Muslim intolerance has arisen. For the past 15 years our papers have been full of tales of jihadist violence in the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa. No echoes in her book of the janjaweed attacking in the Sudan, of Sunnis attacking Shia in Iraq, of Taliban stoning women taken in adultery, of a teenager shot in Pakistan because she wants girls to be educated. We read nothing in her book about Muslim jihadist attacks in the U.S., Spain, and Great Britain. We read nothing about growing Muslim minorities in many European cities; we hear nothing in her book about the murder of a Dutch filmmaker who dared to criicize the Muslim treatment of women. In short, her book is well-written but somehow doesn't really come to grips with what is really going on in the Western-Muslim conflict.

This book represents an attempt by Martha Nussbaum to provide an ethical framework for the treatment of religious minorities in the western world. She draws upon many sources, including Greek philosophers, early American leaders (e.g. Roger Williams), U.S. jurisprudence, including a number of Supreme Court decisions and even literature. She analyses several of the legal approaches and compares them, before putting forth her own derivation of an appropriate ethical basis for approaching minority religious groups within a larger society. She then uses this ethic that she has developed to analyze the situation of Muslims in the US and Europe, which takes up a large portion of the latter half of the book. She also uses the situation of minority Christian and Jewish groups in the US, both to develop her argument, and to attempt to show how it can be applied. I found her development of the ethical basis for approaching minority groups tightly argued and compelling. The application to Muslim groups within the US and Europe is messier and less clear cut, but to my mind, largely successful. None the less, I found the book well written and fascinating. I would think that many people who would disagree with some of her argument or conclusions would still find the analysis useful and interesting. If you are interested in the issues this book addresses, I would highly recommend it. I also note that she largely avoids or concisely explains philosophical jargon, which makes for much easier reading for the general reader (compared to many more academic philosophical works.)

The title is somewhat inaccurate. It would be better stated as "The New Religious intolerance toward Muslims mostly in Western Europe and to a lesser degree the United States." No small irony that someone who talks so much about multiculturalism ends up writing what amounts to a book with an extremely narrow cultural, geographic and religious focus.

The book brings up popular controversies in the west such as burqas, minarets and the so-called "ground zero mosque". Then it makes a bunch of really obvious philosophical arguments in favor of religious tolerance.

There is a certain amount of ugly American triumphalism in the book. A tendency to see the American model as somehow being superior in the context of religion. She wants to present the American ideal of Nationalism as some sort of cure to the problem. And suggests Europe should adopt it. But (also ironically) the multiculturalism she represents utterly rejects that sort of shared national belonging on its face. And the idea that the strength of America these days is "shared political ideals" deserves a skeptical look in the face of all the deep political divides in America today.

She holds out the idea that the only limit on minority religious expression should be considerations of public order and safety. Of course in saying that, she avoids the long and complicated history of restrictions on *majority* religious expression which have gone to the supreme court many times.

She pushes the idea of secular civil culture as a solution. But doesn't see that for many people, the establishment and promotion of such a culture effectively becomes a state religion by another name.

Way too many pages in the book are wasted on the overheated political issue of the so-called "ground zero mosque" (roughly 20% of the content pages).

One of the very odd bits in the book a short historical aside where she tries to suggest that Ottoman Empire and Islamic India as poster children for historical religious tolerance. While an argument can be made on a comparative basis that the Ottoman Empire was more toleratant than (for example) Spain under the Inquisition and the crusaders, it does not mean it was actually tolerant. Islam granted the right of subject peoples to exist, but tolerance extended no further. And the other side of the Ottoman system was that every individual was the "property" of a state controlled religion and the leaders in that religion had their lives hostage to the behavior of their co-religionists. India was not much better.

The book is correct in stating and defending the obvious in terms of the American idea of the first amendment. But there is nothing particularly novel or interesting about that defense. The book would have been far more interesting if it had a global scope bringing in countries like Turkey, Israel and China (as examples). China in terms of the Falun Gong. Israel in terms of the disputes within the Jewish Community. And Turkey as a modern Islamic country moving away from a secular culture. Its just all too narrowly argued along obvious lines and too narrowly focused on western europe & the US.