Part IV: Interpretation, Polls, and Takfir

In Part IV, we continue the substantive portion of our discussion by looking at varying interpretations and polls. Over-focusing on polls is another way to miss the nuances, and in a way, the truth. Despite their contradictory and flawed nature, Harris loves the polls and because he has read them, he thinks he is an expert on the Muslim world. Think of how risible the analogous situation would be vis-a-vis America. If someone had never stepped foot in the United States and knew only a few Americans, but had read the Constitution and read polling results of Americans’ attitudes, they’d come away thinking America was an angry, illiterate mess. (It was for this reason that Christopher Hitchens said he didn’t trust the polls that said said how religious Americans were.) I shudder to think of what a polls-only understanding of an even more diverse country like India would reveal, and how misinformed the polls-only student of that country would be. When dealing with the “Muslim world” — really a nonsensical term — you’re dealing with dozens of countries with their own cultures, unique histories and political circumstances, ideologies, psychologies, and socio-economic conflicts. Ask a Pakistani laborer in Abu Dhabi what he thinks of his “fellow Muslims” who control his body. I’m not saying polls don’t paint a picture. They do. They paint one picture. History and travel and political study paint others. To grasp any society — even at the most micro level— requires a layered, nuanced, multivariable analysis. One-dimensional portraits of any society are by definition limited, and in the case of the Muslim world and Middle East, by definition orientalist — though far too commonplace.

SH: There are more and less plausible interpretations of any text. And what is problematic —

OA: — And who says that the 99% of Muslims who interpret it and live peacefully are less plausible?

SH: Because it is not 99% who have peaceful attitudes that are commensurate with the values of an open, civil society. Simply untrue —

OA: How many people are in ISIS? 20,000, maybe?

SH: 99% of Muslims are supportive of Ayaan’s right to apostatize? 99% of Muslims are supportive of the right of cartoonists to cartoon anything they want about Islam? Are you telling me you believe that?

OA: So, on the point of free speech, that’s actually more of a cultural issue than a theological issue. I hope we can make that distinction. There’s nothing in the Qur’an — nothing in the tradition even — that says you cannot depict the prophet. In fact, in Shia Islam, and throughout Islamic history, there were depictions of the Prophet.

SH: — But you’re

OA: I’m clarifying it for you in the nuances.

SH: — But you’re making a tendentious, illegitimate move. You’re limiting it to a depiction of the prophet. That’s not a free speech issue. The free speech issue is I should be able to say “Islam sucks” and I should be able to say it as a Muslim. I should be able to apostatize. That is free speech.

OA: You can do that in the West and —

SH: — And get your head cut off in any Muslim society on earth, and many Muslims — many, many Muslims — in many cases, majorities, support that.

OA: A fundamental principle of every human being, in terms of their dignity, is to have whatever private theological views that they want. Whether that translates into a public, political view is another matter. Egyptians, 86% of them, think that apostates should be killed. Now, according to you, they think this is the word of god. They don’t go out and they don’t kill ex-Muslims; they’re friends with them. You can go to Egypt, go to Cairo, and you see that. They have the opportunity to vote, and put in apostasy into their legal code, they didn’t do it. They didn’t do it in Pakistan either, where there was an election. Hasn’t been done in Iran. So people can have all kinds of dangerous, deluded, backwards views, and you have the right to that, as many evangelicals in America do, but to translate that into something that is a political program is very different and I think that we should be mindful of that distinction, rather than saying, “Oh, these people over here are so backwards, 99% of them or 80% of them think that apostates should be killed, and that’s the end of the story right there.” No, it’s a little bit more complicated than that, and I want to bring that to light.

SH: Again, this is a distinction without a difference. When you have a lynch mob that’s willing to enforce their religious attitudes, whether there is a formal law against blasphemy on the books, they’re willing to kill blasphemers or kill someone who’s merely rumored to burn a Qur’an, or kill someone who has apostatized, or hunt them to the ends of the earth in other societies, suborn their murder with fatwas that have global reach — that is a problem that is bigger than the statutes that were written or not written in any society.

OA: Five percent of Saudi citizens are convinced atheists and more than that, about fifteen percent — six million people — are not religious people. Are there lynch mobs against them? Are they being beheaded?

SH: Yes, Omer, I hear from these people, they’re in hiding. They can’t even tell their parents they have doubts about god for fear of being murdered by their own families.

OA: And many of them are open. You go to the cafes of Cairo, you go to Riyadh, you go to Amman, you meet openly critical people, you meet openly agnostic and atheist people. So it’s not as simple as saying “86% of Egyptians think apostates should be killed, therefore, all those 86% are backwards people.” If we did the same thing to the United States —

SH: — Oh, please. You’re telling me Raif Badawi is one of the five percent of Saudi atheists who’s just free to be an atheist.

OA: I stood up for him many times when other people on the left did not. And I don’t deny that there needs to be a liberal and constitutional revolution in the Middle East and South Asia — I want to bring this back to the broader point that I’m making — is that your strategy, and Ayaan’s strategy, of telling Muslims we have to excise verses — let’s just say, even if it’s the most intellectually honest position that anyone could have. Let’s just assume that. Strategically and politically, it’s never going to happen, because people believe in the Qur’an and in the tradition and they’re not going to take a razor to their holy books. What I want to see happen is a liberal and democratic and constitutional revolution that happens across the Middle East and South Asia where we support the left, the progressive opposition, that exists in every country, the democratic opposition that exists in every country, but because of US foreign policy and because of domestic tyrants and because of religious tyrants — the religious right — that hasn’t been allowed to emerge. And when that opposition comes in, the cultural change they’ll implement will be permanent. So, that is basically my view on this.

SH: How do you engender those liberal attitudes, when a majority of people believe, as is written in the books, whether you’re talking about the Qur’an, about the Hadith, or the biography of Muhammad — they believe things like women are essentially the property of the men in their lives, or at the very least second-class citizens, they believe things like apostates should be put to death. They believe things like infidels and polytheists are forever your enemy. You have attitudes that could be lifted directly out of the texts based on, not only a plausible reading, I would say on certain of these points, the most plausible reading. On certain of these points, the only plausible reading, and you’re saying that these texts are forever to be held sacred and one can never disavow any line in them.

OA: Here’s the thing. If you were to present this to an actual believing, liberal Muslim who believed every word of it, what they would basically do — and I’ve engaged in this exercise many times and probably ended up as frustrated as you have — is they would contextualize it, and then they would neutralize the view. So they would say, for example, that apostasy — leaving Islam in the 9th century or when the Qur’an was revealed would amount to high treason because the Islamic community was very small. Now, that doesn’t mean that it amounts to high treason anymore so Muslims should be free to leave and to enter the faith. I think the second thing they would do is highlight the importance of interpretation. The fact that 86% of Egyptians are not going out and killing apostates, who are in many cases their friends, signifies to me that mentally, they’ve already excised those verses. They’ve already neutralized those verses. They’re focusing on the part of the Qur’an — the tradition, broadly speaking — the Rumi, the poetry, the music and the spirituality, which I know that you are a fan of, at least in some contexts. They’re focusing on those elements of the religion. I think we should be mindful of that. And look, the polls are contradictory as well. Across the board, you see 97% of South Asians and 85% of Middle Easterners say religious freedom is a good thing. A higher number of Palestinians believe in evolution than evangelical Protestants —

SH: Stop with that first poll result. That’s not actually the paradox you make it out to be. People can answer that question, that religious freedom is a good thing, purely as it applies to me. I want to be free to practice my Salafi Islam. Religious freedom is a good thing. Should apostates be killed? Oh, of course. There is no paradox there if you understand religious freedom to mean your own religious freedom.

OA: Let’s break this down logically. These Salafis — who I hope you appreciate are not the majority in these countries — these Salafis believe that the Qur’an is the literal interpretation of God, their reading is the most plausible, they think that if you do not implement god’s will that they will be sinners — so why don’t they go and do it? Is it a fear of secular law?

SH: Just to back up and let me concede a point you made, which I have made many times before, perhaps this will surprise you —

OA: — We have agreement!

SH: There is some distance between what people profess they believe and what they actually believe. People hold these beliefs to greater or lesser extents and there’s the things they think are probably true and then there are the thing’s they’d bet their life on, things that would absolutely rule their behavior and their emotion whenever that belief becomes relevant. To have 86% of Egyptians say apostates should be killed, that doesn’t tell you that 86% of would kill Ayaan with their own hands —

OA: — Nor would they vote for someone who had that as their platform. Which is the important part.

SH: But what percentage would? What percentage would vote for that platform.

OA: Well, in the Egyptian election, 48–49% voted for the liberal, and the party [that eventually won], Muhammad Morsi’s party, the Freedom and Justice Party, had fifty years of political organization and development, and they could still only muster 53%.

SH: I’m agreeing with you that these numbers come down, when you actually ask people to take concrete steps —

OA: — So the numbers are bullshit.

SH: Every one of these numbers matters. The people who will say that apostates should be killed are on the wrong side of this free speech issue. They’re doing nothing good for free speech and what they’re doing is quite harmful. And many of these people — maybe not 86% in the case of Egypt — but some intolerable percentage would vote the wrong way and would just stand by and watch a mob kill a so-called apostate. Is everyone in the mob who isn’t helping someone who’s about to be lynched, is everyone in the mob culpable, equally culpable? Well, not equally, there are the people who are actually doing the lynching, then there are the people who are just standing there with their cellphones. But all of these people are part of the problem. And yes, there are gradations of belief, gradations of support for terrorism, gradations of commitment to jihad — this was the concentric circle image that I talk about in the book and tried to talk about on Bill Maher’s show. There are people in the absolute center of the bull’s eye, they are strapping on the C4 now because they are going to do an operation today. Let’s say a Sunni who wants to blow up a Shia mosque —

OA: — And where’s the theological pre-requisite or injunction for that?

SH: The whole phenomenon of takfir-ism and the whole phenomenon of judging other people to be apostates or infidels or polytheists.

OA: Takfir for 1,400 years was not practiced, and when it was practiced, it was by a very highly institutionalized and legalized profession of scholars. The independent takfiri fatwas only begin in the 18th century and are perfected by Bin Laden. Again: specific political ideologies, specific political circumstances, and specific political actors.