Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue by Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz.
Title: Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue.
Author: Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz.
Genre: Non-fiction, debates, religion, Islam.
Country: U.K./U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2015.
Summary: An honest yet respectful exchange between the Islamist-turned-liberal-Muslim activist Nawaz, and the neuroscientist who advocates mindful atheism Harris. Is Islam a religion of peace or war? Is it amenable to reform? Why do so many Muslims seem to be drawn to extremism? And what do words like jihadism and fundamentalism really mean? In a world riven by misunderstanding and violence, the two demonstrate how two people with very different religious views can find common ground and join in an urgently needed conversation.
My rating: 8/10.
My review:
♥ Nawaz ..My honest view is that Islam is not a religion of war or of peace-it's a religion. Its sacred scripture, like those of other religions, contains passages that many people would consider extremely problematic. Likewise, all scriptures contain passages that are innocuous. Religion doesn't inherently speak for itself; no scripture, no book, no piece of writing has its own voice. I subscribe to this view whether I'm interpreting Shakespeare or interpreting religious scripture.
♥ If Islam is largely (or entirely) what Muslims make of it, the state of Muslim public opinion is important to take into account. A 2013 PEW poll conducted in eleven Muslim-majority countries showed that support for suicide bombing against civilians in defense of Islam has declined in recent years. Nevertheless, the numbers of people who still think that this form of violence against noncombatants is "often" or "sometimes" justified are sobering: Egypt (25 percent), Indonesia (6 percent), Jordan (12 percent), Lebanon (33 percent), Malaysia (27 percent), Nigeria (8 percent), Pakistan (3 percent), the Palestinian territories (62 percent), Senegal (18 percent), Tunisia (12 percent), and Turkey (16 percent). There are 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide. If even 10 percent support suicide bombing against civilians in defense of the faith, that's 160 million supporters of terrorism.
♥ Nawaz: ..I joined this organization as a deeply aggrieved, perhaps traumatized, sixteen-year-old victim of severely violent racist attacks. However, my grievances were frozen for a long time by the ideological dogma that I came to adopt. I choose my words here deliberately. Grievances are not in themselves sufficient to radicalize somebody. They are half the truth. My meaning is best summarized this way: when we in the West failed to intervene in the Bosnian genocide, some Muslims became radicalized. when we did intervene in Afghanistan and Iraq, more Muslims became radicalized; when we failed to intervene in Syria, many more Muslims became radicalized. The grievance narrative that pins the blame on foreign policy is only half the story. It is insufficient as an explanation for radicalization.
♥ Harris: ..One of the problems with religion is that it creates in-group loyalty and outgroup hostility, even when members of one's own group are behaving like psychopaths.
♥ Nawaz: ..I mention it only because where grievances are relevant is in priming young, vulnerable individuals who are experiencing a profound identity crisis to receive ideological dogma through charismatic recruiters. Once that dogma has been received, it frames one's worldview, the lens through which others are perceived, the vehicle by which others are recruited; it becomes the language we speak. It is very important to understand that, because grievances will always exist. They've existed from the beginning of time, and they will exist until the end of time. Other communities face them as well, but this particular ideological phenomenon has arisen only in certain contexts. For example, people often blame poverty or a lack of education for radicalization, whereas experts have long known that a disproportionate number of terrorists come from highly educated backgrounds. So at sixteen I adopted an ideological worldview that froze my sense of grievance and turned it instead into dogma.
♥ Nawaz: ..when I say "Islamism," I mean the desire to impose any given interpretation of Islam on society. When I say "jihadism," I mean the use of force to spread Islamism.
Islamism and jihadism are politicized, contemporary readings of Islam and jihad; they are not Islam and jihad per se. As I've said, Islam is a traditional religion like any other, replete with sects, denominations, and variant readings. But Islamism is the desire to impose any of those readings on society. It is commonly expressed as the desire to enforce a version of shari'ah as law.
Political Islamists seek to impose their views through the ballot box, biding their time until they can infiltrate the institutions of society from within. Revolutionary Islamists seek change from outside the system in one clean sweep. Militant Islamists are jihadists.
♥ Nawaz: ..As we witnessed in the first round of elections in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood gained only 25 percent of the vote. Second place was claimed by Mubarak's former prime minister, Ahmed Shafik, with 24 percent. That 1 percent margin was insufficient for the Brotherhood to claim victory. In the presidential runoff between Shafik and Mohamed Morsi, despite the certain protest vote against Shafik (who was tainted by affiliation with the previous regime), the Brotherhood still managed to gain only 51 percent of the vote. That suggests that many Egyptians voted for the Muslim Brotherhood in the second round only to prevent the return of Mubarak's former prime minister. It is reasonable to estimate, therefore, that at the height of its power, the world's oldest and largest Islamist group could muster only about 25 percent in dedicated support. ..I'm using Egypt as an example because that's where the Muslim Brotherhood is particularly successful. And if the Brotherhood in Egypt could gain only 25 percent in the first round of elections, it's probably less popular in other Muslim-majority societies. This is what my gut tells me; I have no empirical evidence.
Harris: Actually, one group analyzed the past forty years of parliamentary elections in Muslim-majority countries and found that on average, Islamist parties have carried 15 percent of the vote. This suggests that 15 percent of the world's Muslims are Islamists. However, poll results on the topic of shari'ah generally show much higher levels of support for its implementation-killing adulterers, cutting off the hands of thieves, and so forth. I'm not sure what to think about a society in which 15 percent of people vote for an Islamist party, but 40 percent or even 60 percent want apostates killed. If nothing else, that would seem to nudge the proportion of Islamists a little higher. I've been saying that the number is probably around 20 percent worldwide-an estimate I consider fairly conservative, whereas Muslim apologists consider it an outrageous fiction that testifies to my bigotry and paranoia.
♥ Nawaz: Recall that I classified the majority of Muslims as conservative: though not all conservatives may be "practicing" Muslims, their views tend to reflect traditional Muslim values. Well, a smaller group beyond those are reform Muslims-people like the UK's lead reform theologian, Dr. Usama Hasan. They are attempting both to challenge Islamism head-on and to reform some of the more conservative interpretations of the faith. By "reform" I mean renew or update interpretations, not with any specific reference to the Christian Reformation. These reformists are, I believe, the cream of the crop in terms of having the networks and the intelligence to approach this discussion. I hope they are the future, and if I have anything to do with it, they will be.
♥ Nawaz: ..My holding this dialogue with you may in itself cause concern among some conservative and some tribal (yet nonreligious) Muslims. Whereas I see our conversation as a prime example of how the fog can be lifted if we simply put aside the hyperbole and ditch the posturing, others will view it as fraternizing with the enemy-that enemy being you. My principles allow me to have this dialogue with you, despite your views about Islam and its negative role in today's world, just as they would allow me to have a dialogue with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who advocate "Islam is the solution" for today's world. In either case, my aim would be to further my secular, democratic, human rights values. In fact, I regularly exchange views with committed Islamists and jihadists in an attempt to bring them away from their ideological dogma-as is my role. Yet I suspect that for many conservative or tribal (yet nonreligious) Muslims, my talking to you is more problematic than my talking to jihadists. That highlights the extent of the problem we face today.
♥ Harris: In fact, you're using a more precise definition of the word "secular" than is common in this context. To spell it out for our readers: secularism is simply a commitment to keeping religion out of politics and public policy. Your religion is your business, and my religion, or lack of one, is mine. A willingness to build a wall of separation between church and state is what defines secularism-but, as you point out, behind that wall one may be a full-blown religious fanatic, so long as one doesn't try to impose the fruits of one's fanaticism on others.
♥ Nawaz: ..This is a unique challenge for Muslims today owing to the rise of Islamism and jihadism, and to the historically European context in which secularism is framed. This challenge is not, however, insurmountable.
Ideally, I'd like all Muslims to be either reform-minded or citizens who happen to be Muslims. You won't hear from that last group, however. They're not going to come to you and say, "Hey, Sam, I don't believe in all that and I'm Muslim," because they're not engaging with society as Muslims. They are lawyers, doctors, caretakers, cleaners, and drivers. If all these people became just "citizens" and interacted with their political structures through their elected representatives, most of the problem would be solved.
♥ Harris: ..Specifically, the polls that were done in Britain immediately after the 7/7 bombings in London revealed that more than 20 percent of British Muslims felt sympathy for the bombers' motives; 30 percent wanted to live under shari'ah; 45 percent thought that 9/11 was the result of a conspiracy between the United States and Israel; and 68 percent believe that British citizens who "insult Islam" should be arrested and prosecuted.
..Nawaz: ..A more recent poll indicates that 27 percent of Britain's Muslims said that they had some sympathy for the motives behind the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris. Eleven percent felt sympathy for people who wish to fight against "Western interests." Though this poll establishes that the majority hold less sympathy for violence, these two figures are still alarmingly high in a context where up to 1,000 British Muslims may have gone to fight for the Islamic State.
Harris: Would you say that Britain is the most challenging country in Europe in this respect?
Nawaz: Although Belgium has the highest percentage of citizens who recently went to Iraq and Syria to join the Islamic State, studies show that the 500 to 1,000 who left from Britain have a highest level of education and can be more extreme than their European counterparts. Such numbers point to an uncomfortably large minority and could not have emerged from a vacuum. In fact, one of the most alarming polls reported recently by the London Times found that one in every seven young Britons has "warm feelings" toward the Islamic State. Whether or not this is accurate, it suggests a level of grassroots sympathy that is too high for comfort. An ideological undercurrent within communities fosters these numbers. Britain has become a net exporter of Islamism and jihadism. My former Islamist group didn't exist in Pakistan until we exported it from Britain.
So we've got a serious problem in the UK and across Europe, and I'm not making any excuses for that. We set up Quilliam to meet this challenge head-on. We attempt, first and foremost, to isolate jihadists from everyone else and then to challenge Islamists and distinguish them from conservatives and other Muslim communities. We encourage Muslims to start seeing political Islamism for what it is: a modern ideology that first emerged with the Muslim Brotherhood. We also address Muslim communities in the UK on the broader need to wholeheartedly subscribe to democratic, human rights-based reform. That's a huge challenge just in Europe, let alone the rest of the world. So we need all the help we can get.
♥ Nawaz: There are indeed similarities and differences between Islamism and jihadism. We shouldn't be surprised by this-the same applies when we look at, say, communism. Socialists are on one end, and communists on the other; some are militant, and some aren't. It's the same with Islamism.
..In fact, I believe that four elements exist in all forms of ideological recruitment: a grievance narrative, whether real or perceived; an identity crisis; a charismatic recruiter; and ideological dogma. The dogma's "narrative" is its propaganda.
♥ Nawaz: ..Though they do certainly believe in martyrdom, they also believe in the "evils" of Western imperialism. Likewise, they believe that they're living under Arab dictators. The grievance narrative kicks in, as I said, prior to the point of recruitment. But at the point of recruitment this grievance narrative is fossilized by ideological dogma, which then becomes the vehicle through which they express themselves. So it's not one or the other. But certainly the cosmic struggle is a consistent element for all Islamists.
Another difference between jihadists and Islamists is that Islamists will seek martyrdom according to their own theory. So in Hizb ut-Tahrir we were taught that martyrdom is achieved by being killed while holding a despotic ruler to account or spreading the ideology. We were taught that if the regime kills you while you're attempting to recruit army officers, you'll be a martyr, and you should embrace that. But we were also taught that you're not a martyr if you blow yourself up in a marketplace, because you're killing civilians and other Muslims.
♥ Harris: So you wouldn't distinguish between jihadists and other Islamists as to degree of religious conviction-for instance, their level of certainty about the existence of paradise or the reality of martyrdom? The difference is purely a matter of methodology?
Nawaz: Yes. Some jihadists are not "pious" in the sense of having firm religious convictions. They simply prefer the violence, the direct action, so they're attracted to those groups. Yet some Islamists are incredibly pious and sincerely believe in the holiness of their political cause. So piety of the lack of it, and religious sincerity or the lack of it, fluctuates between, within, and among groups.
♥ Nawaz: ..It is not necessarily accurate to assume that, say, the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood are somehow less pious than the leaders of, say, the Islamic State. More violence does not necessarily equate with greater religious conviction. Each group is deeply convinced of its approach to achieving Islamism in society, and both face much danger in pursuit of that goal. But they differ in methodology, and they very much despise each other, just as Trotsky and Stalin eventually did. That didn't mean one was less a communist than the other; they had a factional dispute within their ideology. Some people misunderstand such disputes within Islamism. They argue, "What do you mean Islamism? There's no such thing." The Muslim Brotherhood hates groups like the Islamic State, and the Islamic State would kill members of the Muslim Brotherhood. I always remind them, that's like saying there's no such thing as communism just because Stalin is said to have killed Trotsky. It's an absurd conclusion to reach. Of course there's a thing called communism. And there's a thing called Islamism. It's an ideology. People are seeking to bring it about, but they differ in their approach.
♥ Harris: ..although there certainly seem to be many cases in which people have no intelligible grievance apart from a theological one and become "radicalized" by the idea of sacrificing everything for their faith. I'm thinking of the Westerners who have joined groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, for instance. Sometimes, religious ideology appears to be not merely necessary but sufficient to motivate a person to do this. You might say that an identity crisis was also involved-but everyone has an identity crisis at some point. In fact, one could say that the whole of life is one long identity crisis. The truth is that some people appear to be almost entirely motivated by their religious beliefs. Absent those beliefs, their behavior would make absolutely no sense; with them, it becomes perfectly understandably, even rational.
As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we've been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars-deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields-who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take Islamists and jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations.
When one asks what the motivations of Islamists and jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion. Needless to say, the West is to blame for all the mayhem we see in Muslim societies. After all, how would we feel if outside powers and their mapmakers had divided our lands and stolen our oil? These beleaguered people just want what everyone else wants out of life. They want economic and political security. They want good schools for their kids. They want to be free to flourish in ways that would be fully compatible with a global civil society. Liberals imagine that jihadists and Islamists are acting as anyone else would given a similar history of unhappy encounters with the West. And they totally discount the role that religious beliefs play in inspiring a group like the Islamic State-to the point where it would be impossible for a jihadist to prove that he was doing anything for religious reasons.
Apparently, it's not enough for an educated person with economic opportunities to devote himself to the most extreme and austere version of Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess his certainty about martyrdom on video before blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstrations of religious fanaticism are somehow considered rhetorically insufficient to prove that he really believed what he said he believed. Of course, if he said he did these things because he was filled with despair and felt nothing but revulsion for humanity, or because he was determined to sacrifice himself to rid his nation of tyranny, such a psychological or political motive would be accepted at face value. This double standard is guaranteed to exonerate religion every time. The game is rigged.
I don't know if you're familiar with the same liberal apologists I am. Some are journalists, some are academics, a few are Muslims-but the general picture is of a white, liberal non-Muslim who equates any criticism of Islamic doctrines with bigotry, "Islamophobia," or even "racism." These people are very prominent in the US, and their influence is as intellectually embarrassing as it is morally problematic. Although they don't make precisely the same noises on every question, they deny any connection between heartfelt religious beliefs and Muslim violence. Whose newspapers and websites can now be doubted on to function as de facto organs of Islamist apology-The Guardian, Salon, The Nation, Alternet, and so forth. This has made it very difficult to have public conversations of the sort we are having.
♥ Nawaz: ..Unfortunately, many "fellow-travelers" of Islamism are on the liberal side of this debate. I call them "regressive leftists"; they are in fact reverse racists. They have a poverty of expectation for minority groups, believing them to be homogeneous and inherently opposed to human rights values. They are culturally reductive in how they see "Eastern"-and in my case, Islamic-culture, and they are culturally deterministic in attempting to freeze their ideal of it in order to satisfy their orientalist fetish. While they rightly question every aspect of their "own" Western culture in the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims who attempt to do so within Islam, and they choose to side instead with every regressive reactionary in the name of "cultural authenticity" and anticolionialism.
They claim that their reason for refusing to criticize any policy, foreign or domestic-other than those of what they consider "their own" government-is that they are not responsible for other governments' actions. However, they leap whenever any (not merely their own) liberal democratic government commits a policy error, while generally ignoring almost every fascist, theocratic, or Muslim-led dictatorial regime and group in the world. It is as if their brains cannot hold two thoughts at the same time. Besides, since when has such isolationism been a trait of liberal internationalists? It is a right-wing trait.
They hold what they think of as "native" communities-and I use that word deliberately-to lesser standards than the ones they claim apply to all "their" people, who happen to be mainly white, and that's why I call it reverse racism. In holding "native" communities to lesser-or more culturally "authentic"-standards, they automatically disempower those communities. They stifle their ambitions. They cut them out of the system entirely, because there's no aspiration left. These communities end up in self-segregated "Muslim areas" where the only thing their members aspire to is being tinpot community leaders, like ghetto chieftains. The "fellow-travelers" fetishize these "Muslim" ghettos in the name of "cultural authenticity" and identity politics, and the ghetto chieftains are often the leading errand boys for them. Identity politics and the pseudo-liberal search for cultural authenticity result in nothing but a downward spiral of competing medieval religious or cultural assertions, fights over who are the "real" Muslims, ever increasing misogyny, homophobia, sectarianism, and extremism.
..Harris: I agree with everything you just said. I once wrote an article titled "The End of Liberalism?" in which I observed that these "fellow-travelers" have made it nearly impossible for well-intentioned, pluralistic, liberal people to speak honestly on this topic-leaving only fascists, neo-Nazis, and other right-wing lunatics to do the job. On some occasions the only people making accurate claims about the motivations of Islamists and jihadists are themselves dangerous bigots. That's terrifying. We have extremists plying both sides of the board in a clash of civilizations, and liberals won't speak sensibly about what's happening.
♥ Nawaz: ..Now, what worse form of bigotry could you possibly adopt than the idea that all 1.6 billion people in the world who subscribe to a particular religious denomination must think and behave in the same way? This sounds like a right-wing approach, but the "fellow-travelers," or the regressive leftists, have adopted it. Allow me to elaborate.
If you're a Muslim liberal speaking as I do, challenging Islamism, the "fellow-travelers" somehow perceive you as being not a genuine conservative Muslim. The "fellow-travelers" then promote "real" voices as legitimate interlocutors, because they seek "purity" and "cultural authenticity" in their orientalist desire to maintain a group identity. So of course a downward spiral begins. The question becomes "Okay, what does being a Muslim mean?" This quickly degenerates into "Well, he's a purer Muslim-let's listen to him."
Such an approach inevitably ends up empowering fundamentalists as the most authentic, because of course the one who wins the game of "Who's a purer Muslim" and outdoes others in a piety contest in the stubborn, dogmatic fundamentalist. This is how "fellow-travelers" disempower liberals and reformers. Without realizing it, they also adopt the role of thought police by asserting that liberalism isn't authentic to Muslims. Again, this is reverse bigotry kicking in.
I want those in what I call the regressive left who are reading this exchange to understand that the first stage in the empowerment of any minority community is the liberation of reformist voices within that community so that its members can take responsibility for themselves and overcome the first hurdle to genuine empowerment: the victimhood mentality. This is what the American civil rights movement achieved, by shifting the debate. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders took responsibility for their own communities and acted in a positive and empowering way, instead of constantly playing the victim card or rioting in the streets. Perpetuating this groupthink mind-set is both extremely dangerous and in fact disempowering.
Harris: Yes, and the irony is that these liberals don't see that they've abandoned women, gays, freethinkers, public intellectuals, and other powerless people in the Muslim world to a cauldron of violence and intolerance. Rather than support the rights of women and girls to not live as slaves, for instance, Western liberals support the right of theocrats to treat their wives and daughters however they want-and to be spared offensive cartoons in the meantime.
♥ Nawaz: ..Where there is a genuine grievance, such as the genocide in Bosnia, it needs to be addressed. Where there's a perceived grievance, the perception must be encouraged to unravel. Addressing real or perceived grievances will stem the flow of angry young fifteen-year-olds before they are recruited. We can say, "Okay, I see why you're angry about Bosnia-but have you considered that the Americans intervened in the end and helped put a stop to it? Why don't they get some credit for that?"
Harris: However, on the topic of perceived versus genuine grievances, religion plays a decidedly unhelpful role. For instance, what do you make of the fact that there are more protests in Muslim communities over Israel than over the Islamic State? Even more preposterous is the fact that if a pastor in Florida burns a copy of the Qur'an-or merely threatens to do so-it reliably produces more outrage in dozens of Muslim societies than the atrocities committed daily by Sunnis against Shia ever will.
♥ Nawaz: ..What I would add is that dogma is a lens through which grievances are filtered.
..Either lens through which grievances are interpreted-dogma or tribalism-must be addressed head-on. I challenge both, because of course the grievances themselves will always be there. It's the nature of life. What we can change is the ideological lens, or the tribal nature of one's identity, or the identity-politics games we tend to play. I believe that indulging identity politics can be dangerous. It usually leads to division. It doesn't lead to communities standing together.
♥ Nawaz: ..The other [mistake] would be focusing explicitly on what we think the text says rather than on the method through which the text is approached, because I would argue that no approach to a text is without method-even what you would call literalism wand what I call "vacuous literalism." (In fact, in many instances, some of the which we will address, a purely literal interpretation leads to a surprisingly liberal outcome.) For me, vacuousness in itself is a method of approaching a text. I use the word "vacuous" because an insistence on ignoring apparent contradictions is not in keeping with literal wording. When you pick one passage of any text, and demonstrate that it appears to contradict another passage, the insistence on being comfortable with those apparent contradictions and effectively arguing for both positions at the same time is a method. It doesn't make sense to me, but it's a method beyond mere literalism, as would be the method of attempting to reconcile such contradictions. Even agreeing on what the literal wording is requires a method.
♥ Harris: The tensions you've been describing are familiar to all religious moderates, but they seem especially onerous under Islam. The problem is that moderates of all faiths are committed to reinterpreting, or ignoring outright, the most dangerous and absurd parts of their scripture-and this commitment is precisely what makes them moderates. But it also requires some degree of intellectual dishonesty, because moderates can't acknowledge that their moderation comes from outside the faith. The doors leading out of the portion of scriptural literalism simply do not open from the inside. In the twenty-first century, the moderate's commitment to scientific rationality, human rights, gender equality, and every other modern value-values that, as you say, are potentially universal for human beings-comes from the past thousand years of human progress, much of which was accomplished in spite of religion, not because of it. So when moderates claim to find their modern, ethical commitments within scripture, it looks like an exercise in self-deception. The truth is that most of our modern values are antithetical to the specif teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And where we do find these values expressed in our holy books, they are almost never best expressed there.
Moderates seem unwilling to grapple with the fact that all scriptures contain an extraordinary amount of stupidity and barbarism that can always be rediscovered and made holy anew by fundamentalists-and there's no principle of moderation internal to the faith that prevents this. These fundamentalist readings are, almost by definition, more complete and consistent-and, therefore, more honest.
..Imagine that a literalist and a moderate have gone to a restaurant for lunch, and the menu promises "fresh lobster" as the specialty of the house. Loving lobster, the literalism simply places his order and waits. The moderate does likewise, but claims to be entirely comfortable with the idea that the lobster might not really be a lobster after all-perhaps it's a goose! And, whatever it is, it need not be "Fresh" in any conventional sense-for the moderate understands that the meaning of this term shifts according to the context. This would be a very strange attitude to adopt toward lunch, but it is even stranger when considering the most important questions of existence-what to live for, what to die for, and what to kill for. Consequently, the appeal of literalism isn't difficult to see.
..Simply living with the moderate' dilemma may be the only way forward, because the alternative would be to radically edit these books. I'm not such an idealist as to imagine that will happen. We can't say, "Listen, you barbarians. These holy books of yours are filled with murderous nonsense. In the interests of getting you to behave like civilized human beings, we're going to redact them and give you back something that reads like Kahlil Gibran. There you go... Don't you feel better now that you no longer hate homosexuals?" However, that's really what one should be able to do in any intellectual tradition in the twenty-first century. Again, this problem confronts religious moderates everywhere, but it's an excruciating problem with Muslims.
♥ Harris: ..I'm well aware that millions of nominally Muslim freethinkers are in hiding out of necessity. This is one of the things I find so insufferable about the liberal backlash against critics of Islam-especially the pernicious meme "Islamophobia," by which anyone who thinks Islam merits special concern at this moment in history is branded a bigot. What worries me is that so many moderate Muslims believe that "Islamophobia" is a bugger problem than literalist Islam is. They seem more outraged that someone like me would equate jihad with holy war than that millions of their co-religionists do this and commit atrocities as a result.
In recent days, the Islamic State has been burning prisoners alive in cages and decapitating people by the dozen-and gleefully posting videos attesting to the enormity of their sadism online. Far from being their version of a My Lai massacre, these crimes against innocents represent what they unabashedly stand for. In fact, these ghastly videos have become a highly successful recruiting tool, inspiring young jihadists from all over the world to travel to Syria and Iraq to join the cause. No doubt, most Muslims are horrified by this, but the truth is that in the very week that the Islamic State was taking its barbarism to new heights, we saw a much larger outcry in the Muslim world over the killing of three college students in North Carolina, amid circumstances that made it very likely to have been an ordinary triple murder (as opposed to a hate crime indicating some wave of anti-Muslim bigotry in the US). This skewing of priorities produces a grotesque combination of political sensitivity and moral callousness-wherein hate crimes against Muslims in the US (which are tiny in number, often property-related, and still dwarfed fivefold by similar offenses against Jews) appear to be of greater concern than the enslavement and obliteration of countless people throughout the Muslim world.
As you say, even having a conversation like this is considered a killing offense in many circles. I hear from Muslims who are afraid to tell their own parents that they have lost their faith in God, for fear of being murdered by them. These people say things like "If a liberal intellectual like you can't speak about the link between specific doctrines and violence without being defamed as a bigot, what hope is there for someone like me, who has to worry about being killed by her own family or village for merely expressing doubts about God?" So yes, I'm aware that one can't speak in Pakistan as I do here.
♥ Nawaz: ..A sensible way forward would be to establish this idea that there is no correct reading of scripture. This is especially easy for Sunnis-who represent 80 percent of the Muslims around the world-because they have no clergy. If a particular passage says "Smite their necks," to conclude, despite all the passages that came before it and everything that comes after it, that this passage means "Smite their necks today" is to engage in a certain method of interpretation. If we could popularize the understanding that all conclusions from scripture are but interpretations, then all variant readings of a holy book would become a matter of differing human perspectives.
That would radically reduce the stakes and undermine the claim that the Islamists are in possession of God's words. What is said in Arabic and Islamic terminology is: This is nothing but your ijtihad. This is nothing but your interpretation of the texts as a whole. There was a historical debate about whether or not the doors of ijtihad were closed. It concluded that they cannot be closed, because Sunni Muslims have no clergy. Anyone can interpret scripture if he is sufficiently learned in that scripture, which means that even extremists may interpret scripture. The best way to undermine extremists' insistence that truth is on their side is to argue that theirs is merely one way of looking at things. The only truth is that there is no correct way to interpret scripture.
When you open it up like that, you're effectively saying there is no right answer. And in the absence of a right answer, pluralism is the only option. And pluralism will lead to secularism, and to democracy, and to human rights. We must all focus on those values without worrying about whether atheism is the most intellectually pure approach. I genuinely believe that if we focus on the pluralistic nature of interpretation and on democracy, human rights, and secularism-on these values-we'll get to a time of peace and stability in Muslim-majority countries that then allows for conversations like this. Questioning whether God really exists would become a choice, open to all.
♥ Harris: ..However, I'm worried that progress on the practical problem will always be impeded by inertia on the intellectual one. Any position arrived at through this (granted, more appealing and more modern) approach to interpretation seems unstable, because fundamentalism can always rise again. And it will tend to rise again, to the degree that anyone feels the impulse to hew closely to the texts. What can you say to a person who thinks, "Okay, Maajid, you may be smarter than I am, but I just want to know what the Qur'an actually says. It says here that I should hate and fear infidels and take none as friends. So I'm just going to go with that and not split hairs."
♥ Harris: ..It seems to me that the Qur'an contains two central messages, and I would be interested to hear you reflect on how they might be open to a reformist approach-because, as generally understood, they seem inimical to pluralism, secularism, and everything else you're espousing.
The first is the demonization of infidels. However I squint my eyes or cock my head, a hatred and fear of infidels seems central to the Qur'an. Muslims are told to have no friends among them and are assured that Allah will mock, curse, shame, and destroy them on the Day of Judgment. In fact, their very skins will testify to their misdeeds, and they will burn for eternity in hellfire. There's simply no question that, under Islam, being an infidel is considered the worst possible deviation from the good life. Again, this idea isn't foreign to other religions-Judaism and Christianity both have a version of it. The difference is an emphasis. The evil of unbelief is spelled out in the Qur'an on almost every page, and one finds only a few stray lines-for example, "There is no compulsion in religion" (2:256)-with which to offset the general message of intolerance. There is also the doctrine of "abrogation," under which later-generally less tolerant-verses are believed to supersede earlier ones. My understanding is that 2:256 is nullified in this way.
The second central message-the other side of the same coin, really-is the promise of paradise, which explicitly devalues life in this world. Obliviously, that isn't unique to Islam either, but the belief in martyrdom, and in jihad as a way of achieving it, is primarily a Muslim phenomenon. Islam teaches that dying in defense of the faith is among the surest paths to paradise-and the only one to reach it directly, bypassing the Day of Judgment. Some teachings suggest that a martyr can bring seventy of his dearest friends and family in after him. And we all know about the virgins who seem to guarantee that eternity will be spent in an open-air bordello. The belief that a life of eternal pleasure awaits martyrs after death explains why certain people can honestly chant, "We love death more than the infidels love life." Again, you and I both know that these people aren't bluffing. They truly believe in martyrdom-as evidenced by the fact that they regularly sacrifice their lives, or watch their children do so, without a qualm.
♥ Nawaz: ..I'm not in the business of denial, or of burying my head in the sand. That's why I do the work I do, because I want to confront these issues head-on. I wish other Muslims would confront them as well, and have conversations with the likes of you and Ayaan, because that's what's needed. It's how we will resolve all this. ..We cannot disempower people who aren't Muslims from discussing this, because everyone-the whole human race-has to deal with the implications of our failure to fix this question. We Muslims must get used to the fact that people will criticize our religion, just as we criticize everyone else's religion for not being "true." Some people will choose to leave the faith, and wee Muslims will need to come to terms with this, and to understand how to treat ex-Muslims not just with civility but with the utmost respect. Critiquing Islam, critiquing any idea, is not bigotry. "Islamophobia" is a troubled and inherently unhelpful term. Yes, hatred of Muslims by neo-Nazi-style groups does exist, and it is a form of cultural intolerance, but that must never be conflated with the free-speech right to critique Islam. Islam is, after all, an idea; we cannot expect its merits or demerits to be accepted if we cannot openly debate it. So I'm not one to try to avoid these issues. We have to address them head-on.
♥ Nawaz: ..My view is that no idea is above scrutiny, and no people are beneath dignity.
♥ Nawaz: ..This reinforces a point made by Quentin Skinner: One cannot approach scripture by imposing upon it meanings that words have come to acquire today while ignoring what they meant then.
♥ Nawaz: ..Some Hanafis took a similar view regarding apostasy. The hadith you referred to is a solitary (ahad) hadith: "Whoever changes his persuasion (din), kill him." Some Hanafis argue that this couldn't possibly mean "kill apostates," because the hadith literally says "changes," which would imply entering as well as leaving Islam. The hadith doesn't literally say "kill whoever leaves Islam to follow any other religion." The issue arises here with the synonymous meanings for the Arabic word din (persuasion or religion). That's why some jurists took the view that this hadith cannot possibly be addressing apostasy.
This group of jurists then put this solitary hadith into context with the Qur'an and took the view that it contradicts the explicit prohibition against forced conversions: "There is no compulsion in religion." There din could not have been intended to mean "religion" in the hadith. It may instead have been referring to changing persuasion to a political order-in other words, treason. This was evidenced by the example of the first caliph, Abu Bakr, who immediately after the Prophet's death fought in the Wars of Apostasy, otherwise known as the Wars of Rebellion, against treacherous tribes. Some Hanafis argued that this solitary hadith was really addressing the obligation to fight those who attempt military insurrection from within an existing authority, or the obligation of citizens to fight in a civil war context. Of course, I'm not arguing that all Hanafi jurisprudence be held up today as a model of virtue. Much of it is rooted in medievalism. Rather, I'm merely attempting to demonstrate the nature of textual variance.
♥ Nawaz: ..the Islamist (not traditional Muslim) belief in the necessity of "ruling by Islam." To fully dissect how such a construct is partly a modern byproduct of the advent of the European nation state would require an essay in itself. However, Islamists do refer to certain plausible scriptural justifications in support of this tenet, which must be addressed. Qur'anic passages such as "the rule (hukm) is for none by God" and "whomsoever does not rule (yahkum) by what God has revealed, they are disbelievers" are among the most oft quoted in this regard.
Again, in applying a linguistic methodology, one learns of a dispute here as to whether the Arabic word used in these passages, hukm, means in its original usage "to rule" or "to judge." This subtle distinction in language makes all the difference. Of course, "to rule" may imply an active obligation to "implement" Islam as a "law" over society. To judge is a more passive requirement to arbitrate using God's commands between those who voluntarily come to your seeking such arbitration, rather than actively seeking to "rule" over people. In this way the linguistic dispute here over the literal meaning of these passages becomes hugely significant.
♥ Nawaz: .. It's the same with the question of cohabiting with "infidels." The Arabic word kafir is commonly translated to a word derived from Christianity, "infidel." There's a reason why jihadist movements weren't really popular before the nineteenth-century Islamist movements. For long periods of time, Muslims were relatively progressive. Of course they were living by very medieval standards that today we would find repugnant. But by comparison with other societies at that time, they were relatively-I say relatively-progressive, encouraging science and math. That is well documented.
So why didn't we have comparable problems relating to cohabiting with "infidels" within their societies? Because these debates had already been held. But modern-day Islamists, with their particularly vacuous approach to interpretation, have resurrected some of them. In the theological sphere, there's a well-known Muslim exegete, philosopher, and mystic, Ibn 'Arabi. He proposed a theory that eventually came to be known as wahdat al-wujud, or the "unity of being," which focused on a universal approach to oneness, truth, and justice in matters theological, regardless of one's religious heritage. Some followers of Imam al-Ash'ari, whom we mentioned earlier, also took the view that only those who-like Satan-recognize Islam as true and then knowingly reject it out of arrogance can be described as kuffar, or infidels. They referred to the literal Arabic meaning of the word kafir, "one who conceals," to argue that concealing the truth is a deliberate act and cannot be ascribed to anyone who doesn't recognize it as truth in the first instance.
♥ Nawaz: ..However, I personally prefer to focus on people's values, not the religious heritage they claim as the source of those values.
♥ Harris: ..Most of human history is a bloodbath, of course, so Islam is not unique in this. But it is misleading to suggest that the problems of Muslim triumphalism and intolerance are modern ones. I know that modern Islamism learned a trick or two from European fascism, but when Muslim armies were stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683, the world had witnessed a thousand years of jihad-which had spread the faith from Portugal to the Caucasus to India to sub-Saharan Africa. Islam was spread primarily by conquest, not conversation. Infidels were forced to convert or die. "People of the book"-Jews and Christians-were given the option of paying a protection tax (jizya) and living in an apartheid state (as dhimmi). In fact, Muslim historians recorded in assiduous detail the numbers of infidels they slaughtered or enslaved and deported.
It seems to me that a politically correct mythology is replacing history on many of these topics. Consider the Crusades. The Christians are often depicted as barbarian aggressors and the Muslims as their highly cultured victims. But the Crusades were primarily a response to 300 years of jihad (whether the crusaders were aware of the Islamic doctrine or not). They were a reaction to Muslim incursions in Europe, the persecution of Eastern Christians, and the desecration of Christian holy sites. And few people seem to remember that the crusaders lost all but the first of those wars.
Although the Crusades were undoubtedly an expression of religious tribalism, the idea of holy war is a late, peripheral, and in many ways self-contradictory development within Christianity-and one that has almost no connection to the life and teachings of Jesus. One can't say the same about the status of jihad under Islam.
Likewise, the vaunted peace of Andalusia is largely a fairy tale, first presented in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Benjamin Disraeli, and others who romanticized Muslim civilization at its height. Apart from the experience of a few courtiers and poets, if life was ever good for Jews living under Muslim rule, it was good only by comparison with the most murderous periods of medieval Christendom. We can make such comparisons, as you point out, but the general reality was of a world absolutely suffocated by religious stupidity and violence.
♥ Harris: ..But I'm not painting the West as blameless. It has much to atone for from the age of imperialism onward-especially the practice of slavery. But as you know, Muslims, too, practiced slavery in Africa, and Western slavers appear to have learned a good deal from them. In fact, Muslims regularly enslaved white Christian Europeans. For hundreds of years, to live or travel anywhere on the Mediterranean was to risk being captured by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery. It is believed that more than a million Europeans were enslaved and forced to work in North Africa my Muslims between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
♥ Harris: ..But I reject the idea that jihad and a hatred of infidels are modern phenomena. As you know, many people make this claim because they want to hold the West and Israel responsible for all the violence we see in the Muslim world-even, somehow, for the internecine conflict between Sunni and Shia. But the problem we must grapple with-is that, whatever other historical and political factors are involved, the reality of martyrdom and the sanctity of armed jihad are about as controversial under Islam as is the resurrection of Jesus under Christianity. It is not an accident that millions of Muslims recite the shahadah or make pilgrimage to Mecca. Neither is it an accident that in the year 2015, horrific footage of infidels and apostates being decapitated has become a popular form of pornography throughout the Muslim world. All these practices, including this ghastly method of murder, finds explicit support in scripture.
♥ Harris: ..Reformists either rely on examples that are not doctrinal-that is, instances in which Muslims behaved better than their scripture mandates-or cite something like a commitment to honoring covenants and treaties, which occasionally has sinister implications. One regularly hears Muslims saying, "Yes, we must follow the laws of England because our faith tells us that we should follow covenants." But many of these people want the laws to change-indeed, many want shari'ah established in the UK. Hand-waving displays of tolerance often conceal some very ugly truths-which puts one in mind of the doctrine of taqqiya, wherein it is said that Muslims are encouraged to lie to infidels whenever it serves their purpose.
♥ Harris: ..I once attended a wedding where I was introduced to a close friend of the groom. As it turned out, this man was an Orthodox Jew. After a suitable period of small talk, I said, "What's your opinion of all the barbarism in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Exodus? For instance, what do you make of that bit about a woman's not being a virgin on her wedding night-should we really take her to her father's doorstep and stone her to death? Seems a bit harsh. And I rather like this woman our friend is marrying."
My companion then began to wax rabbinical on how these seemingly brutal strictures must be understood in the context of their time. Needless to say, he assured me that they don't apply today. In fact, he said, these rules applied only when there was a Sanhedrin-a supreme religious council that hasn't existed since the time of the Romans.
"Okay," I said, "so what happens when the Messiah comes back, as you surely expect he will, and you reconvene the Sanhedrin? Then what?"
Here I glimpsed the rueful smile of the cornered theocrat. "Well, that's a very interesting question," he said-to which he had no interesting or even sane answer. He simply conceded that if the Messiah came back and reconvened the Sanhedrin, well, then, yes-though mere mortals like ourselves might not see the wisdom of it-homosexuals, adulteresses, witches, and Sabbath breakers would be killed, and every other barbaric prescription found in the Old Testament would apply.
As I was contemplating where on his person I should aim my vomit, he managed this final defense of his religion: "You just don't understand what an obscenity-what a sacrilege-these things would represent in the presence of the Messiah and in the view of a properly consecrated Sanhedrin." Indeed, I don't.
♥ Nawaz: I appreciate your recognition that your wording has often contributed to this "clash of civilizations" narrative. It is the nature of many people that they tend to hear only what they already expect to hear from any given speaker. They cease listening to the words of the speaker and instead react to what they have been expecting the speaker to say. This happens to me all the time, and I believe this has happened to you a few times too. In your defense, this is not always avoidable, but we are duty bound to try and minimize it through careful wording, so thank you.
♥ Nawaz: ..A complete overhaul of cultural identity patterns and a reformed scriptural approach is required. Identity must start with humanity as a founding principle, and human rights as a basis. "My people" do not simply include any Muslim, no matter how barbaric. "My people" are human beings, and then those who share my multiple cultural references and human rights values, regardless of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion. Beyond that, "my people" are those who simply share the land that I call my home, my neighbors. The Islamic concept of ummah, or people, must be reappraised here. Most Muslims today would view the ummah as comprising of solely other Muslims. This is where tribalism can emerge. However, again by taking a more adaptive look at texts, one can find that the Prophet was reported to have included non-Muslims in his definition of ummah upon authoring a document-known as the Covenant of Medina-that regulated the rights and duties of those residing under his authority. Dr. Hasan's pamphlet exploring the nature of citizenship ummah, and Muslim and non-Muslim cohabitation will be useful here.
Such scriptural reform must involve denying those who approach texts vacuously-albeit plausibly-from absolute certainty that theirs is the correct view, as I attempt to do in our dialogue above.
♥ Nawaz: ..This is why merely condemning the Islamic State, or defeating them militarily, is entirely insufficient. Similarly, this is why previously focusing on al-Qaeda's military defeat has also proven to be insufficient. The US killed bin Laden, yes, but something worse (which we couldn't have imagined prior to al-Qaeda) emerged to replace him. This will keep happening until and unless the ideology that breeds these groups is discredited. Islamism must be defeated.
The last two years of George W. Bush's term witnessed a basic recognition of this simple truth. But as with all democratic handovers, Barack Obama's team wanted nothing to do with the previous collective wisdom, including where Bush's team had learned from their many terrible mistakes. If the first few years of the Bush administration could be caricatured as an attempt at imposing values at the barrel of a gun, then President Obama's administration ditched the values and kept the gun.
Launching more drone strikes than Bush ever did and compiling a secret "kill list," President Obama's administration took the view that al-Qaeda was like an organized crime gang-disrupt the hierarchy, destroy the gang. Theirs was a concerted and dogmatic attempt at pretending that al-Qaeda was nothing but a fringe criminal group, and not a concrete realization of an ideological phenomenon with grassroots sympathy. They took this view in part because of how successful Islamist "fellow-traveller" lobbies had been in influencing Obama's campaign after the mistakes of the Bush years. For Islamists and their allies, the problem was "al-Qaeda-inspired extremism" and not the extremism that had inspired al-Qaeda. Such an approach left us here at Quilliam incredibly frustrated. We gave many interviews and published many papers calling out the rise of this ideology for what it was: a full-blown jihadist insurgency.
♥ Nawaz: ..As we have discussed, however, Islam is just a religion. Islamism is the ideology that seeks to impose any version of Islam over society. Islamism is, therefore, theocratic extremism. Jihadism is the use of force to spread Islamism. Jihadist terrorism is the use of force that targets civilians to spread Islamism. The Islamic State is merely one jihadist terrorist group. The problem was never "al-Qaeda-inspired" extremism, because extremism itself inspired al-Qaeda, and then inspired the Islamic State. It is this extremism that must be named-as Islamism-and opposed.
It is true that one cannot argue that the Islamic State represents all of Islam, just like one cannot argue that it has nothing to do with Islam. But it should be obvious that "a desire to impose Islam" cannot reasonably be said to have "nothing to do with Islam." Clearly, it has something to do with it. One may disagree with the Islamic State's interpretation of the faith, but imagine that we were debating its supporters: Would we be debating Das Kapital or Islamic scripture?
We must name the ideology behind the Islamic State so that we can refute it. It is crucial to name Islamism so that Muslims like me are confronted with a stark choice. Either we reclaim our religion and its narrative or allow thugs and demagogues to speak in its name and impose it on others. Merely calling it "extremism" is too relative and vague, and sidesteps the responsibility to counter its scriptural justification.
♥ Harris: And how do you see us increasing the demand for secular democracy at the grassroots level if both secularism and democracy are so often viewed as an assault upon religious identity?
Nawaz: This is only possible with a combination of cultivating more Muslim reform voices-along with more liberal, ex-Muslim, and non-Muslim voices that are willing to speak critically about these issues. Each of these is sorely lacking, while the far-right critique is rising. Therefore, the liberal and "moderate" Muslim concern to "support" Muslims against extremism, by pandering and equivocating, is only harming Muslims and aiding extremists, as proponents on the far right are the only ones consistently seen to be challenging anyone.
Harris: That last point has been one of my greatest concerns for over a decade. As daunting as the project of reforming Islam is, it cannot even begin if the way forward is thought to be a choice between wishful thinking on one hand and bigotry on the other. I'm very grateful that you've taken the time to explore a third path with me, Maajid-where the conversation between a Muslim and a non-Muslim can begin with a frank admission of the full scope and actual dynamics of the problem of Muslim intolerance. Beliefs matter. It's amazing that the point needs to even be made-but it does, again and again. And the only hope of moving beyond the current religious chaos, through pluralism and secularism, and finally to a convergence on liberal values, is to modify the beliefs of millions of people through honest conversation.
It's a conversation that I've very much enjoyed having with you, Maajid, and I hope it's only the fist of many. Needless to say, I wish you the best of luck with all your endeavors.