The vast majority of tolerance research in political science takes place in the context of the US and other Western democracies (Marquart-Pyatt and Paxton 2007). This research defines tolerance as the willingness to grant rights characteristic of Western-style liberal democracies—such as freedoms of speech and association—to disliked groups. As a result, far less is known about tolerance in the context of autocracies and hybrid regimes, even though political theorists have shown that tolerance has evolved historically across sociopolitical contexts, albeit in differing forms (Murphy 1997). In this paper, we ask: What does tolerance mean in a non-Western context? Specifically, what kinds of behaviors are required to demonstrate it? And how robust is tolerance under authoritarianism? To answer these questions, we analyze data from an original, nationally-representative survey of 1000 Qatari citizens, conducted in February 2016. First, we probe the behaviors associated with tolerance through a question bank of ten possible actions, which range from avoidance of and politeness toward those who are different to allowing them to speak on television, teach one’s children, and occupy positions of power in society. These questions allow us both to move beyond the “rights”-dominant view peculiar to tolerance in the West, and to test hypotheses from political theory (Forst 2013) about minimal (such as “mere” non-interference) and maximal variations on tolerance (such as respect and recognition). The latter are increasingly seen by theorists as better suited to the needs of today’s more multicultural societies. Second, we also use a framing experiment to test the robustness of tolerance, drawing on the “slippage” hypothesis, which emphasizes the possible gap between abstract commitments to civil liberties and applications to concrete cases (Prothro and Grigg 1960). Half of the respondents begin with a question that asks them to identify groups they would not like to have as neighbors. Then, the tolerance question bank is presented, prefaced by asking respondents to focus on the concrete least-favored group(s) (thus meeting the “objection” criterion). To ascertain commitments to tolerance in the abstract, the other half receives the tolerance question bank first, so that respondents are not primed to think specifically about their least-favored groups. By combining the bank of questions on tolerant behaviors with a framing experiment, our research builds knowledge of the concept and robustness of tolerance in a contemporary authoritarian regime, and offers important lessons for state-led social engineering efforts to increase tolerance.

In 1970, Sultan Qaboos staged a palace coup, ending what Michael Hudson has called “one of the most successful efforts by any ruler to prevent modernization.” For years, Qaboos’ father, Said bin Taimur, had imprisoned Omanis caught smoking in public. Upon taking power, Qaboos lifted these restrictions and, as Sergey Plekhanov has observed, “smokers spilled out into the streets [of Muscat], saluting with clouds of smoke the abolition of the law of smoking outdoors.” Two decades later, in 1991, Bisharah Baroudi, a Philip Morris executive, noted in a company memorandum that smoking was the “‘necessary evil’ along with the general influx of expatriates” for the success of Oman’s program of modernization. This paper investigates the intersection of modernization and smoking in Oman through the lens of Oman’s framework of pragmatic tolerance. This framework reflects a combination of official and societal flexibility and a religious and legal Ibadi jurisprudence that frames the issue as one of tolerance for non-Muslims. Together, the governmental, societal, and religious perspectives accepted tobacco as a necessary element to modernize the Sultanate. While Ibadi jurisprudence prohibits smoking, Omanis freely smoke in private, grow and sell tobacco (primarily to Iran), and public levels of smoking have risen to the extent that the government has framed new curbs on public smoking as part of larger public health efforts. This pragmatic tolerance stands in contrast to other Ibadi communities in North Africa, where smoking in public is strictly prohibited. To prove my argument, I use two rich sources which have not been exhaustively used in studies of Oman. The first is the internal documents of tobacco companies housed at the University of California, San Francisco, including market analysis and surveys of smokers. These types of documents have been used for some states in the Middle East but not Oman. The second is Ibadi jurisprudence which was explored in Hoffman (2012) but remains an understudied area of Islamic law. The history of smoking has often included an admission of its health hazards—stated but deliberately disregarded—along with a frank statement of its attractions: “Tobacco is a dirty weed/I like it” (Graham Lee Hemming). If in its play with fire it has elements of the diabolical—“tobacco is a filthy weed and from the devil doth proceed” (Benjamin Waterhouse)—in the context of modern Islam, it became an emblem of enlightened liberation, a sign of sophistication, worldliness, and a cosmopolitan toleration.

Political tolerance, or the willingness to “put up” with disliked groups exercising their civil rights, is an essential component not only of democratic politics (Dahl 1970; 1989; Diamond 1994, 1999; Linz and Stepan 1996; Seligson 2000), but of any viable political system regardless of its level of democracy (Lipset 1993; Gibson 1996). By contrast, the story of many Arab societies since 2011 is one of intolerance, prejudices and conflicts along ideological and sectarian lines. What started as sporadic incidents of violence during mass demonstrations against authoritarian rulers evolved into systemic political violence, terrorist attacks, and civil wars. Hence, one of the pressing questions of political research is whether creating tolerant societies in this part of the world is attainable and under what conditions. In this paper, we aim to examine what could best promote tolerance toward least-favored political groups in transitioning societies. Former studies have overwhelmingly focused on the determinants of tolerance in democratic and developing democracies in different parts of the world, however, our knowledge remains limited in regard to the dynamics of (in)tolerance under authoritarian and transitioning political regimes in the Middle East. While our previous work (author citation 2016) has analyzed the drivers of tolerance under failed transition, focusing on the case of Egypt, we aim in this paper to better understand the underlying mechanisms of tolerance in countries that have undergone successful transitions. Tunisia is a particularly valuable case study for this purpose, given its history as a tolerant, modernizing, and secular state since independence. Using a randomized, population-based survey experiment in Tunisia, we test three main competing arguments through exposing respondents to different primes, emphasizing the importance of tolerance on the basis of religious, economic, or government endorsements. Respondents are then asked questions that gauge their tolerance levels toward their least-favored group (mainly Islamists, Salafists, remnants of the former regime). We also control for the level of trust in government, religiosity, interpersonal trust, contact, and political knowledge. Our results will allow us to better understand the micro-level dynamics of political tolerance in transitioning societies.

This paper reconsiders commonly-held assumptions about the existence of a causal relationship between religious orthodoxy and intolerance towards religious minorities. It does so by analyzing the notion of tolerance in the social imaginary of the Nur community in Turkey; that is, the way in which Nur students understand, internalize and practice toleration. The Nur are followers of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, a Sunni scholar who preached in the Ottoman Empire/Turkey from ca. 1890 to 1960. A growing community with roughly six million members, the Nur are staunch allies of the ruling AKP government, and they hold significant political and cultural influence. The paper draws from ethnographic research conducted between 2012 and 2014 in Turkey among the Nur community, including participant-observation, interviews, and archival sources. Methodologically, focusing the analysis on the level of imaginary (Taylor, 2003) allows the researcher to grasp the meaning attributed to tolerance by Muslims at the grassroots level of lived experiences, along with the possibilities of action offered by the surrounding political landscape. In the view of Nur students, the reasons to tolerate are ingrained in Quranic statements that make respect for the freedom of non-Muslims a religious obligation, and in Nursi’s eschatology that makes it a moral duty by attributing to non-Muslims a crucial role at the end times. At the same time, tolerance is presented as compatible with a strong belief in the superiority of Islam and with proselytizing activities among non-Muslims. Conceptualized in this way, tolerance translates into a form of legal equality that does not require, nor is sustained by, moral equality: Muslims and non-Muslims are equal in front of the law, but not in absolute terms. The paper also provides examples of how reinterpretations of tolerance among Nur students were tied to the burst of neo-Ottomanism in Turkish society over the last few decades. This political development strengthened the tendency - already existing in Nursi’s writings - to base tolerance on group rights rather than individual rights, and, consequently, reinforced intolerance towards individual dissent within the group as well as individual positioning outside of a recognized religious group. This paper’s conclusions reflect on the strengths and shortcomings of an Islamic argument for religious toleration, the possibility of reconciling orthodoxy and tolerance, and the methodological advantages of situating the inquiry into tolerance within the study of the broader Islamic social imaginary.

The ideal of tolerance has long played a central role in the Western political imagination. In the context of the multiculturalist policies that characterised the latter half of the 20th century in particular, tolerance has often been presented as an essential component of a prosperous pluralistic society. The ideal of tolerance, however, has also emerged beyond the West in non-democratic, non-secular, and to some extent, not-so-pluralistic societies, including the oil monarchies of the Arabian Gulf. In 2016 the UAE announced its first (and the world’s first) Minister of Tolerance, as part of the country’s wider efforts in recent years to present itself as an ‘open’ and ‘tolerant’ society. Qatar similarly has put great emphasis on the ideal of tolerance, hosting annual interfaith conferences on themes such as religious freedom. Oman hosts an annual meeting on November 16th, the ‘International Day of Tolerance’, and publishes a periodical called Al-Tasamoh (‘Tolerance’). Even Saudi Arabia, notorious for its apparent intolerance at home, funds the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue. Tolerance, it seems, is everywhere. But what is behind the newfound popularity of this ideal in the Gulf? What is the lived experience of tolerance in countries like Qatar or the UAE? How do values travel? This paper looks at discourses of tolerance in the Gulf, focusing in particular on the question of religious tolerance in Qatar and the UAE. It traces the history of the concept, and accounts for its pervasiveness in the region today, drawing on recent anthropological fieldwork, including interviews and participant-observation. While importantly not intimating that tolerance is an inherently, nor is it an exclusively Western ideal, I suggest that the ‘tolerance’ that has become so salient in the Gulf in recent years borrows heavily from Western political discourse. This paper revolves around the following questions; how has the already problematically ambiguous ideal of tolerance been appropriated and mobilised in the Gulf, and to what ends? Given its now central role in Gulf countries’ self-presentation on the world stage, what efforts have been made to promote tolerance at home? And what are the limits of religious tolerance in self-proclaimed Islamic countries? Contributing to the broader conversation on the globalisation of values, this paper describes the lived experience of tolerance in the Gulf today and accounts for its prominence in political discourse.