Part III: “Islam has to be defeated” and What is Islam?

In Part III, we debate the merits of the claim “Islam has to be defeated.” Harris never tells us how the religion of 1.6 billion people will be “defeated” or if there is a precedent for a major world religion being “defeated.” His focus on the texts and on the verses, again, comes at the expense of a holistic understanding of religion and terrorism. His dreamed-up cave man who encounters the texts of Islam after a thousand years would not be encountering them as a blank state — s/he would have their own ideological, political, moral, and ethical framework that would mediate the words on the page. At one point, Harris gets frustrated when I try to add nuance to our definition of Islam as being more than just the Qur’an by citing an actual scholar who put out a brilliant book that would literally educate Harris on the complexity, diversity, and contradictions of Islam — Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam? He didn’t like that.

This was frustrating for me as well though— talking to someone who is so uncomfortable in gray areas and must cling to reductive binaries to make sense of the world requires a certain level of patience, which I admit I don’t have. If Harris wants to obsess over verses as the only or the chief explanatory variable of all religious problems, he should become a theologian, or at least, have more theologians on his show — they are the experts on verses and I’m sure the two of them could talk all day long about the “doctrine of abrogation” or the “sword verses.”

[As an aside, why does every quote of Harris’s need to be contextualized and “charitably read” but the same standard does not apply to holy books? After all, theologians debate and discourse over single characters of single verses — what did a word mean when it was revealed, how was the verse understood in the sixth century, how did the jurists deal with ambiguity, what were the principles (consensus, reason, analogy, etc) that clarified the verse’s reach? If Harris wants to play pop-theologian, he can, but he won’t be taken seriously by anyone.]

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.

SH: No, it does, because what does it mean to say “Islam must be defeated.” Islam is a set of ideas. She’s not calling for genocide there, she’s calling for defeating the ideas. I think Islam is a dangerous religion. I have made no secret of that. I have said things just like that. Islam has to be defeated, I’ll say it now. Islam has be defeated.

OA: How is it that that kind of statement should not be perceived as belligerent?

SH: I think all religion has to be defeated. I’m an atheist.

OA: Ok, but an idea is not merely defeated. You’re talking about the people who believe in this idea.

SH: I have written an article titled “Science Must Destroy Religion.” So these are ideas that we need to talk about.

OA: And it never will.

SH: Listen, the problem here is the unwillingness on your part to enter an open-ended conversation about ideas, about what your partner, your opponent in this case, thinks, that is proceeding on the basis of a modicum of charity, where you actually want to understand what the other person’s views are.

OA: No, the game is rigged. There’s a double-standard here. If someone criticizes you or Ayaan, we’re attacking your motives or being uncharitable, but if you say militaristic, chauvinistic things, then you’re misspeaking.

SH: Absolutely not.

OA: She misspoke, you misspoke. It’s the same thing over and over again.

SH: I rarely misspeak. I occasionally misspeak, but I rarely do. And I rarely, obviously, miswrite. But, I am increasingly on my guard, through cruel experience, against people who are only pretending to have a conversation on this topic, and are just trying to defame another person. Now, Ayaan — you are talking about her as though she would execute a nuclear first strike on the Muslim world —

OA: — No, that’s your position, right?

SH: That is a position that has been ascribed to me by utterly dishonest people. I hope you were joking.

OA: There were certain preconditions that, of course, you gave. You didn’t say — please correct me if I’m wrong — that we should have a nuclear first strike against any country, but if an “Islamist regime” came to power and had nuclear weapons, that’s a possibility [a nuclear first strike] you would entertain. Is that a clear understanding of your view?

SH: Well, certainly not the way it’s situated in your brain, it’s not. Again, this is something that will be obvious to our listeners. The fact that you think you’re entering this conversation in a way that’s intellectually honest and open to having your views challenged and responsive to evidence that you didn’t have a moment ago. It’s pure an act of self-deception as I’ve witnessed in a long time. You are so defensive, there’s nothing I could say to you about the reality of publishing, or about my experience as an author, or about the opportunity cost, or the security cost, or anything else, that only I in this conversation am in a position to talk about, there’s nothing I could say to you that modifies your view about my opportunism and get-rich-quickery, even slightly. Now we’re proceeding on to much more difficult ground. Now we’re talking about Ayaan, now we’re going to talk about Islam and apostasy. This is not how you have a conversation with another human being.

OA: You repeat this mantra over and over again, as if you are the arbiter of truth. I’ve quoted you your own words, you dismissed them. I’ve quoted you Ayaan’s words, you dismissed them —

SH: — I didn’t dismiss them.

OA: You were very condescending, let’s just say. You don’t want to engage with the text of your own words that I’m quoting back to you now.

SH: Of course I will engage with it and I can justify saying something like “Islam has to be defeated.”

OA: Please do. What do you mean by that, “Islam has to be defeated.” Let’s tease this out.

SH: Because I think I can say religion has to be defeated.

OA: And how do you defeat Islam?

SH: You’re asking a different question now.

OA: Well, I want to know what you mean by that statement otherwise you’re going to say I’m misquoting you.

SH: I think that believing in revelation is intrinsically dangerous. I think that believing that one of your books was dictated by the creator of the universe is a stupid, divisive, dangerous thing to do. I think it goes nowhere worth going. I think the harms produced by this attitude are obvious, undeniable, and among the worst harms that humanity has ever suffered. We have to get out of this business of believing in revelation. Now, how do you do that? As you rightly observe, I have spent a lot of time focused on that problem. It’s not what I exclusively focus on and less and less do I want to focus on it because I am just repeating myself. I’ve said more or less everything I think on that topic, so it’s both boring for me and boring for my listeners. But I think, yes, we have to get out of the religion business. We have to defeat religion. I can say it in a nice way. And I can say it in a provocative way, but I can certainly defend the claim. And I’ve said it every which way.

Now, I also have justified ad nauseum a focus on specific religions on specific points where they present specific liabilities. I think that individual religions are not interchangeable, they have very different theologies, they have different ideas, they make different behavioral and logical —

OA: Can I just respond to what you said before?

SH: Yeah.

OA: Look, saying that the Qur’an has problematic and violent verses, that is a statement of fact. Anyone who disagrees with you there is lying. But saying that we are “war with Islam,” saying that the central message of the Qur’an is jihad, these are value judgments. And in my opinion, in my estimation, they are very ill-informed ones, and they are ultimately going to lead to counter-productive strategies. For me, this boils down to what do you think Islam is? Is it just the text — the jihadist verses of the Qu’ran? Or is it more capacious than that?

Earlier, I mentioned scholarly works — serious, scholarly works on Islam — I’ll give you the name of one that just came out from a very serious scholar, PhD in History who died recently, fluent in eight languages, traveled throughout the Middle East, his name was Shahab Ahmed. He wrote a book called What is Islam? His definition of Islam was the capacious, lived tradition of Muslims throughout history and how it actually exists today. So that includes, for example, poetry. It includes wine — I hope you would not want to defeat either wine or poetry. It includes music. It includes a whole host of legal and political and spiritual motivations that are inherent in the lived tradition. It’s not just about jihad. So when you say, “Islam must be defeated” as a kind of blanket statement, that to me is ultimately a very dangerous and ill-conceived one, because you’re not getting at A) the heart of the matter, which is a political ideology that I refer to as Wahhabism and as a state ideology of our ally, Saudi Arabia that propagates this and that did not exist before a specific period in history and B) I think you denigrate, or deny, or reduce the actual tradition that people live in through this kind of slogan of ‘jihad’ that the extremists are parroting. So we miss the nuances when we use these kinds of blanket statements.

SH: [pauses] The pause you hear from me is I’m trying to figure out how to proceed here because given how we’ve foundered on very simple points I’m reluctant to just set sail on the rougher part of the sea here. So, briefly, Islam is many things. On one level you could define it as Islam is the way 1.6 billion Muslims live it, it’s whatever they think it is and now we know a fair amount about the moral and political and theological attitudes of Muslims based on polls, and most of those polls are frankly terrifying —

OA: — And most of those polls are bullshit.

SH: I don’t know how you would know that. If you ask 50,000 people a question, and they give an answer —

OA: I’ll tell you how.

SH: — Let me just finish this point. The problem for me about revelation, and this is why I focus on the texts, the texts are essentially a software program for rebooting a worldview. So we could forget about Islam for a thousand years and someone could discover the full text of the tradition — the Qur’an, and the hadith, and the biography of Muhammad — in a cave somewhere and read it, and accept its most straightforward, most literalistic claims, just to give a very plausible, literal reading of what they have there, and essentially reboot Islam for themselves, and it would be a particular kind of Islam, it would be an Islam that would not at all be influenced by anything surrounding them, because all that would have been lost. There’d be no architecture, there’d be no art, there’d be no tradition, there’d be no food. But they would have the texts, and if they understood the texts in a plausible way — my problem, is what they would get, is something very much like Wahhabism and a lot less like Rumi, and that’s a problem. A plausible reading of the text — I’m not saying it’s the only reading, and again, Maajid and I get into this in real detail — but a plausible reading gets you something totalitarian, intolerant, a rather unlucky circumstance for women —

OA: Contradictory as well, schizophrenic you could even say.

SH: But not as contradictory as one would hope. Not as contradictory as Christianity or Judaism.

OA: “There’s no compulsion in religion” and the “sword” verses.

SH: But if you have a doctrine of abrogation that makes sense of that.

OA: Of course, many people don’t adhere to that. What you’re basically parroting here is the Salafist version of Islam, which is a particular interpretation that comes out of the Arabian peninsula in the 17th-18th century and is led by a totalitarian radical who is not trained in the Islamic tradition and the West and the Ottoman Empire tried to put it down until it grew. So look, this is a specific political interpretation. If I give you a text, Sam — it doesn’t matter what it is — if I give you a text and I tell you you can interpret this however you want, you’re going to interpret it according to your political ideology.