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But here’s what also needs to be said: certain forms of contemporary Islam are an enormous, confounding problem and a threat to the liberal political and social order. The threat isn’t just from bombs, bullets, and butcher’s knives. It’s also, and perhaps more gravely, from ideas that may well be fundamentally unassimilable to a liberal way of life.

Liberalism offers the following deal to individuals and groups: give up the hope of controlling the whole of social life, of using government power (and violence) to enforce your vision of the highest good, and allow the natural pluralism of society to grow and flourish; in return you’ll be granted the freedom to find a home within that highly differentiated socio-cultural ecosystem, a place where you and those with whom you freely choose to associate can also grow and flourish in peace.

Tolerate — and you will be tolerated in turn.

That’s the liberal bargain. It is one of the finest achievements of Western civilization, and one of its greatest gifts to humanity in all times and places — nothing less than an all-purpose strategy for getting along despite our often rancorous disagreements about the highest good and ultimate ends of life.