




Abd al-Hamid al-Ansari

When God Almighty addressed Muhammad with the words: Wouldst thou (Muhammad) compel men until they are believers?[1] that was a declaration of Islam's confirmation of the right to difference, and its support for religious pluralism and the strong guarantee granted to humankind of their choice of belief and worship. If the Prophet did not have the right to impose his religion upon others by force, and that his only recourse was to Call unto the way of thy Lord with wisdom and fair exhortation,[2] then it follows that an ordinary man has even less right to impose his opinion on others.


Yusuf Aba al-Khayl

The Companions of the Prophet and the early Tābiʽūn[1] used to read the texts of the Qur’ān according to what they thought God Almighty meant by it, doing so directly and determining the meaning through a live interaction with the living vocabulary of the text. The same went for the Companions who lived at the time when the Qur’ān was revealed, in a language they lived with on a daily basis, employing the mechanisms of positive interpretation that did not depart from the Arab linguistic and cultural norms in which the Qur’ān was revealed.


Fakhir al-Sultan

The late Egyptian thinker Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd argues that the mechanisms which govern the large part of religious discourse are the same, whether they manifest themselves in moderate or extremist discourse. He maintains that these mechanisms underpin the intellectual premises of discourse to such an extent that they converge with them, so that the one cannot be distinguished from the other.