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This chapter critically explores contemporary Islamic discussions of religious difference that feature prominently in scholarly discourse in the United States, including the contributions of Engineer, Sachedina, Aydin, Nasr, Shah-Kazemi, Legenhausen, Winter, Esack, and al-Fārūqī. In reference to these contributions, it highlights two dominant trends (the prioritization of religious sameness and the attempt to simultaneously affirm both religious sameness and religious difference) and a shared, underlying conception of religious difference as that which discretely and statically divides religious groups. This chapter details the implications and shortcomings of this shared conception of religious difference for understanding the proximate religious Other, the Other-who-can-never-be-wholly-other.

This chapter provides an overview of feminist contributions to theology of religions, including those of Ruether, Suchocki, Plaskow, McCarthy, King, Gross, Hill Fletcher, Kwok, and McGarvey. It aims to identify various elements of these feminist approaches that are consistent with the conception of human difference drawn from Muslim women interpreters of the Qurʾān. This chapter probes the ways various feminist theologians have attempted to extend their methods, sources, and norms to the topic of religious diversity, and it critically co-opts aspects of their approaches, including their critiques of theology of religions and the typology of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism, and their endeavor to account for and value religious sameness and religious difference without resorting to hierarchical evaluation.

Utilizing the conceptual and hermeneutical infrastructure developed in earlier chapters, this chapter begins to reinterpret the Qurʾānic discourse on the religious Other and to articulate a Muslima theology of religious pluralism. It distinguishes between hierarchical and lateral religious difference in the Qurʾān—between the semantic fields of taqwā (God consciousness) and umma (community)—and explores the relationship between the two distinct genres. On this basis, this chapter argues against the static and holistic alignment of the two genres of difference, which results in the automatic ascription of a particular evaluation or status to a particular religious community.

This chapter examines various genres of the historical Islamic discourse on religious difference—including the apologetic, polemical, exegetical, juridical, and Sufi—in an effort to highlight the complex and diverse processes of self-identification, boundary creation, and Othering that are woven throughout Islamic history. In these diverse genres, this chapter highlights a number of recurring themes, including the role of divine ontology (e.g., divine oneness and mercy) in assessing the human Other; the depiction of created anthropology (e.g., the status of humans without revelation and the purpose of humanity); the relationship between various revelations and prophets (e.g., issues of taḥrīf, supersession, completion, and the necessity of affirming Muḥammad); and the legal and soteriological explication of Qurʾānic categories (e.g., definition of threshold criteria and internal composition of categories such as īmān, islām, and kufr).

In Body of Lies Ridley Scott explores the relentless clash of ideologies and religion in the Middle East. This realistic spy movie doesn’t take the usual dashing and romantic approach; it is gritty and violent. Roger Ferris, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is on dangerous ground differentiating those who want to help him from those who want to kill him. To further complicate his life, his CIA boss, Ed Hoffman, portrayed by Russell Crowe, who communicates with his operative primarily via telephonic communication, is working against Ferris behind his back for his own political and personal purposes. Although the film has a logic of its own, audiences found it confusing and critics gave it mostly negative reviews.