Tolerance

Noor Huda Ismail, a Moslem from Indonesia, wrote in Sunday's Washington Post about the madrasa he attended as a teenager. Many of his fellow students, and a co-founder of the school have been arrested as terrorists. The school itself is regarded as a breeding-ground for Islamic extremists.

The article makes it strikingly clear that much the success of the extremist philosophy depends on making the student intolerant of and isolated from those who think differently. It is in stark contrast to what I think of as perhaps the greatest virtue of the American experiment--tolerance. It is this, not freedom alone, that should be our rallying cry. It should be what we seek above all to foster around the world. It is certainly a quality much of the world lacks. Intolerance is the essence of the Islamic jihad.

Americans themselves can certainly be intolerant. Much in our history proves this. The current political climate suggests that the future of this virtue in our land is not assured. Moderation in defense of the public welfare seems to be a vice; partisanship consistently trumps compromise. Yet our battles against discrimination continue, embraced in rhetoric at least, often in action, by the mainstream of both parties. Forty years ago that was not true. These battles--by and for Catholics, Jews, African-Americans, Asians, the Irish, perhaps against all ethnicities at one time or another--have been constant in American history, which can be characterized as a struggle of our best side against our worst. Thus far our best side has come out ahead far more often than not.

Assuredly, other countries have fought similar battles. But their histories have not been shaped by them in the way that American history has. For only Americans define themselves in political terms. Others--the French, the English, the Chinese, the Arabs--define themselves in other ways, in terms of language, religion, ancestry (see Walker Connor's insightful Ethnonationalism for an extended version of this argument). To be American is to believe in the tenets of the founding documents of the United States and the political traditions that they embody,

Tolerance is one of these traditions, strongly embedded in this country from its beginning, found among the most prominent qualities of the early colonies. Its seeds lie not in Plymouth, obviously, but in New Amsterdam, the future New York, as Russell Shorto shows in his enlightening account of the Dutch colony, The Island at the Center of the World.

It is worthwhile to keep in mind not only that the citizens of New Amsterdam included a range of races, ethnicities and faiths, but also that they tolerated each other. That is, they put up with each other. They lived next to each other, dealt with each other as neighbors, merchants, customers, and citizens. They did not necessarily approve of each other. Nonetheless, they managed to create a new society in a difficult land. In truth, at its heart, toleration does not mean concord; it need mean only that people agree to live and let live.

The lesson that we can hope to extend to other peoples, including those Moslems like those Noor Huda Ismail grew up with, is merely that we will all be better off if you and I let each other be. Simple as this message is, spreading it is a Sisyphian task. Catholics and Protestants only learned it after two centuries of massacres; this country often forgets it. Yet it is an essential part, perhaps the most essential part, of what we have to offer.