"As societies throughout the world become more modern,

they do not thereby become more similar. Often they move further apart. In these circumstances, we need to think afresh about how regimes and ways of life that will always be different can come to coexist in peace.

Rather than looking to an illusive future we would do better to turn to the past. Toleration was practised many centuries ago in Buddhist India, in the Ottoman Empire and the Moorish kingdoms of medieval Spain, and in China. There is nothing liberal, western or modern about the peaceful coexistence of communities having different values and beliefs.

Such regimes cannot simply be reinvented. They were devices for peaceful coexistence in times when most people were born into a single way of life. Today, many societies harbour many ways of life, with many people belonging to more than one. Even so, these ancient regimes of toleration teach a vital lesson. Liberal societies are only one way in which different ways of life can live together.

The modern myth is that with the advance of science one set of values will be accepted everywhere. Can we not accept that human beings have divergent and conflicting values, and learn to live with this fact? It is a strange notion that humanity is destined for a single way of living, when history is so rich in conflict an contrivance.

-John Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern, p. 113