Part VII: Free Speech, Cartoons, and “Supposedly Thin-Skinned Muslims”

In Part VII of our debate, we continue talking about free speech and “supposedly thin-skinned Muslims.” How do most religious people deal with inconvenient verses? They a) ignore them; b) interpret them liberally; c) contextualize them; and d) neutralize them. Because religious texts are by definition contradictory and schizophrenic — the number of contradictions in the Bible and the Qur’an are astounding — they require picking-and-choosing, focusing on certain parts, de-emphasizing other parts, and interpreting verses that offer meaning. It is impossible to “follow the book” literally, with regard to every verse, because you’d be pulled in multiple directions. Had Harris known more about the political interests and motivations of Saudi Arabia and Iran in stoking sectarian tensions over free speech issues, he’d get why citizens of autocracies where demonstrations are illegal somehow showed up en masse to denounce cartoons and novels.

SH: As you know, the mandate under Islam — however doctrinaire — is not simply to kill all the Jews, there’s the whole business of allowing them to live as dhimmi. Again, the only way to constrain this so that we’re actually talking about anything coherent is to come back to specific points, and I want to return to the paragraph you just read, because you made another point, after claiming that everything that Maajid is saying is obvious and so many other people are doing it. You made the point about “supposedly thin-skinned Muslims who cannot take a joke.” This is the kind of writing and this is the kind of attitude that I just find impossible to square with the facts and it seems to betray a kind of identity politics or just a lack of engagement with the problem. What do you mean by “supposedly” thin-skinned? Are you doubting whether such thin-skinned Muslims exist? Or are you saying they are just a tiny minority?

OA: There are thin-skinned people who are going to protest if you publish a cartoon or if you write a novel that. What I’m saying is that — 1) We shouldn’t coddle them, even if they are thin-skinned, but 2) Recognize that this is not theology that’s making them run off and do crazy things or burn effigies or storm embassies, it’s politics. In terms —

SH: First of all, you seem to be stepping away from “supposedly” thin-skinned —

OA: Do you think most Muslims are thin-skinned and emotional?

SH: Most Muslims — if you’re speaking the world over — I don’t know if it’s most as in more than 50% but it’s a shockingly high percentage in any community that’s been polled. For instance, take Britain where I know the polling was done. 68% of British Muslims think that the Danish cartoonists should have been imprisoned. And undoubtedly some percentage of those thought they should have been killed. I mean the question wasn’t asked. But the question they asked was whether they should have been punished. Now 68% think that’s the case. Now, that’s Britain. What was it in Sudan, what was it in Nigeria, what was it in Saudi Arabia?

OA: And there’s another poll that says that British Muslims are better integrated into British society than even white Britons are. So is this a red herring — I ask you.

SH: It’s not a red herring when people show up at your door and kill you.

OA: Sam, the Danish cartoons were an inflated political opportunity for a particular brand of Islam to stoke threats. Listen, when the Danish cartoons were published —

SH: No, I’m asking you a question that you’re sliding off of. What were the Charlie Hebdo cartoons? This is a problem that is not going away, it is appearing in every society. Can you actually say that you think the Muslim community is no different from any religious community on this point?

OA: Yes. I think there’s a minority that is very vocal and will denounce and even threaten violence, but I think that, look, the Danish Cartoons when they were initially published, did not cause a stir. Only after certain Imams were contacted for comment — I don’t know why journalists are contacts Imams for comment on this — only then did the Saudi diplomats begin parroting this and making it a big controversy. The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988 and there was no fatwa until 1989. In fact, the first country to ban The Satanic Verses was India. The reason why was because the Congress Party wanted to appease the local Muslims there, the local Jamaat-e-Islami, which is an Islamist organization in order to win votes. And it was inflated after Khomeini out-Pakistan’d the Pakistanis.

SH: But how does it inflate if no one has these attitudes?

OA: The Danish cartoons were reprinted by the Egyptian newspaper Al Fagr and a number of other newspapers throughout the Middle East. The thing is that if people have a reason to be offended, if they’re seeing this all over the news and all these Imams are giving fatwas — right-wing, Islamist Imams, of course — then yes, they’re going to be offended. Most people are going to ignore it, which is what happened with the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. The Hebdo cartoons were published four years before.

SH: I will grant you that most, or at least many Muslims, will ignore it. I’m not saying that most Muslims will kill you with their own hands if you cartoon the prophet. But a disconcerting number of them will and a disconcerting number will acquiesce to that or apologize for it or tacitly support it or not condemn it. And a disconcerting number of liberal apologists — non-Muslims, secularists like Glenn Greenwald — will focus on the ostensible racism of the cartoons and not on the fact that the cartoonists were murdered.

OA: Yeah, I defended the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, and what I’m saying is that there is this right-wing fringe — I think it’s a fringe, you think it’s central. They’re extremists, their Salafis, Islamists, whatever you want to call it. And we should isolate them and oppose them rather than saying, “All of these Muslims over here are so emotional that they can’t take a joke.” This is the point that I’m making. The Danish Cartoons, The Satanic Verses, the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, initially did not cause controversy because people ignored them, people are busy, they got shit to do, but once you start calling up the Imams and making this a big issue, and the Saudi diplomats and the Pakistani diplomats want this kind of stuff to be banned, then yes. Think about this. The people who are protesting in authoritarian countries against these cartoons — these people are not allowed to protest. How did a hundred thousand protestors, or whatever the number was, show up in authoritarian squares that are closed off to demonstrations, and that those images were repeated on Western media and we say we say “Look at all those Muslims, they’re so emotional.” This was politicized by certain actors with their own interests in mind. Those are the actors that I want to isolate and I want to oppose by supporting the leftists and progressives that are opposing them, rather than saying let’s paint a broad brush and say it’s all Muslims.

SH: I have never said it’s all Muslims. Every time I talk about this, I am careful to differentiate between, again, the concentric circles of commitment to these ideas. Yes, there are many Muslims who don’t care about cartoons, but many, many more Muslims are dodging the issue, the way I think you’re dodging it here —

OA: — How am I dodging it? Please tell me.

SH: There is an intolerable difference between the Muslim world — the Muslim world is now our world, it’s not just in the Middle East — there’s a difference between how Muslims will respond at whatever percentage we’re talking about, to criticism, to jokes, to art they don’t like, to art they don’t like, to novels they haven’t read but heard they wouldn’t like, to dissidents, to free speech. I could give you the same deal I gave to Glenn Greenwald. We can settle this with a duel of cartoon contests. You do a cartoon contest for Islam and I’ll do one for any other religion on earth.

OA: Let me think about this.

SH: And then send me a postcard from the witness protection box.

OA: Is Islam the problem here?

SH: Yes.

OA: It’s not the politics and the political actors on the right.

SH: No. Because there are people with no political grievances in their life. Here I’ll tell you a story that I’m simply one node away from. This is technically hearsay, I wasn’t in the room when this happened, but this is a story I believe to be factual. One of my own doctors was having lunch with an Indian-Muslim doctor in India and brought up the Salman Rushdie affair, this is when Rushdie was in hiding, and he had his excruciating security concerns. Two colleagues talking, the doctor I know is an incredibly well-esteemed doctor and presumably his Indian colleague was a real doctor, and they brought this up, and he said that he would have killed Rushdie with his own hands.

OA: And how did your doctor respond?

SH: Just horrified. A horror that ends relationships and eclipses all possibility of conversation. Are you telling me that you cannot get a penalty for blasphemy as death out of reading the Hadith?

OA: I mean, look, many Muslims don’t adhere to the Hadith, but let’s take the fundamentalists and all the people who protest in the squares, and let’s take all their views as given and as authentic. You still would not be able to reduce their protesting, their demands, their very totalitarian mindset, to just a reading of the text, which is what you want to focus on. There are all these other political factors.

SH: What is the political factor of a well-to-do Muslim doctor in India?

OA: I don’t know this guy. You’re giving me one view of his. He’s a fascist, maybe that’s it.

SH: He’s just someone who thinks that the penalty for blasphemy is death.

OA: And he’s on a political spectrum that’s on the far-right. I meet these people all the time. I’ve debated with these people all the time. I’ve had a conversation in my living room with an extended friend-of-a-friend, who’s a liberal on many issues and was somehow defending stoning. and I told him to his face that you’re a religious fascist.

SH: No, no, stop. It’s perfect. He’s not a religious fascist, you just said he’s a liberal on so many other issues but he’s defending stoning. He has a religious reason and only to defend what would otherwise be a barbaric practice that even his politics repudiate. That is a fucking science experiment psychologically showing you that it was not his politics.

OA: Look, I’m not going to dispute the violence in the Qur’an or that people are violent and are religious.

SH: But you’ve been arguing that it’s all politics. Here you’ve got your friend.

OA: And I’ve got another friend who for him, Islam means everything and his Islam means assisting the poor, which he also has textual support for. It’s contradictory, there’s a schizophrenic relationship between the mind and the text and you have to choose what you’re going to interpret and how you’re going to interpret it. Whatever Platonic ideal you have about religious Muslims, I was a religious Muslim. This is how Muslims actually live their life. They take texts, they interpret it, and often times, yes, they are going to agree with positions that they would not otherwise agree with, but for emotional emotional reasons — because I could present to him all the evidence against stoning, and he would have nothing to say to me, or he’ll go silent and run away — Muslims as they actually live, of course they selectively pick and they selectively choose, and focus on particular interpretations and particular verses. But the broader point is that we shouldn’t remove politics from the discussion.

SH: I have never divorced politics from the discussion, except in those cases where it’s obviously not the necessary and sufficient factor. And in this case, you just gave me the perfect one. You got someone who has liberal politics and yet he is still attached to stoning people to death, for what, for adultery?

OA: Earlier I said that religiously conservative and peaceful Muslims would interpret and then would neutralize. So if we continue this conversation along the stoning line, he would say, “But, Sharia demands that there are four witnesses to the act of adultery, therefore no one is going to be stoned.” Of course, you can still say he’s still violent, still believes it, but he’s rationalized it to himself where it’s non-existent anymore but he can still believe in it and still claim to be a good Muslim because he does not want to feel like a sinner. This is how people do it. They proceed dialectically. So it’s not enough to just reduce it to, “Oh, he believes in stoning and he’s a liberal, therefore he’s a religious theocrat.” The point I’m trying to make is that it’s more complicated than you have it.

SH: It’s not more complicated than I have it. The only reason why he would ever get it into his head that maybe sometimes you want to stone people to death, is because it’s in his holy book. If it wasn’t in there, he certainly wouldn’t think it.

OA: — A religious person, and a Salafist.

SH: And if it said you need five witnesses, he would think you need five witnesses, and if it said you need no witnesses, he would believe that.

OA: I’m not sure about that. He may agree with it in the abstract the way many people agree with all kinds of ideals in the abstract.

SH: If we know anything about our world it’s that there are a significant number of people who agree with it in fact. And are moved, emotionally and behaviorally, and act on these precepts. ISIS is the perfect example.

OA: So let’s isolate them and combat them, I don’t know why we’re talking about all these peaceful Muslims you’re lumping in and you say we’re at war with Islam.

SH: Because it’s all on a continuum.

OA: And we’re talking about the far right here.

SH: Your liberal friend, who’s only bulwark against stoning his sister to death for adultery is that you have to find four witnesses rather than two.

OA: — That’s nonsense. It’s not true. He would have a moral argument against it if we kept proceeding along those lines.

SH: But the fact that you have to waste any time at all is the problem.

OA: Welcome to the reality of the world. People are religious, they live in these traditions.

SH: But it’s only the reality under Islam at the moment. I’ll come back to the cartoon contest. If you were stupid enough to accept it, I wouldn’t let you. You’d be wasting your life.

OA: Here’s what I did do, which is write an article in The New Republic and share it widely saying that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons should be reprinted. Didn’t get any threats based on that. And if there were then we’ll deal with that threat when it arises. I’m not afraid of the assassin, nor will I be silenced because of what some fascist thinks. The point I’m trying to make to you is that there is this extremist, right-wing fringe that I’m trying — and I think you’re trying — to isolate that has very far-right-wing politics. Asking this person, asking any Muslim who is believing to stop believing in their text, is to cut their religious legs from under them. It’s not going to happen.

SH: As you’ll notice, that’s not the line I took in my book with Maajid. I spent no time trying to win the debate in favor of atheism against Maajid. There is not a line in that book where I’m trying to get Maajid to admit that believing in Islam or believing the Qur’an is the word of God is something he has to give up. He persuaded me — I was persuaded before we even sat down — the reason why I collaborated with him on the book was because I was persuaded that another conversation had to happen. We have to find some way forward for secularism and liberalism in the Muslim world, and that cannot be synonymous with atheism.

OA: I’m not sure if you’ve seen pictures of Afghanistan or Pakistan or Egypt in the 60s or 70s — very liberal. You see women bearing arms, you see the sexes intermingling, you see a liberal society. Now what happens after that and how do we get back to that is to support the Muslim left and the Muslim opposition. In the 1970s, the group that’s empowered is the far-right of the Muslim world. Dwight Eisenhower had Said Ramadan, one of the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood in his office in the White House. The Israelis assisted in the formation of Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO. We are complicit, partly, in this, and to get back to a political leftism and progressivism and openness, it requires having democracy and stability and not bombs there. It was there before — it was there in the 50s and 60s, you had liberal, open societies, now we have conservative and closed ones, closed-minded in many cases, where the right is on the upsurge. It’s possible to get there but that’s a political conversation that we need to be having.

SH: Well listen, there’s nothing in what I said — and to the contrary, I have said we have to support liberal voices in the Muslim world — but the main obstacle to that support is the apologetics for the illiberalism of the Muslim world, both from Muslims and non-Muslims, who are either deluded by political correctness and false charges of bigotry and racism. Or bullied into it, who thinks you can’t criticize the illiberalism of Muslims. And when that illiberalism comes directly out of the texts, we should honestly be able to say that there is a connection between what people hold as their sincere religious beliefs and what you’re calling their political attitudes. If you want to join religion and politics at their hips and always mention them in the same sentence, that’s fine, but there’s still the religious origin of specific ideas around blasphemy, apostasy, the status of women, the expectation of paradise after death.

OA: You interpret them to be meaningless or liberal. Look, a holy book is more like a novel than it is like a non-fiction book, and not only in the sense that it’s fictional, but in the sense that it is contradictory and you can take whatever messages you want from it, depending on your ideology.

SH: Unfortunately not.

OA: So how do you square, “there is no compulsion in religion” to go and kill people. If I read that, I’m going to be focusing on “no compulsion in religion.” If you take me from Toronto, Canada and you drop me in Raqqa, Syria or into Damascus or into the Northwest Frontier Province, I may have a different opinion on that matter, because I am not educated and because there are drones flying above or because I have been radicalized by some organization. Fundamentally, and this is to my broader point as well, I concede, of course, religious beliefs matter, they have a very important influence on consequences. What I’m also saying is that surrounding it, underlying political and social circumstances also matter, which help explain why terrorism and Muslim terrorism is such a grave problem in a way that it wasn’t before.