Islam: The Religion and the People

Chapter 5: Diversity and Tolerance

In traditional Islam, diversity, within certain limits, was seen as not only acceptable, but even beneficial. This diversity finds its most characteristic expression in the emergence, within Sunni Islam, of four different schools of doctrine and law, each with its own centers of learning, masters, and literature. These differ from each other on a number of points, but each respects the others as forming part of the community of orthodox Islam (see pp. 30-36).

The use of the term orthodoxy in a Muslim context raises another issue. Orthodoxy is a Christian, originally Platonic, term meaning “correct belief,” as opposed to heterodoxy, literally “other belief,” and, worse, “heresy.” Heresy, a Greek word meaning ...