Craig Considine

“ Prophet Muhammad set a legal precedent for Muslim rulers; non-Muslims were given the right to live in a nation that neither promotes nor disparages any particular religion. Under the leadership of the Prophet, religion—whether it be Islam, Christianity, or any other tradition—was not meant to be a matter of duress, intimidation, or persuasion, but rather of conscience and free will. According to the Covenant with the Christians of Persia, Muslims who coerce Christians into converting to Islam commit an act of fitnah, or sedition and, therefore, must be resolutely avoided. ”

“ In this sense, a government that pursues the cultural assimilation of minorities is a “cultural nation”; cultural unity is seen as the foundation for a strong nation-state ( [90] , p. 561) . The differences between the cultural and ethnic nation model is that “cultural nations” encourage assimilation whereas “ethnic nations” do not, because the latter concept demarcates culture by ancestry and “race”, which cannot be gained or learned by human effort. ”

“ Membership into the Muslim nation is open equally and without any qualification or restriction. In this sense it embodies the universalism of Islam: the nation becomes a consciousness of belonging to a religious and political community that is independent of the Muslim state ( [41] , p. 49) . While the Covenants may be interpreted as requiring only Muslims themselves—and not the actually Islamic state—to protect Christians, one can also argue that Muhammad’s role as Caliph of the ummah and his commandments outlined in the Covenants were in fact a type of “law” alongside the Qur’an and hadiths. ”

“ In his Covenant with the Christians of Persia, the Prophet is nothing less than emphatic on the issue of complete religious freedom:
And even as they honor and respect me, so shall Moslems care for that people as being under our protection and whensoever any distress or discomfort shall overtake [Christians] , Moslems shall hold themselves in duty bound to aid and care for them, for they are a people subject to my Nation, obedient to their word, whose helpers also they are. ”

“ Indonesia, the world’s largest “Muslim nation”, is an interesting case study in observing how the pluralist spirit of the Covenants has been applied to modern societies. Article 28E of the Constitution reflects much of what was written in the Covenant with the Monks of Mount Sinai:
Every person shall be free to choose and to practice the religion of his/her choice, to choose one’s education, to choose one’s employment, to choose one’s citizenship, and to choose one’s place of residence within the state territory, to leave it and to subsequently return to it. ”

“ Islam might be the religion of the majority, but the state or nation itself has no overt religious identity.
The emphasis the Qur’an places on respecting the “People of the Book” indicates that Muslims are tolerant of religious groups so long as they are monotheists, or believers in “one God”. While the Qur’an frequently calls on and encourages non-Muslims to worship God according to “Islamic principles”, the Islamic holy text can be interpreted as extending freedom of religion to “disbelievers” or those outside the Abrahamic tradition. ”

“ The Covenants show that Muslim leaders are not advised by Muhammad to prohibit citizens from expressing non-Muslim identities or ruin churches, but are instead commanded to treat them as equal members of the ummah.
Considering that the “People of the Book” have a special status in the Islamic tradition, critics have wondered about the rights of non-Abrahamic communities living inside the territories of the ummah. Muslims during the time of Prophet Muhammad used the term “polytheists” to refer to people who do not have a tradition of a revealed book in their religion. ”

“ Having considered the concept of religious pluralism in the Covenants, the paper now takes up the discussion of civic rights among members of the “Muslim nation”. Scholars have dedicated much time and effort to unpack the various kinds of nation-building projects, but the distinction between “civic nation” versus “ethnic nation” is perhaps the most widely-employed conceptual building block in the study of nationhood and national identity ( [90] , p. 554) . While these types of nations share common elements like historical territory and common culture, they have distinct features. ”

“ Europeans assumed that European culture had always been progressive and that Muslim societies were backward, inefficient, and corrupt [1] . European colonialists in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia also wreaked havoc by plundering Islamic economies and supplanting Islamic educational systems with secular or Christianity-based systems [2] . These kind of colonial interactions had a decisive influence on the religious and political relations between Muslims and Christians, and shaped not least the mutual theological images and assessments of the other [3] . ”

“ The United States, a predominantly “Christian” nation that frequently depicts itself as advocating for religious pluralism and civil society, has a “high to very high” level of social hostilities involving religion. A poll taken at the end of 2013 by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life [9] showed that 60 percent of all Republicans exhibited prejudice towards Muslims. American citizens are particularly hostile towards Arab-Americans, many of whom are Muslim. ”

“ Tolerance also does not require Muslims and Christians to know anything about each other. In essence, Eck calls on individuals and groups to move beyond the “indifference” of tolerance and towards the “celebration of difference” as found in in the pluralist tradition. Pluralism can be further distinguished from tolerance in another other way. While pluralism treats religious diversity as something to be celebrated in order to produce positive social changes, tolerance can be said to encourage social isolation and impenetrable social group boundaries. ”

“ This type of governance follows the concept of civic nation because a civic nation takes account of their fellow citizens’ interests; citizens are also not forced to adopt the cultural practices of the majority within ( [98] , p. 278) . In the Covenants, Prophet Muhammad established civic national principles by creating a fair set of rules within which Christians had equal opportunity to make free choices (perhaps based on their cultural preference) [97] . ”

“ Muslim absolutists assert that democratic principles, such as the right to private property and freedom of religion, are fundamentally incompatible with “Islamic values” and that Muslims, by necessity of their religion, must oppose all forms of democratic culture and governance. Recent Pew Global Attitudes surveys, in fact, show that majorities in the “Arab world” favor democracy as a form of government [71] . ”

“ According to Prophet Muhammad, a “Muslim nation” must also extend rights to Christian religious leaders, as discussed in the Covenant with the Christian Monks of Mount Sinai. This particular community had complete freedom in anointing leaders and control over their places of worship. Consider the following passage from the Covenant:
A bishop shall not be removed from his bishopric, nor a monk from his monastery, nor a hermit from his tower, nor shall a pilgrim be hindered from his pilgrimage. ”

“ Before embarking on contemporary issues affecting Muslim and Christian communities, a few historical issues are in order. In the modern era (1500–1945 CE) , the major part of the “Muslim world” was ruled by “Christian civilization”. During this period, the Islamic world, as noted by Armstrong, was “convulsed by the modernization process. Instead of being one of the leaders of world civilization, Islamdom was quickly and permanently reduced to a dependent bloc by the European powers” [1] . ”

“ Religious persecution in the United States and throughout the Middle East has made theologians, sociologists, and political theorists acutely aware of the need to foster pluralism and civility in religiously diverse nations. ”

“ While Emon claims that dhimmi rules are important indices of the inherent intolerance in the Islamic tradition, they appear to contradict several hadiths. Prophet Muhammad, for example, stated “Whoever oppresses a dhimmi or burdens a weight over him more than he can carry, I will be his enemy” [50] . Similarly, Prophet Muhammad stated “I am claimant of anyone who depresses a dhimmi. ”

“ At this stage of the paper, it is important to distinguish Prophet Muhammad’s religious pluralism from toleration, which allows only for coexistence [44] . In addition to encouraging Muslims and Christians to form bonds of solidarity, he advises individuals in each group to vigorously defend each other. ”

“ However, some scholars have attacked the narrow logic that ethnic nations are simply “ethnic” in the sense of being emotionally-charged and exclusive entities based only on dominant ethno-cultural groups. ”

“ The passage encapsulates the spirit of religious pluralism in that it fosters mutually inspiring relationships and common action among members of different religious groups for the “common good” ( [58] , p. 2) . As Patel and Meyer remind us, religious pluralism is “not simply relativism, but makes room for real and different religious commitments” ( [58] , p. 2) . ”

“ Every person shall have the right to the freedom to believe his/her faith, and to express his/her views and thoughts, in accordance with his/her conscience. Every person shall have the right to the freedom to associate, to assemble, and to express opinions [73] . ”

“ A survey carried out in 2014 by Zogby Analytics [10] , an Egyptian research group, found that only 36 percent of American citizens have a “favorable” view of Arab-Americans, a number that fell down from 43 percent in 2010 [11] . Comparatively, states that have a high percentage of Muslims almost uniformly persecute minority religious communities, especially Christians in Middle Eastern states [12] . In Syria and Iraq, Christians have borne the worst of the religious persecution that has inflicted the Middle East in recent years. ”

“ According to Saunders, the word ummah, or Muslim nation, is most closely linked to the term “people”, and is thought to be a cognate of the Hebrew am and ummetha ( [40] , p. 306) . Reflecting such usage, “ummah has been historically translated as ‘nation’, and is often used in Arabic to denote the Western concept of ‘nation’, e.g., al-Umam al-Muttahida (the United Nations) ” ( [40] , p. 306) . ”

“ In light of this overview of pluralism, it is important to recognize that there are different types of pluralism, among them being cultural, political, and religious. For the purpose of this article, it is necessary to focus on religious pluralism. ”

“ While religious tolerance, broadly speaking, encourages a level of respect for religious traditions, it does little to counter ignorance and stereotypes of religious communities. Tolerance, Eck argues, reproduces old patterns of division and violence ”