The role of religion in building bridges between communities is under greater scrutiny today than it was in the 1970s and 1980s. In the present period, religion has assumed a critical responsibility in defining the guidelines for life in a civil society in which a modern notion of inclusive citizenry is at odds with a community of the faithful defined as religiously exclusive. Monotheistic traditions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam are notoriously exclusivist in their theologies and discriminatory in their laws. In order to meet the challenge of all-encompassing secularisation, religious scholars are engaged in exploring the scriptural resources of their respective traditions to provide relevant textual references and their accompanying interpretations that can accommodate the demands of plurality in human religious commitments. This chapter undertakes to examine Islamic scriptural sources to demonstrate that the Qur'ān and its interpreters were fully aware of the need to provide principles that could guide co-existence among religious communities so that people could learn to live together in harmony and peace.

Taking pluralism to mean the acknowledgement and affirmation that various spiritual paths are capable of guiding and saving their adherents, the basic argument to be made about the relation between the Qur'ān and pluralism is that Muslim scriptures capture the real experience of the early community as it struggled to balance tolerance with exclusive truth claims that provided the nascent Muslim community with its unique identity among communities of the faithful.

In recent decades, especially following the Islamic revolution and the establishment of religious authority as the head of government in the modern nationstate of Iran, the public role of religion in general and the role of Islam in particular has been revisited by social scientists. With the American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, constitutional debates have as yet to tackle the role of religious convictions and values in the development of democratic institutions to guarantee basic freedoms and rights in those countries. The major stumbling block to democratization appears to be the way the role of religious values is defined in developing an inclusive sense of citizenship without insisting upon doctrinal/theological uniformity. In both of these countries religious leaders have insisted on making the religious law of Islam, the Shari’a, the principal source of defining freedoms and rights in the national constitution. While it is acknowledged that in the area of the personal status of a Muslim man and woman, the Shari’a could continue to provide judicial decisions in the area of personal law, there is also a major concern in the way traditional juridical formulations define a woman's social and political rights. More importantly, the religiously pluralistic nature of Muslim societies requires taking into consideration not only Sunni- Shi’ite but also interfaith relationships. The need to search for inclusive religious values has assumed a situation of urgency.

The challenge that faces the community today is this: There is a deeply held belief among religiously oriented Muslims that as a comprehensive guide to human life, Islam must not only guide but also govern a modern state with a Muslim majority. Is this conceivable? Are there resources within the classically inherited tradition that can be tapped for the creation of a nation-state that is also a member of the international public order? While the latter question is beyond the scope of the present paper, I want to explore the conceivability of a religious-minded demand in light of the changed circumstances under which modern nation-states conduct their affairs. In order to do that, I will begin my search in the foundational sources of Islamic political discourse in the context in which this discourse shaped the political underpinnings of the Muslim empire.