My alma mater, The University of Chicago, was recently in the news for an overtly politically correct act for replacing its historic Bond Chapel's pews for Muslims to worship. This act is raising hackles reminiscent of the university's other, recent, tone-deaf decision to demolish the childhood home of former President Ronald Reagan, on its campus, and replace it with a parking lot and a commemorative plaque....

At first, I thought they (Islamic sectarian hate-mongers) were bats of darkness on Twitter. I thought they were masked people who enjoy insulting, criticizing and accusing others of infidelity on Twitter because they know no one can pursue them or hold them accountable. But I later realized that the situation is far more dangerous and expanded than that. A university scholar who teaches in a prominent university in our country (Saudi Arabia) wrote “we must remind our children that the infidel. Shiite and Alawites are the ones who [committed crimes] against our people in Qusayr. I will spit in the face of whoever preaches to me about tolerance.” A Saudi reminded him of humanitarian, cultural, national and religious references that unite people and described the former’s stance as reactionary and primitive. The university teacher responded saying: “Welcome to reactionism and primitiveness that will purge our country of your impurity.”...

Tolerance in Islam is a translation of the widely used Arabic word called: “At- Tasamuh” meaning to allow, or to forgive or to recognize the right of the next person to live. That’s the literal or linguistic meaning, but conventionally, tolerance is used to describe the peaceful existence of the three most popular religions in the world (Islam Christianity and Judaism) and for each religion to recognise the right of the other to live and practice its faith without being harmed or hurt by the other….

Unperturbed by the sloganeering and Islamophobic rants by the protestors, the Muslims present in the mosque invited the protestors over a cup of tea inside the mosque and served them tea and snacks. Later they played a friendly match with them. This reaction of the Muslims impressed the protestors and the common men in town....

"Buddha does not teach hatred and violence. A monk should not insult, hurt, or assault others. It is against the values of Buddhism. Instead of spreading hatred, it is much better to show compassion to others to end violence," said Dhammakaro Thera, secretary-general of the Indonesia Grand Sangha Conference...

“The government of Iran continues to engage in systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom, including prolonged detention, torture, and executions based primarily or entirely upon the religion of the accused. …..

Attacks on places of worship, on places of residence, targeted killings, forced conversions and blasphemy allegations are the different forms of persecution that minorities in Pakistan have incrementally faced over the past few years....

The latest victim of religious intolerance in Egypt is Mona Prince, a renowned writer and novelist and a professor at the Faculty of Education at the Suez Canal University of Egypt. She was accused by students affiliated to Muslim Brotherhood of contempt of religion. All she did was while discussing sectarianism in the context of the ongoing sectarian strife in Egypt with the students; she criticised sectarianism promoted by the Salafists. The topic was agreed on by Mona Prince and the students and while discussing the topic she showed the students a poster put up by the Salafi students on the university walls saying, ‘Shias are enemy’ and said that this was what we call sectarianism. But after the class some students filed a complaint against Mona Prince to the Dean of the faculty accusing her of defaming Islam….

So when a Protestant church in Setu, Bekasi, West Java, known for donating meat to the Muslim community during the Eid al-Adha holiday – which honours the willingness of the prophet Ibrahim (Abraham) to submit to God’s request to sacrifice his first born son – was demolished in March because it lacked a permit, it greatly concerned me and many other Indonesians. We firmly believe that democracy and religious freedom are tenets of Islam....

First of all, this is a man with a monumental ego, to whom every avenue to self-aggrandizement is welcomed, whether it is Obama care or realigning the Middle East.  Either or both may end in utter disaster for others, but that is hardly a deterrent to Obama. What some see as a failure of his Middle East policy is a success in carrying out his vision of a historic realignment….

These strata of highly educated Muslim society and its intelligentsia should have become the leaders of the Muslim masses but because of their alienation from Islam, they have distanced themselves from the people. Western education is therefore looked upon with suspicion with good reason and the Muslims to blame for it are the educated ones who are ‘lost’ to Muslim society……

Symbolically, however, the most devastating Taliban attack occurred last spring at the shrine of the 17th-century poet-saint Rahman Baba, at the foot of the Khyber Pass in northwest Pakistan. For centuries, the complex has been a place for musicians and poets to gather, and Rahman Baba’s Sufi verses had long made him the national poet of the Pashtuns living on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. ....

In reality, a separation of religion and state is essential for religious diversity and peaceful coexistence to prosper. Most importantly, granting of equal rights and justice for all citizens regardless of gender, race, religion, and affiliations will ensure pluralism in predominantly faith-based societies……

Suppose we want to beat somebody, but due to the societal norms I can’t do it, my Id troubles me, hence I become a batsman and I “hit” balls and derive pleasure from it. And according to Freud religion is the most enduring form of sublimation, we take our anger and sexual lust and make it “sublime” to become a saint, a mullah, a pundit….

Religious intolerance in a culture of violence and anger is a fatal mix and has gone on a bloody rampage. While the causes, factors and agents responsible for the ongoing madness are intertwined in a complex manner, the counter-narrative and healing that ought to have come from the representatives of religion has been inadequate, half-hearted and equivocal....

Let us now look at the civilizing influence of religion. We are all familiar with moral and ethical precepts that come from religion such as, the virtues of striving in the face of odds, of patience and perseverance, of abstinence and piety, of forgiveness in place of revenge, of returning good for evil, of observing limits in behaviour, the virtues of hard work, honesty, sharing, sacrifice and gratitude, the virtue of faithfulness and propriety and of justice.....

Will the recent carnage change any of this? In an unprecedented show of solidarity with the mourners, protests sprang up in a great many parts of the country, finally forcing the government to respond — which it did by imposing the executive authority of the governor over the province and directing the police and paramilitary to act against the groups involved.

A mob attacked Alexander Aan even before an Indonesian court in June jailed him for two and a half years for “inciting religious hatred”. His crime was to write “God does not exist” on a Facebook group he had founded for atheists in Minang, a province of the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Like most non-believers in Islamic regions, he was brought up as a Muslim. And like many who profess godlessness openly, he has been punished....

All of us from time to time stare into the abyss and wonder why we were born only to eventually die. As far as we know, humans are the only animals born with the knowledge of our own impending demise and so religion — almost any religion — was created to offer some comfort as we struggle with this. It is a comfort to many people and is perhaps a fundamental way to keep our species from succumbing to despair. Which is why religious tolerance makes so much sense.

Intolerance is the trade mark of Taliban mindset and looking at the facts from this angle it seems that Taliban mindset is spreading fast because of the one sided propaganda and killing of innocent children, men and women by drones attacks and use of the fire arms through killing machines. One reason for this rising intolerance in Pakistan can easily be found in the ongoing war of terror in Afghanistan, in the porous border with our neighbor and in the creation of a Pakistani Taliban movement since.

Persecution is not limited to non-Muslim minorities. It extends to all those persons who will decline to think and act as their tormentors do. Dissident groups arise within the larger Muslim community and become objects of harassment by those who happen to be dominant at the time. Majorities and minorities are not rigidly fixed. Groups will divide into factions, which in turn will split into still smaller entities.

Pakistan is steps away from the point of no return and urgently needs a public outcry against religiously motivated violence. The situation is clearly at an extreme, but there is still some space (beyond Twitter and the op-ed columns of English-language newspapers) to question the way things are progressing and even voice horror at the mounting instances of injustice and violence. If we don’t seize this opportunity, we will soon find ourselves with no recourse.

A person greatly admires Hazrat Maulana Rashid Gangohi, the outstanding scholar who was one of the founders of the Deoband madrasa. The gentleman to whom I refer is a kindly soul, who can be depended upon for help by others. However, when in the course of conversation I chanced to remark that the most basic virtue lay in kindness towards others, he contradicted me. Kindness, he contended, was reserved for “pious, practicing Muslims”. As for others, they should be given a chance to mend their ways, after which “they would be Wajibul Qatal”. Another person I chanced to meet — a finance man, no less — feels that people who do not attend Friday prayers “should simply be killed. Slit their throats!”

Now, this kind of sanguinary verbal ferocity is very different from the traditions of quiet piety and gentle acceptance in which most Muslims were brought up. I claim no expertise to suggest whether this or the other is the ‘correct’ version of Islamic thinking. However, there are certainly many scholars who hold that this aggressive literalism, popularly but incorrectly referred to as ‘fundamentalism’, is a doctrinal innovation of relatively recent origin. It is very much a product of the linear, pseudo-logical thinking that has characterised our violent and intolerant age — an age that began with the full flowering of modern imperialism in the nineteenth century and whose baleful cultural and psychic responses have long outlived their origins. With this kind of intellectual legacy as a backdrop, what kind of political discourse is possible in Pakistan -- Salman Tarik Kureshi

Confining the freedom of other people’s opinions is a matter of fanaticism, extremism, intolerance and exclusion. There is no doubt that extremism exists in the East as well as in the West. There are thousands of individuals who have been misled by the belief that they have absolute freedom to hate and punish people with “different” religions. -- Abdullah Al Alami

Leaving aside the question of whether India's religious traditions are in fact tolerant — a subject on which the tens of thousands of victims of communal and caste violence might have interesting opinions — this spurious secularism has served in the main to institutionalise and sharpen communal boundaries. It has also allowed clerics to exercise influence over state policy — insulating themselves from a secularising world. -- Praveen Swami