Tolerance, Minorities, and Ideological Perspectives

Muslims and Muslim rulers are frequently charged with intolerance and oppression toward religious minorities, yet a careful examination of history reveals a very different reality. To understand this, one must first look at how dominant religious powers other than the Muslims treated those under their authority. In 1609, King Philip III of Spain issued a decree expelling all remaining Moriscos—the Spanish Muslims who had been forcibly converted to Christianity during the Reconquista of 1492 under King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella. The decree warned that any who remained could be arrested, stripped of their goods, or even killed. Facing military losses against Dutch rebels and fearful that these converts still secretly practiced Islam, Philip III redirected his people's attention toward this "internal enemy," forcing nearly three hundred thousand Moriscos into exile.

This persecution was not unique to Spain. In twelfth-century France, the Catholic Church launched inquisitions against heretical sects and religious minorities, a systematic form of oppression that eventually reached Spain centuries later. During the Spanish Inquisition, both Jews and Muslims who remained after forced conversion or expulsion became objects of severe regulation. So intense was this suppression that even prominent Christian leaders spoke against it: the Archbishop of Seville in 1610 called upon the king to show compassion to the innocent and revise his decree, though his pleas were ignored, and communities that had lived in Spain for seven centuries were left with no choice but to depart. Such documented histories are rarely discussed, perhaps because they expose Christian intolerance, while Muslims and Muslim rulers are made the archetypal example of oppressive regimes. This is not accidental, and it invites two central questions: whether the Islamic system governing religious minorities was truly oppressive in its historical context, and, if not, what ideological frameworks have produced the belief that Islamic regimes are especially intolerant.

The foundations of minority treatment in Muslim lands were established early: upon conquest, non-Muslims were either bound by a mutual ṣulḥ agreement or granted the status of dhimmīs, protected minorities. Becoming a dhimmī guaranteed safety, exemption from military service, and freedom to practice one's religion in exchange for the jizyah (poll-tax) and loyalty to the state. Under Ottoman rule, this developed into the formal millet system, which organized religious and ethnic communities and defined their legal autonomy. Though the system preserved the Empire's unity and productivity, and though Muslims held the highest status, the Ottomans—in stark contrast to former Christian empires—never sought to erase religious or ethnic identities through mass forced conversions. A defining feature was the appointment of a patriarch for each community, chosen by his own people to ensure his authority rested on their respect and obedience. He answered both to his Ottoman supervisor, usually the chief qāḍī, and to his congregation, resolving their complaints and, for instance, granting financial aid to those unable to pay the jizyah while submitting the tax collectively.

Modern theorists have judged this model deficient. The political philosopher John Rawls, drawing on the liberal tradition, described religious tolerance as the individual's freedom to practice or change his religion at will—a freedom of conscience held to be the pinnacle of human rights. Yet Will Kymlicka challenged this assumption, proposing instead a group-rights model in which communities, rather than individuals, serve as self-governing units granted collective rights and responsibilities. On this view, the millet system effectively secured religious liberties for whole communities, even while restricting an individual's ability to change or dissent from his inherited faith. The Greek and Armenian Orthodox communities and the Jews enjoyed self-government and legal autonomy, though they faced limits on public religious expression, such as distinctive dress and a prohibition on proselytizing. Through this system, deeply committed to conservative and theocratic values and uniting "church and state," the Ottoman Empire ruled diverse territories for nearly half a millennium while avoiding religious wars and large-scale persecution—leading Kymlicka to conclude that the millet model "is arguably the more natural form of religious tolerance." Notably, such toleration existed before England's Toleration Act, and it was only with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that Europe ended a century-long struggle over whether subjects could hold a faith different from their ruler's.

Every group-rights model raises the concern of limited individual freedom, for challenging one's religious affiliation was virtually unheard of; proselytization and apostasy were, under certain conditions, criminal offenses. Liberal thinkers argue this curtails autonomy and the freedom to think critically about one's faith. But this reasoning assumes that every individual can properly assess what is good and always seeks his society's benefit. The group-rights model instead presumes that religious affiliation is the most powerful identity a person holds and the very crux of holding society together, so that protecting it justly overrides personal interest—rendering the prohibition of proselytizing and apostasy sensible, since these acts harm not merely the individual but the whole community. Recognizing this does not require insisting it is the only valid form of tolerance; one may acknowledge its success while still advocating individual autonomy, as Kymlicka himself does. The point is caution: we should not carelessly denounce historical Islamic communal organization as intolerant, for the millet standard both prevented religious wars and granted genuine collective liberties, including separate courts and unhindered religious practice.

From the seventeenth century onward, the Ottomans faced military defeats, internal conflict, and later devastating losses to Russia. Nationalist movements spread, provoking separatist uprisings and the loss of land, while rising European influence brought financial dependence and foreign interference—European states cultivated Christian grievances to help minorities evade Ottoman law, some non-Muslims even seeking foreign protection and becoming, in effect, resident aliens. In response came the Tanzimat ("organizing") reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, which centralized and "Westernized" the state. The millet system was abolished in favor of modern citizenship: the Imperial Edict of Gülhane in 1839 declared Muslims and non-Muslims equal before the law, the 1856 edict united the separate educational systems, and by 1876 political rights transformed the Empire into a constitutional monarchy. Yet these reforms were adopted not from a genuine conviction that the centuries-old millet system had failed, but to secure state sovereignty and channel loyalty toward the nation-state. The Europeans themselves, it should be noted, were likewise not truly concerned with tolerance. The demand for a melting pot over a pluralistic society bred new tensions; in Syria, where Muslims and Christians had long coexisted, relations became severely polarized. The Ottoman statesman Cevdet Paşa observed that while non-Muslims rejoiced at gaining equality, "the patriarchs and other spiritual chiefs were displeased, because their appointments were incorporated in the ferman." At stake was the unrecognized tension between a secular notion of statehood and a national identity grounded in religion.

Why, then, has Islamic history been stained with accusations of brutality if the group-rights model was arguably a more natural form of tolerance? The answer lies in the lens through which such history is judged. Western democracies are defined by secular and liberal models, and, as the theorist Wendy Brown has argued, liberal secularism rests upon the privatization of religion, so that any society permitting a public religious space is automatically deemed intolerant. Liberalism thus masquerades as a culture-less doctrine devoted to individual freedom—yet this, Brown contends, is a myth, for liberalism is as subject to cultural and political influence as any ideology it criticizes. By placing itself above all others, it brands every other doctrine as intolerant or uncivilized, elevating its own norms—steeped in Protestant assumptions—as the standard of civilization and modernity, thereby granting the West authority in international affairs. Saba Mahmood extends this by exposing two contradictions of the supposedly neutral nation-state: it is in fact heavily involved in regulating religion, its underlying Protestant norms deciding which practices may be tolerated (polygamy versus same-sex marriage), and this subjective management only intensifies religious difference. Such inconsistencies reveal liberalism's aim of enforcing sameness, whereas true tolerance accepts and values difference rather than insisting all religions be measured by a single metric.

History is always understood through a point of view, shaped by the author's time, circumstances, and biases. When we consider "Islamic" approaches to tolerance and the minority question, we must recognize the political and social ideologies shaping our judgments and challenge the notion that liberty and tolerance have only one valid form across all time and place. We must also confront our own double standards, unable to accuse the past while ignoring the inequities faced by non-citizens today. Islamic history is not without fault; yet before charging Islam with intolerance, one should remember that it took the "enlightened" West nearly a millennium to begin considering the very tolerance that Muslim empires had instituted centuries before.