By Paul Weiser
Sometimes the same word has different and confusing meanings in different contexts. Other words - such as tolerance - have different contextual meanings which throw useful light on one another.
In medical terms, a person develops tolerance for a drug when increasing doses are required to produce a given effect. In common usage, tolerance denotes suffering discomfort - especially verbal and visual affront - without anger or retaliation. The similar political usage indicates that a polity allows varied practices and beliefs instead of criminalizing unorthodoxy.
An important similarity between medical and political "tolerance" is that, while some individuals are naturally immune to some drugs, normally there is no tolerance without exposure. The man who takes a shot of morphine, then just smiles and returns to work has already seen much morphine. Similarly, a polity that has been forced to endure mixed religions for 500 years can tolerate the situation where one that's never had to may respond very intolerantly.
From this, two observations follow. First, Islam has never had to actually tolerate any other religion. Muslims have always either dominated all others by armed force (which requires no actual tolerance) or been in the process of expulsion by their erstwhile victims. Muslims are, today, living in non- Muslim countries unprivileged for the first time... and responding with violent intolerance.
Second, and more subtly, every drug is different. The West has developed (in centuries of religious war, pogroms, and witch hunts) a tolerance for Judaeo- Christian sects and schisms. But it has never developed such a tolerance - for there has been no side-by-side peaceful exposure - to Islam. Some drugs are, after all, poisons when taken internally in sufficient quantity. It is entirely possible that, political dogma to the contrary, no tolerant accommodation with Islam is possible and expulsion/conversion is the only cure.
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