The Tolerant Society and its Enemies: Moral Relativism, Multiculturalism, and Islamism

In this paper, T. M. Murray defends a vision of liberal tolerance as grounding the common good. She critiques the discourse that Western liberalism amounts to ‘Islamophobia’ or ‘cultural imperialism’. She argues that liberal academics, in maintaining these narratives, contradict their own vaunted values and tacitly collude with religious hypocrisy and intolerance. She argues for a universal vision of the common good broadly grounded in human flourishing and human nature and linked to the philosophies of Aristotle and J. S. Mill.

Is Tolerance Liberal? Javed Ahmad Ghamidi and the Non-Muslim Minority

Tolerance is claimed not just as central to liberalism, but increasingly as the sole preserve of a liberal order. This essay opens up a critical space for examining the naturalized relationship between liberalism and tolerance by focusing on the political thought of Javed Ahmad Ghamidi (1951–), a prominent Pakistani public intellectual who is often labeled as a “liberal” Islamic thinker. Ghamidi has never identified himself as one. Using as an investigative opportunity the disjuncture between his self-identification and how his ideas are labeled, and placing Ghamidi’s ideas within the wider tradition of Islamic thought, this essay elaborates on his vision of non-liberal tolerance predicated on individual responsibility infused with humility and shari’a-inspired state minimalism. Insight into the depth of nonliberal conceptions can facilitate a reconsideration of the relationship between liberalism and tolerance.

Ars Erotica

This chapter compares narratives of digital utopia against the turgid material process of factory labor in Asia. It begins by exploring how role-playing video games like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Guild Wars 2, and others shore up evidence for digital utopia by enacting its values of liberal tolerance, freedom, and egalitarianism within a virtual realm. Yet played erotically, role playing offers new connections between the empire and its Asian provinces through playing a role, an act characteristic of the power positions of sexual role play (domination and subjugation). Using Michel Foucault’s theories of ars erotica and aphrodisia, this chapter argues that role playing bounds the gamelike, the queer, and the erotic, as all develop rule-based fantasy worlds with hierarchized avatars or roles. Role play can make explicit the transnational power differentials that function as digital utopia’s conditions of possibility.

Literature as a Ruthless Excavator of Culture: From the Literary Mode of Being to Lituratterre

This chapter substantiates the book’s psychoanalytic approach to modern Arabic thought. It argues that the framework of theoretical psychoanalysis is an alternative to post-colonial, post-structuralist, and deconstructionist approaches. The chapter discusses the psychoanalytic topology of the symbolic, imaginary, and Real and its relevance to the study of literary sources. It then explicates how fantasy produces and canalizes desire in the context of symbolic crisis in modernity. The chapter addresses the anxieties around language and culture in modern Arabic sources as anxieties underlined by the modern contestation between reason and the unconscious. Diagnosing this contestation between reason and irrationality is crucial for overcoming the antinomy of culturalism/ liberalism that over-determines the study of modern Arabic sources. Anxieties over habits and culture expose early on the limits of liberal tolerance and force us to consider how the compulsion for freedom in modernity is experienced as a split in particularity rather than an affirmation of it. The chapter pits Lacan-Freud against Wendy Brown’s liberal critique of psychoanalysis through Shidyaq and Bustani.