Islamic polities practiced broad tolerance while denying full religious equality
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
Category: Factual Claims
- DEFINE: Distinguishes tolerance of partial truth (allowed to believers in revealed religions) from full equality — a useful conceptual distinction for comparative religious tolerance.