Violent Protests in Indonesia Blow an Ill Will for Religious Tolerance

Mark Durie wrote: "Yet the greater concern is a question for us all: Does the Islamic sharia permit non-Muslims to live alongside Muslims as equals in one world? This is a crucial question …"

Perhaps Mark Durie is wise not to hazard his own view of the answer. Robert Spencer recently said, as I recall, that it makes sense not to pronounce upon what "Islam" is, since no one in Islam has authority to establish orthodoxy.  Still, I wonder if it is not time to rise above this sort of methodological agnosticism — or is it a kind of culturally pervasive post-modernism that has affected even those who decry excesses of relativism and related features of current cultures?  Even if Islam has no pure absolutely unambiguous "essence" and we should avoid "essentializing" it, generalizing and summing it up, does it not at least tend to go in some definite direction, doesn't it have at least a quasi-essence, and shouldn't we unhesitatingly state what that is based on the ample evidence?  The core texts of Islam no doubt give some leeway to interpretation, but the leeway is far from infinite and Islam is not a Rorschach test, as some forms of deconstructive consciousness, so pervasive in our culture, suggest.  

In fairness, Mark Durie hardly if at all merits criticism on the above counts. His is perhaps the most brilliant work of Islam criticism in the last couple of decades. I mean his book The Third Choice.