Home Journal List Journal of Islamic Thought and Civilization Volume IV Article Details

Religious Pluralism

Abstract

In the traditional paradigm, the study of the ‘other’ was based on the exclusivist approach. Hence, every individual religious identity claimed exclusiveness in terms of salvation particularly, and in general, the right to live at his existence level, and the right to persist at his conceptual level. But the West witnessed an utterly different experience during and after the Renaissance, the period which was wrongly interpreted as a combat between religion and science; actually it was a combat between an interpolated sacred text and the ever increasing human perception based on the tools made by human beings after a long experiential phenomenon. Thereafter, the West enabled herself to design a diametrically opposed notion by a total rejection of ‘religion as such,’ and considered it as an inspirational tool in order to satisfy the inner needs and feelings of those who still found their attachment to the other world. Thereby emerges the pattern of civilizational study, and this replaced the study of religions in a very clever manner. The study of religions helps one to know the right path and follow it, whereas the study based on civilization helps one to know different values and trends of thinking without the least idea to accept, for in this study genre, discovering the right path is not intended at all. Later on, considering the ‘other’ the right one along with one’s own self, shaped a new discipline called pluralism, which has assumed another name - the new religion. Keeping in view the paradigm of pluralism, it is claimed by the modernist that the followers of every religion have the right of salvation but the historical analysis of religious study disapproves it. In this article, Christianity and Islamic perspective of salvation have been discussed. Further, an in-depth study of Islam reveals two dimensions in the above succinctly stated Western experience; one, the text Islam presents is not interpolated; second, historical study of Islam manifests that ‘religious tolerance’ has been a hallmark of every Islamic epoch, derived from its very text, and this is altogether different from that of ‘religious pluralism,’ an extended model of civilizational study.

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