Tolerance is an often debated topic in the contemporary global village. It is
permanently invoked and accusations of intolerance are equaly frequent. It is said that when a
word is too much used it loses its deep meaning, its essence, its initial purpose, so that it
becomes nothnig ore than a meaningless word among other meaningless words making up a
discourse. The word tolerance is not an exception. We hear it every day in the street, at school,
in debates, and especially on television. We might ask ourselves what tolerance stil means in the
contemporay world. Is it a virtue or just a convention used at international level? These
questions start, on the one hand, from Fethullan Gulen’s words who says that tolerance is
forgiveness, forgiveness of all sins, compassion and mercy for the whole Creation, the hiding of
people’s shame and mistakes, and on the other hand from the realities of the 21st century, the
global world ordered by laws, rules, conventions. The present paper is an attempt to define
and to comment on the concepts of tolerance and intolerance.