Religious Pluralism
Abstract
Abstract Views: 66
In the traditional paradigm, the study of the ‘other’ was based on the exclusivist approach. Hence, every individual religious identity claimed exclusiveness in terms of salvation particularly, and in general, the right to live at his existence level, and the right to persist at his conceptual level. But the West witnessed an utterly different experience during and after the Renaissance, the period which was wrongly interpreted as a combat
between religion and science; actually it was a combat between an interpolated sacred text and the ever increasing human perception based on the tools made by human beings after a long experiential phenomenon. Thereafter, the West enabled herself to design a diametrically opposed notion by a total rejection of ‘religion as such,’ and considered it as an inspirational tool in order to satisfy the inner needs and feelings of those who still
found their attachment to the other world. Thereby emerges the pattern of civilizational study, and this replaced the study of religions in a very clever manner. The study of religions helps one to know the right path and follow it, whereas the study based on civilization helps one to know different values and trends of thinking without the least idea to accept, for in this study genre, discovering the right path is not intended at all. Later on, considering the ‘other’ the right one along with one’s own self, shaped a new discipline called pluralism, which has assumed another name - the new religion. Keeping in view the paradigm of pluralism, it is claimed by the modernist that the followers of every religion have the right of salvation but the historical analysis of religious study disapproves it. In this article, Christianity and Islamic perspective of salvation have been discussed. Further, an in-depth study of Islam reveals two dimensions in the above succinctly stated Western experience; one, the text Islam presents is not interpolated; second, historical study of Islam manifests that ‘religious tolerance’ has been a hallmark of every Islamic epoch, derived from its very text, and this is altogether different from that of ‘religious pluralism,’ an extended model of civilizational study.
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References
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Linwood Urban,A Short History of Christian Thought(New York: Oxford University
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Ibid.,256.
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Charles Gore, The Mission of the Church (London: Oxford University Press, 1899),
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10 Ibid.,110.
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12 Ibid., 38.
13 Joseph A. Komonchak, The New Dictionary of Theology, Marry Collins and Dermot
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14 Ibid., 770.
15 Ibid.,771.
16 Tony Lane, A Concise History of Christian Thought (London: T & T. Clark, 2006),
312.
17 Ibid.,311.
18 Ibid.,329.
19 Joseph A. Komonchak, The New Dictionary of Theology, 670.
20 Lane, A Concise History of Christian Thought, 336.
21 Martin Forward, Interfaith Dialogue (One World, Oxford, 2001), 39.
22 Ibid.,39.
23 Ibid.,41.
24 Joachim Wach, The Comparative Study of Religion (New York: Columbia
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25 Ibid., xxxvii.
26 Akbar S. Ahmad, Postmodernism and Islam (London: Rutledge, 1992), 10.
27 Ibid.,10.
28 Ibid.,10.
29 Komonchak, The New Dictionary of Theology, 1828.
30 Ahmad Ghorab, Subverting Islam: The Role of Orientalist Centers (Malaysia: The
Open Press, 1996), 11.
31 Martin Forward, Jean Holm, eds. Sacred Writings (London: Pinter Publications,
1994), 103.
32 Muzaffar Iqbal, Definitive Encounters (Lahore: Dost Publication, 2008), 6.
33 Ibid.,9.
34 Abdullah Saeed, The Quran. An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2008), 209.
35 Al-e-Imran 03:85
36 Adnan Aslam, “Religious Pluralism,” Journal of Islamic Thought and Civilization 1,
no. 2 (2011): 44.
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