Many negative stereotypes of Muslims can be traced to the clashes between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe in the Middle Ages. Paula Sutter Fichtner explores here the particular dynamics between the Ottoman and Austrian Habsburg empires and chronicles the evolution of a political relationship that shifted from hatred to understanding. In the fourteenth century, Ottoman armies swept westward across the Danube Valley before confronting the Habsburgs, who ruled central and eastern Europe, and in Terror and Toleration, Fichtner charts the religious and political conflicts that fueled 300 years of war. She reveals how ruling powers in Vienna and the church spread propaganda about Muslims that still lingers today. But the Habsburgs dramatically reversed their attitudes toward Muslims in the seventeenth century, and through this story, Fichtner explains how one can recognize an enemy while adjusting one’s views about them. A fascinating read, Terror and Toleration sheds new light on the deep roots of the often contentious relationship between Islam and the West.

Many negative stereotypes of Muslims can be traced to the clashes between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe in the Middle Ages. Paula Sutter Fichtner explores here the particular dynamics between the Ottoman and Austrian Habsburg empires and chronic.

Many tolerance researchers suggest that political tolerance has increased considerably in America since the 1950s, while others suggest that trends of increasing tolerance may instead reflect the decline in relevance of many of the groups traditionally used in tolerance research. While most scholars agree that tolerant attitudes towards certain groups in American society have increased (i.e. domestic communists, atheists, homosexuals, etc.), there is some debate as to whether intolerance has been redirected towards other political groups or whether it has faded subsequent to the decline of communist influence and relevance. Data from a 2003 Student Opinion Survey at a public Midwest university (N=1,650), and the General Social Surveys, 1972-2006 [Cumulative File], are assessed to illustrate the need for new measures of intolerance in political tolerance research, as well as to demonstrate the increasing relevance of intolerant attitudes toward Islamist radicals in the post September 11, 2001 era. Due to the religio-political nature of Islamist ideology, the current research also explores the influence of predominant religious and political orientations in America upon issues of tolerance for Islamists, and other groups, whose ideology inspires them to justify and support acts of violence and terrorism.

Law review articles and p ...

In this book, Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama tackle the question: how does religious liberty develop?

Tolerance is generally regarded as an unqualified achievement of the modern West. Emerging in early modern Europe to defuse violent religious conflict and reduce persecution, tolerance today is hailed as a key to decreasing conflict across a wide range of other dividing lines-- cultural, racial, ethnic, and sexual. But, as political theorist Wendy Brown argues in Regulating Aversion, tolerance also has dark and troubling undercurrents. Dislike, disapproval, and regulation lurk at the heart of tolerance. To tolerate is not to affirm but to conditionally allow what is unwanted or deviant. And, although presented as an alternative to violence, tolerance can play a part in justifying violence--dramatically so in the war in Iraq and the War on Terror. Wielded, especially since 9/11, as a way of distinguishing a civilized West from a barbaric Islam, tolerance is paradoxically underwriting Western imperialism. Brown's analysis of the history and contemporary life of tolerance reveals it in a startlingly unfamiliar guise. Heavy with norms and consolidating the dominance of the powerful, tolerance sustains the abjection of the tolerated and equates the intolerant with the barbaric. Examining the operation of tolerance in contexts as different as the War on Terror, campaigns for gay rights, and the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance, Brown traces the operation of tolerance in contemporary struggles over identity, citizenship, and civilization.