Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Religious violence has once again become a heated debate over the past decade with numerous attacks by ISIS, mainly in regards to those that took place in Europe. Consequently, the legitimacy of Islam as a “religion of peace” has come to be questioned and Muslim minorities around the world have become scrutinized for their faith. In the light of the subsequent “refugee crisis,” this paper addresses the problem of tolerance emerging out of such political encounters with Islam as a religion and analyzes the influence of such encounters on the perception of Muslims as fellow citizens in Western countries. It is argued that this problem of tolerance has been reinforced through a global conceptualization of secularity that in turn affects the dynamics of cohabitation of people within intersecting but distinct religious settings. In this context, the incompatibility of tolerance and religious otherness will be discussed through a critique of the concept of secularism as a globalized phenomenon around a Western understanding of religiosity.