Islam and the Culture of Tolerance

One of the matchless obligations for making attempts toward re-sublimation of Islamic civilization and culture, which enjoys a bright and unequalled background in history, is reference to the real cultural history of this very civilization. The present article has been founded on the basis of the ideas of the German researcher (Thomas Bauer) in his The Culture of Ambiguity: Another Side of Islam. The research methodology in this work is mainly cultural studies; that is, study of a certain period from the perspective of cultural procedure. The writer shows that the eminent Muslim scholars in various fields of Islamic sciences such as science of recitation, interpretation, jurisprudence, and ḥadīth, have, in their attempts for understanding Divine Revelation, created an unparalleled culture, which the writer mentions as “the multi-meaning culture and tolerance” versus “single-meaning and non-tolerant culture of modernity”. According to the writer, the Muslims influenced by the technical and military dominance have entrapped in modernity instead of referring to the fountainheads of their own rich culture for confronting this invasion and decided to present a version of Islam by following its standards that conforms to modernity. Therefore, despite the view of the writer of the book, many of today’s viewpoints about Islam, even those presented by Muslims in defense of Islam, are exactly rooted in modernity.