In Part II, we go back and forth over Ayaan Hirsi Ali and quoting people out of context. Unfortunately, we get bogged down in Hirsi Ali’s biography rather than debating her ideas. This is a running theme of the podcast: the double-standard. When it comes to Harris’s friends, their words and deeds are excused through biography-turned-hagiography:“Look at what Ayaan suffered!”; “Maajid lost a wife and kid over this!” When it comes to Harris’s enemies, they are foolish scumbags with disreputable motives who are also liars: “Murtaza Hussain is a lunatic; Glenn Greenwald is a regressive; XYZ is dishonest, unethical, [fill in the blank].” When it comes to quoting his words, Harris demands full context and “charitable readings.” When it comes to quoting others, knowing something they’ve Tweeted or said in an interview is sufficient to know everything about them. No one said life was fair.
OA: Yeah, OK, Let’s continue. [Begins reading from text]: The books that make up Project Islamic Reformation are not works of scholarship or even well-crafted popular texts. They are almost exclusively political pamphlets of a very personal nature that often begin as biography and end as self-help, except the “self” in this case includes a quarter of the world’s people, and the “help” may or may not come at the end of a missile. Ayaan Hirsi Ali — who deserves empathy for her personal ordeals but not her conclusions — released such a book earlier this year, with neat, Manichean categories delineating good and bad Muslims, as well as the expected check-list of proposed reforms. More tracts will certainly follow, because publishers love a good reformist, and the affluent, Western audience that consumes these books loves having most of their pre-existing beliefs confirmed rather than challenged.
SH: You pay lip service to Ayaan deserving some sympathy —
OA: — No, no. I would never attack her personally. I think that she went through a tremendous ordeal and that people who do attack her personally for what she went through or deny the immense ordeals she went through are lacking in moral empathy.
SH: OK, but you still cynically imply that her work as a critic of the very ideology that produced this misery for her is purely opportunistic and driven by a desire to make money. I mean —
OA: — I think you hit the nail on the head perfectly there, when you said that the “ideology” put her through this ordeal, because you and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other people, you do not distinguish between a particular political ideology, which is fascistic and totalitarian and Wahabbist and Salafist and very violent, and the doctrine and religion of Islam. And that is the major criticism.
SH: That’s not true. I do that across the board, every time I raise the issue. That is simply untrue.
OA: Really? OK? Is Islam “the motherlode of bad ideas” or is Wahhabism the “the motherlode of bad ideas”? Does Islam “marry religious ecstasy and sectarian hatred” or does Wahhabism “marry religious ecstasy and sectarian hatred”? Is Islam “especially belligerent,” in your words, “and inimical to the norms of civil discourse” or is Wahhabism and violent jihadism “especially belligerent and inimical to the norms of civil discourse”?
SH: We will get in to that. But, as you know, the problem is bigger than Wahhabism, and the fact that you would circumscribe it just to Wahhabism is a real problem —
OA: — Wahhabism is the prime mover of it.
SH: I want to get in to that, but I’m just now focused on Ayaan. I want to move through this systematically, because what should be interesting from your point of view as a writer, and should be interesting, I hope, to our listeners, is how this piece of yours, that you took the time to write, and you think just makes the case — clearly — against us, communicates nothing to me but your misunderstanding of the situation, and that —
OA: — I quote you, and quote her words. What in that [quoted] paragraph do I not understand about you?
SH: Your treatment of Ayaan, here. So you say, yes, she’s had this terrible experience, but again, she’s just an opportunist who’s out to make money in this reform Islam program. Just consider her circumstances for a second. You realize, how much easier her life would be if she were part of the herd that just refuses to engage these issues. Do you realize how talented she is? Do you realize that when a person starts out as an uneducated Somali girl, who doesn’t speak a word of Dutch, and in a few short years, gets a degree in political science and becomes a member of parliament, and who speaks half a dozen languages at that point? You realize there are other things she could do in life if she just wants to get ahead and make money, beyond just pissing off a mob of religious maniacs, and then, having to suffer, not only her threats, but just the condescending stupidity of critics who don’t have a fraction of the courage she has, who haven’t suffered any of the abuse she has, who haven’t taken any of the risks she has, but who then decide, that it is probably a good idea to make her situation even more dangerous by attacking her as a bigot. You want to talk about opportunism — the opportunism is on the side of the Islamist assholes — the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — who tried to get Ayaan disinvited from speaking at universities and pretend that she, one of the most persecuted public intellectuals in living memory, is the one infringing on people’s civil rights.
OA: Yeah, I mean that’s nonsense — she was supposed to speak at Yale, and it was either canceled or there was some kerfuffle about that, and look, I’m a free speech fundamentalist and I defended her right to speak, as with Bill Maher or anyone, because the marketplace of ideas should not have this kind of estrangement.
But look, your peddling a fallacy here, because basically what you are saying is that because of her personal ordeals, that exonerates or excuses the words she has spoken — her arguments. This is what I’m focusing on. The arguments that she has made. She said that “Islam must be defeated.” She said that “We are at war with Islam.” She said that we should “bomb the lands of Islam.” To me, her personal story now is irrelevant. I am focused on exactly what she has said, and to me, that is a deranged, deluded conclusion. And if you do not speak up against that, I think your morals and ethics should be questioned. If anyone else said it, you wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, look at all these things they have done, look at the personal ordeals they went through, look at their CV,’ no, absolutely nonsense, you attack the arguments.
SH: People are not attacking her arguments. First of all, you just conceded that the work of an organization like CAIR that tries to get her de-platformed, that goes after her, rather than going after the theocrats who are hunting her —
OA: — I’m not a representative of CAIR, Mr. Harris.
SH: I understand that, but why go after Ayaan and not after the core problem here, which you limit to Wahhabism —
OA: — I have gone after Wahhabism, actually, and anyone who supports that, including the Saudis who are now funding an institution at Yale, and should be barred from doing so, and should be criticized, loudly and roundly. But also, an obligation of a writer and an intellectual and someone in the public sphere is to stand up for minorities. The people who would be bombed under Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s policy, the people who we would be at war with do not have a voice in this debate.
SH: Ayaan does not have a policy of bombing the Middle East. Ayaan is probably more hawkish than you are. I’m probably more hawkish than you are, but if Ayaan’s views have been treated to the misrepresentations that mine have — and I’m sure they have, I follow this reasonably closely — I have no confidence that you even know what her views are. And certainly you are not disposed to give a charitable reading of something in context, or something she might have said in an interview that didn’t come out exactly right and that a further examination of her views in her books or in other interviews would give you a bigger picture of what she said.
OA: The editors of Reason magazine [where Ayaan Hirsi Ali made the comments about bombing the “lands of Islam”] were bewildered when she said this, and they asked her to clarify in the most charitable way that they could and she still didn’t. In fact, she doubled down. And recently, she’s called for Benjamin Netanyahu to win the Nobel Peace Prize — I hope that’s a position you disagree with. She is a great supporter of [Egyptian President] Sisi, who has launched a war, not only on Islamists, remember, but on atheists as well, and killed more people than [former Egyptian President] Morsi did. Probably more than [Hosni] Mubarak did. And so this is — she is supporting right-wing dictators, in one case, an extreme right-wing, chauvinistic politician, in another case, and then calling for wars with Islam. I mean, at this point, the personal ordeal and her immense tragedy is irrelevant to me. As much as I empathize with it, I’m focusing on her arguments, and you should too, instead of defending and giving her cover, if you’re a serious intellectual.
SH: Listen, I do focus on all of these specific claims and all of them are incredibly complex to get into —
OA: — No, let’s get into them.
SH: We will get into them, but the fact that we can’t even get through these simplest of all disagreements, where information is very clear to put forward doesn’t give me much hope that we can deal with deeper issues here. Take for instance your claim here — this is why I want to move through your review systematically — you have this line about Manichean categories, delineating good and bad Muslims, what are you saying here? Are you doubting whether there are good and bad Muslims, tolerant and intolerant strands of Islam? I don’t think you can be.
OA: No, what I’m saying is that someone from the outside, putting Muslims into a category of Mecca and Medina Muslims [the dichotomy put forward in Hirsi Ali’s book] ultimately unhelpful and counter-productive. It’s not going to reach anyone. The people you want to convince are not going to listen to you. And in general, I think it’s a Stalinist technique, when people from the outside begin categorizing people.
SH: She’s not from the outside. She’s from the inside.
OA: She’s an ex-Muslim, right?
SH: She has lived in the Muslim world as a Muslim, was driven out of the Muslim world by violent theocrats, and lives every minute of her life under the shadow of their threats. She is in the Muslim world, arguably, more than you are.
OA: She’s certainly not perceived to be. And she’s not perceived to be an honest interlocutor because of her very militaristic views.
SH: OK, but that says a lot. Forget her militaristic views —
OA: No, they’re central —
SH: — They’re not central to why she’s not perceived as an honest interlocutor. She’s not perceived as an honest interlocutor because she’s an apostate. People are not trying to kill her because of her militaristic views, people are trying to kill her before she had any views, because she was an apostate. Everything is backwards for you.
OA: Certain fascist groups, Islamic fascists groups are after her —
SH: — It’s not just certain fascist groups. The level of support for the killing of apostates in the Muslim world, as you undoubtedly know, is shockingly high and it’s not just limited to Wahhabism.
OA: Way too high. And look, people are — do you want talk about apostasy now or later?
SH: It’ll come up later. But you can’t just say, ‘way too high, way too high.’ You just tried to limit the problem to Wahhabism. You just tried to paint Ayaan as someone who has been marginalized for her hawkish views, which you still have not characterized accurately.
OA: I quoted you her words directly.
SH: That Reason interview is a famous instance of someone misspeaking, not giving a full context for her views.
OA: How do I respond to something like that? If you say something chauvinistic and militaristic, you misspeak. It’s an unfalsifiable position.
SH: It is falsifiable, because she will not hide her views when you talk to her at length. She has written about these things, she’s been interviewed, I’ve interviewed her, trying to put her comments in context. You could throw back at her what she said about Anders Brevik, that has been distorted and spun and used as a way of lying about her actual beliefs. This has been done to me endlessly. The “Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas” statement on Bill Maher’s show — I have already said I misspoke there, I should have said it was “a motherlode of bad ideas.” And I can talk to you for an hour about why I think I should have said that, but there are still people who want to hold me to “it is THE motherlode of bad ideas,” as though there is no other source of bad ideas on earth. You either want to understand where someone is coming from, or you don’t.
OA: It’s not that. It’s that you should hold people accountable for their words.
SH: You don’t hold them accountable for their misstatements that they then clarify.
OA: How is that a misstatement? This entire interview — which I hope your readers and listeners read, from 2007 in Reason magazine — she said that “Islam must be defeated.” “Do you mean radical Islam,” [the editor asked her] and she says “No. Islam, period.” That’s a clear statement.
SH: OK, I have said the same things —
OA: — This doesn’t require textual or hermeneutical interpretations here. It’s very clear.
