ABSTRACT
The death threat to Salman Rushdie raises the issue of how religions and ideologies should treat one another in a shrunken world. Christians have considered Muslims to be blasphemous infidels, and Muslims have looked on Christians as idolatrous and polytheistic, guilty of the heinous sin of shirk. The relations between Buddhists and Confucians and Taoists in China have sometimes been very bad: and followers of Siva and Vishnu have clashed in India. Abdul Farid Gabteni, a prominent French leader, has also repudiated the idea that Rushdie should be killed. Such attitudes are a reminder that Islam, like other religions, has considerable diversity within it. A tolerant society may not give every group everything it wants. But in an open society, each group can gain at least eighty per cent of what it wants – such as the possibility of following Muslim or Christian rules of daily living up to a point where they do not interfere with pluralistic government.
