Islam’s traditional tolerance of other believers exceeded Christian practice before secularism.

Evidence

Islam was never prepared, either in theory or in practice, to accord full equality to those who held other beliefs and practiced other forms of worship. It did, however, accord to the holders of partial truth a degree of practical as well as theoretical tolerance rarely paralleled in the Christian world until the West adopted a measure of secularism in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1579

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the standard Orientalist binary of Muslim intolerance versus Western tolerance — useful qualification for the reader’s cluster.