#32 — The Best Podcast Ever
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 36 minutes
Words per Minute
188.99612
Hate Speech Sentences
115
Summary
Sam Harris explains why he decided to release the entire conversation he had with Omer Aziz, and why he thinks it's a good idea to do so. He also explains why it's not a bad thing that the conversation didn't make it into the public eye. And why he doesn't care if it does or doesn't get made public at all, as long as it's good for him to have a conversation with someone who's willing to talk to him about his ideas and ideas. And he also argues that it doesn't really matter what he says, because he's the only person who can decide whether or not to make it public. And that's why he should just do what he said he would do, and release the whole thing, even if it's bad for him and bad for the rest of us. And if he doesn t, well, he'll just have to make his own decision about whether to release it or not, because it's his own damn fault that it didn't happen. and why it should be allowed to be made public. He also points out that he's been on the receiving end of censorship from a variety of people, including Glenn Greenwald, Glenn Greenwald and a wide range of silly people, who complain that he infringes on his right to free speech. And he's not the only one who needs to make a decision about what he thinks he should release. The problem is, he's just as good as anyone does, and he just doesn't have a choice. to make that decision as he does, because people make their own decisions about what they think they should or not. and they don't have the choice to make them. of what they should do, which is what he should do or they don t have a say in the matter which is why they should make the decision not have the right to do or not have it in the first place at all so they have no say in what they do or not to decide what they choose to do, right or not do . the choice is their own decision and what they want to do with their own free speech And why they do it, not the other person s why they won't tell him about it, and why he needs to do it or why it matters how they won t make it and how it s not good enough.
Transcript
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Okay, well, I'm now going to do what I said I wouldn't do, and release the whole conversation
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Now, I'd like to take a few minutes to explain why I've decided to do this.
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and provide some context to the conversation itself.
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As I said before, I didn't want to release this podcast because I thought it was a terrible
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conversation, and terrible in ways that were not actually interesting.
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I was attempting something with Omar that he wasn't up to, and I failed repeatedly to get
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So it was a failure on both our parts to have a productive conversation.
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And I just felt that broadcasting this failure wouldn't be good for anyone, and that listeners
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But I've received an extraordinary amount of pressure, both well-intentioned and not,
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to release this podcast in response to the cries of censorship I heard from Omer and Glenn
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And this pressure has come not merely from the silly themselves, but from my actual supporters
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who say that my not releasing the podcast is making the job of defending me much more
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According to many of you, even though I told Omer in advance that I wouldn't release the
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podcast if I thought our conversation had been a total waste of time, my not releasing
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it is too easily spun as my hiding something, and incredibly as my infringing on Omer's right
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So many of you tell me that I am harming my cause by not releasing it.
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Now, I don't know whether you're right or not, but I've decided to assume that you are.
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Now, paradoxically, my claim that the podcast was too boring to release is no longer true,
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Because given all the controversy and given the charges that Omer has leveled at me, given
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the speculation that he might have defeated me in a debate and revealed my ignorance of
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all things Islamic, the podcast is suddenly very interesting to many of you.
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So, I've decided to adapt to these changes and release the podcast.
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But before I do, I want to give you a few facts.
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I was absolutely clear with Omer about the format of this conversation in advance, about
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my reasons for insisting upon it, and about the fact that I might ditch the whole podcast
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if we proved unable to have a productive conversation.
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As you'll hear, we discussed the possibility of my not airing the podcast at the very end of
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the conversation in a surprisingly collegial way, given how ugly this aftermath has become.
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Now, on this point, you should know, I've been on the receiving end of this sort of thing
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Okay, for instance, I once sat with Robert Wright, the journalist with whom I've had many
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disagreements, for a two-hour interview on his video podcast, The Meaning of Life TV.
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Now, to my knowledge, that conversation never saw the light of day.
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It has never once occurred to me in the intervening years to cry censorship.
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And Robert never explained why he didn't release the podcast.
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Okay, I once sat for an hour in the NPR studios and spoke with Guy Raz for his TED radio hour
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about the talk I gave at TED on the foundations of morality.
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Guy killed the episode because he had trouble finding another speaker to, quote,
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But never in a million years would it occur to me to think that Guy had infringed on my freedom
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Nor would it occur to me to publish an article in Salon alleging that Guy had said some extraordinarily
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hateful and embarrassing things in our conversation as a way of trying to force him to release it
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as the only way to clear his reputation, which is what Omer has done to me.
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Now, when Omer grows up, if he grows up, he will realize that people make editorial decisions
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And unlike the way I've treated him, they usually won't tell him about this possibility
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And they won't let him make his own copy of the broadcast and release it just because
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Now, as I told Omer in an email exchange explaining my position before our conversation,
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I spent 90 minutes doing a roundtable interview with a few religious people and Meredith Vieira.
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And my appearance was cut down to a single sentence and a reaction shot of me looking confused.
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But I've been persuaded by many of you that even though it's ridiculous, it still looks like
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And that I don't trust people to come to their own judgments about who made more sense
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And there is some truth to both of these claims.
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My decision not to publish this was, by definition, a decision to hide something.
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I've been hiding a fruitless and surprisingly painful waste of my time.
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Okay, and very early in this conversation, you'll hear my patience begin to fray.
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Because remember, I was talking to someone who had already proved to be a
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amazingly dishonest in what he wrote about my book with Majid.
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He wrote a viciously stupid review in Salon to begin with.
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But once I started getting wrapped around the axle with him, in attempting to discuss
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And that certainly didn't help the conversation get on track.
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And I absolutely consider that a failing of mine.
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And it's not who I want to be on my own podcast.
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So, given that I couldn't get Omer to stay on topic, and I couldn't even get him to realize
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that he ever went off topic, and I grew more and more frustrated by this, and we never arrived
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It's only natural that I didn't want to publish the result.
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In fact, when I declared the broadcast too boring to release, that wasn't quite accurate.
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The truth is, I found it too boring to even review.
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I started to listen to it, but I found that I just could not bear to spend any more time
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But in response to this controversy, I've now listened to the whole thing for the first
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And I recommend the last hour over the first two, if you're only going to listen to part
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I can't say I recommend you listen to any of it.
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In my view, this is a conversation that should have never happened.
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I should have recognized, based on what Omer wrote in Salon the first time around, that
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there was no way I could have a real conversation with him.
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Now, as to the second point, about my not trusting people to come up with their own intelligent
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assessment of what went on here, that's actually somewhat true.
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There are many people I don't trust to do this.
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In fact, I trust that they will come to the wrong conclusion about what happened here.
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In fact, some already have, based on the excerpts I released in my last podcast.
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Many people have declared that I broke my promise to Omer by releasing those clips.
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But of course, I only released those clips to respond to the false charges he's now made
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In any case, you and Omer are now getting the whole podcast.
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But let me give you one example of how many will get confused by Omer.
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Consider this a brief field guide to human stupidity.
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Listen to this clip that I aired on my last podcast.
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So, I mean, the problem for me, in general, just to step back before we get into the text
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here, is that I understand Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi better than you understand me and Majid.
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And I can actually say this with certainty, because you are absolutely wrong about me and
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And I could ascribe beliefs to al-Baghdadi at random and do a better job than you've
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I could throw the I Ching and come to a better understanding of his motives than you have
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come to an understanding of ours by reading and reviewing our book.
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The only thing I want to say to that is I think I understand Baghdadi better than you
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and Majid understand Baghdadi, because I actually factor in to account his political strategy,
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his geostrategic policy that he's had in Syria and in Iraq that's allowed al-Qaeda in
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Iraq, the Islamic State in Iraq, to go from being a ragtag group of rebels that was decimated
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in 2011 to be this very powerful militia in 2016.
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And the political factors, and I hope we get to them, those are things that you and Majid
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I mean, whether you understand Baghdadi better than I do, we can discuss.
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I'm saying that I understand him, this person who is practically infinitely distant from
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me on the moral and political and religious and intellectual spectrum, better than you
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And we have told you our motives for writing this book, right?
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You describe, or we're going to get into this, because one of the things I'm going to take
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issue with very early on in your review is your description of motives to us.
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I made a point about how completely Omer misunderstands my and Majid's motives for writing our book.
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He did this in his Salon Review, in the very opening paragraph.
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I sought to illustrate this by saying that I understand Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi better than
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It may have seemed like a hyperbolic example, but it actually isn't.
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Omer then just changed the subject and claimed that he understands Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi better
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than either Majid or I do, because we ignore politics and he doesn't.
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When I pulled him back to the actual topic I had raised, he claimed not to care about
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He then made a claim about Mayan Majid's ignoring politics, which is itself untrue.
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And then when I brought him back to the topic, he denied that he cares about our motives
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The first paragraph of his essay directly impugns our motives.
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He claims we wrote our book just to make money.
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So this is a small masterpiece of deflection and dishonesty, which, yes, many people will
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Even now, when I perform an autopsy on this moment, many people will not understand what
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In fact, I've already heard from people who listened to that clip on my last podcast who
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He understands al-Baghdadi better than you and Majid do.
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These people are destined to love Omer's side of this podcast.
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But for anyone actually paying attention, you will hear me struggling in vain to keep
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He confidently asserts points, like the point about al-Baghdadi you just heard, that are
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Sometimes I follow him down that rabbit hole, and we wind up discussing these topics.
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And when I don't, I am sure his audience will interpret that as my having conceded the irrelevant
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But as you'll hear all too clearly in places, I found the resulting conversation deeply frustrating.
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If there is anything in this podcast that embarrasses me, it's just how annoyed I let
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myself get, and very early on, merely having a conversation with another human being.
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And not to demonize Omer, I think that most of this behavior on his part is probably unconscious.
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Most of the time he's going off point and being effectively evasive, I don't think he even
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He's very articulate, and he has these chunks of language on the hard drive he wants to download.
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But the true things he says are usually irrelevant.
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And the relevant things he says are usually false.
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And that is a toxic combination, especially for me.
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And I'm not proud of who I was in those moments.
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And you will also hear a fair amount of despair from me at points.
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This is not the despair of someone who was worried he was losing a debate.
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Now, on the contrary, if you want to view this as a debate, there are several moments where
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True to form, Omer didn't realize he had been knocked out.
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I was trying to have a truly honest conversation.
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And the despair you hear, especially at the end, was over the discovery that this just wasn't
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But here's what you will not find in this podcast.
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You will not find any of the things that Omer says you would find there.
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Virtually every word in his recap of our conversation on Salon is a lie.
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He read into my silences other things I don't believe and would never say.
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He claims to have demonstrated my ignorance on topics about which I'm not ignorant and
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which were among the many irrelevant points he raised and we barely touched.
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But most incredible of all, he said that somewhere in this conversation you are about to hear,
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I, quote, demonized Muslims to such an extreme degree that it verged on bloodlust and that
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I communicated in some way that, quote, Muslim-looking or brown-skinned bodies were of no human value
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Now, I don't know how he thought he could get away with that.
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He's a journalist in his 20s getting his law degree at one of the best law schools on
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He's published in the New Republic and the New York Times.
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He's an adult and he is attempting to destroy my reputation by alleging that I said things
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I didn't say in a conversation that was recorded.
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And I have the recording, which I can choose to release, as I'm doing now.
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Well, I'll tell you what I think he's thinking.
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I think Omer understands that he is writing primarily for an audience that does not care
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They just want to see the people they disagree with demonized.
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And this is the audience that Glenn Greenwald writes for and Chris Hedges and Reza Aslan.
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And when you guys tell me that I've done something that makes me look less than honest, that matters
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And what's more, it quite obviously matters to you.
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I'm often charged by people like Glenn Greenwald with having a cult of followers who just agree
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As far as I can tell, your tolerance for me appearing to be intellectually dishonest is
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And the fact that so many of you thought it looked shady for me not to release the full
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As you might imagine, I've elected not to spend the $500 to $1,000 it would have cost me to
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Because we've edited out all the big Skype glitches and bathroom breaks and coughing fits.
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And there were many moments when Omer and I were talking over one another, which on Skype
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just becomes a total mess and you can barely understand what's being said.
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And the same thing winds up being said a moment later once one person just stops trying to
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So in the interest of preserving your sanity and your hearing, we cut those bits as well.
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But just to be clear, every meaningful sentence of our conversation has been preserved.
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And now, for better or worse, I give you Omer Aziz.
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I expect this will be a difficult conversation.
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In fact, I'm pretty sure it's going to be difficult.
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But before we get into it, please tell our listeners a little about yourself and where
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I'm looking forward to exploring our areas of disagreement and potentially of agreement.
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First and foremost, I consider myself a writer.
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I studied in England and France and Canada and now the U.S., born to a Muslim family that
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And I'm interested in all of these issues around religion, around human rights, around
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foreign policy, and exploring fundamentally the best way forward.
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So what did you do your undergraduate in and where'd you do that?
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So I did my undergraduate in politics, but really more so in books, because I spent it
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I did my master's in international relations in Cambridge.
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I spent my time traveling throughout the Middle East.
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And I think that was really where my perceptions of Islam and the Muslim world changed a lot.
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I think before that, I was reacting, as many people come out of religious families do, towards
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sort of the religion and culture of their birth.
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And so I probably would have agreed with you more at that point.
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But then I went to Iraq and Jordan, for example, and did some reporting and saw it for myself,
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You were born into a Muslim family and have been identified as a Muslim all your life?
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Or you say you came to your commitment to Islam later in life?
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Yeah, well, I mean, I come from an interesting family that I think is representative, really,
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in terms of one of my parents being very secular and very skeptical, one of my parents being
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I identify culturally as a Muslim and was within the community of Islam because it was part of
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You know, when Eid comes around once a year, I want to be with my family and want to celebrate.
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And so you could say I might even agree with you on the question of whether God exists.
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Well, I'm talking to you now because of the book review you published in Salon, my favorite
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website, in which you wrote very critically and dismissively about the book I wrote with
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Majid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance.
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And so rather than just talk to you about the review in general, I'm going to have you read
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it out loud on the podcast so that we can discuss it point for point.
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Now, you've agreed to do this, but under some duress.
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You told me by email you think this is a terrible idea.
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But I want our listeners to understand why I've structured the conversation this way.
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I mean, I'm simply insisting that you also read every word of your review so that our listeners
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But you can make any caveats or supporting points you want, and we can talk about anything
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under the sun, I just want to deal with your review first and pretty systematically.
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So just to be clear, there's absolutely nothing about this that is closing down debate or
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I'm not going to edit anything you say unless you ask me to.
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First, it's a very common experience for a person to read a review like this or even to
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write one and to have no idea what the target of this kind of criticism could or would say
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in response because there's simply no good format in which to answer charges like this.
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And so as an experiment, I want to use my podcast for this, if only just this once.
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And in particular, I want our listeners to know what it's like, and I want you to know
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what it's like for me to read a review like this, actually almost in real time, sentence
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Because it seems to me you can't possibly know how fully this essay of yours misfires from
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Presumably, you think your statements are clear and accurate and that you've built a very
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damning case against me and Majid, in particular me.
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But there's almost no single sentence here that survives scrutiny.
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My initial reservations to doing it in this format, and I highlighted this when you said
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And my suggestion that it's never been done before is because this could descend into a
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kind of Talmudic parsing of, you know, single sentences and words that won't be helpful
00:22:16.440
Now, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say that's not going to happen.
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On the second point, I think in an earlier podcast, you said that I really hate you and
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I find some of your ideas to be repugnant and I was responding to those.
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I'm merely contending and responding to the ideas that I read in your book.
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And we'll get into what you said specifically and its implications.
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And again, it's not going to be a rabbinical parsing of every word, but I do want to move
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And I want to also make clear that my goal isn't to embarrass you and my goal really isn't
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I'm trying to bridge the gap between your essay and the cynicism that it communicates to
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me and what I would consider a real conversation.
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But I think doing this is going to take some real work because it's, you know, I think
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And I'm going to, you know, obviously I'm going to cut you some slack because I understand
00:23:23.380
that no one writes an article like this anticipating to then have to read it to its primary target.
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And I can only assume that even if you kept your opinions about me as they are, you would
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probably phrase a few of these points differently in the context of an actual conversation.
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So I think one thing to make clear up front is that your insults don't matter to me.
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I mean, I don't take anything you've written personally.
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The problem is I don't take anything you've written to heart at all because it's as though
00:23:54.440
And this is why I want to have this conversation.
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So, I mean, the problem for me in general, just to step back before we get into the text
00:24:00.920
here, is that I understand Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi better than you understand me and Majid.
00:24:07.820
And I can actually say this with certainty because you are absolutely wrong about me and Majid.
00:24:13.660
And I could ascribe beliefs to al-Baghdadi at random and do a better job than you've done
00:24:19.780
I could throw the I Ching and come to a better understanding of his motives than you have come
00:24:25.140
to an understanding of ours by reading and reviewing our book.
00:24:28.720
The only thing I want to say to that is I think I understand Baghdadi better than you
00:24:32.360
and Majid understand Baghdadi because I actually factor in to account his political strategy
00:24:37.240
and his geostrategic policy that he's had in Syria and in Iraq that's allowed al-Qaeda
00:24:42.080
in Iraq, the Islamic State in Iraq, to go from being a ragtag group of rebels that was decimated
00:24:47.580
in 2011 to be this very powerful militia in 2016.
00:24:51.360
And the political factors, and I hope we get to them, those are things that you and Majid
00:24:59.540
I mean, whether you understand Baghdadi better than I do, we can discuss.
00:25:03.140
I'm saying that I understand him, this person who is practically infinitely distant from me
00:25:08.860
on the moral and political and religious and intellectual spectrum, better than you understand
00:25:15.180
And we have told you our motives for writing this book, right?
00:25:25.420
You describe, or we're going to get into this, because one of the things I'm going to take
00:25:28.460
issue with very early on in your review is your ascription of motives to us.
00:25:35.160
You're a very smart person who is capable of writing about these issues honestly.
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I mean, in fact, I told you by email that you had a piece in The New Republic about jihadism.
00:25:47.400
So that's the mystery I want to attempt to resolve, that you could write an article on
00:25:51.440
jihadism that I could recommend almost without reservation, and yet you could review my dialogue
00:25:57.180
with Majid so uncharitably that I can honestly say, from my point of view, that you communicated
00:26:06.300
Okay, so my goal here, again, just to be clear, is I want to bridge that gap, essentially,
00:26:10.420
between your two articles, but I really think it's not going to be easy, because from my
00:26:15.540
point of view, almost no sentence in your review does what you think it does.
00:26:20.320
That's where we're starting, and I think the only other thing I want to say before you start
00:26:24.100
reading your review is that our listeners should know that I've sent you a version of it where
00:26:28.640
I've marked many places where I think there's something for us to talk about, and I did this
00:26:33.100
because given the time lag on Skype, I didn't want to continually be talking over you as you
00:26:38.400
began reading a new sentence or paragraph. So you have the complete text of your review
00:26:42.760
marked by me, and you'll just read sections, and then we'll pause and then begin speaking
00:26:49.180
Yeah, sure, and I hope that, you know, just to respond to your previous point about my
00:26:53.240
New Republic piece, which I still stand by, of course, there's a difference between examining
00:26:57.420
the assumptions, the beliefs, and the motivations of an isolated extremist, and then extrapolating
00:27:03.380
that and saying that that is either representative of an authentic or legitimate form of Islam.
00:27:08.060
And my intention in writing this piece and in critiquing your views is that how do we
00:27:12.760
actually get a reformation? How do we actually get cultural liberalism in the Middle East?
00:27:17.840
And I propose that your solutions and Majid's solutions, which focus on versus almost to
00:27:23.140
the exclusion of politics, is the wrong way forward. So that's what I'll say on that.
00:27:27.420
Okay, well, let's go. Please start with the title.
00:27:30.960
Sure. So the title that the salon editors put on this, and these are the only words in the
00:27:36.640
entire piece that are not my own, is Sam Harris's detestable crusade. And I think that I also want
00:27:43.660
to have my original title, which I put, which they changed, of course, it was originally called
00:27:48.980
The Poverty of the Intellectuals, Sam Harris, Majid Nawaz, and the Illusion of Tolerance. And look,
00:27:54.680
I wouldn't use a phrase like detestable crusade, because to me, that's clickbait nonsense. And that's
00:28:00.260
what all editors from time immemorial have done. And so you can, you know, you can rebut that. And
00:28:05.200
we probably agree that that's not a helpful title. But I stand by my own in saying that the ideas in
00:28:10.940
here in this in this tract were very often impoverished. Yes.
00:28:14.180
Okay, well, that's very interesting. But so please just read the full title and the subtitle,
00:28:20.760
Yeah, sure. Just give me a here. So this, the full title was Sam Harris's detestable crusade,
00:28:28.520
how his latest anti-Islam tract reveals the bankruptcy of his ideas. And the subtitle was
00:28:34.120
Harris's haughty ignorance and chauvinism are on full display in his new book,
00:28:42.280
Right. Okay, so it's interesting to, as I expected, you didn't write this title,
00:28:46.780
and you're not actually happy with it, which is so now you are, I think, the third writer
00:28:52.540
from Salon who I've communicated with. One of them is another Muslim who's just as critical of me as
00:28:58.180
you are, who felt the need to apologize for the title that Salon put on there.
00:29:02.340
No, no, I don't want to apologize. I don't apologize because this is not my, these are not
00:29:06.440
my words. They're not my article. But this happens with, you've written before for public
00:29:10.920
magazines as well. And you're well aware that editors choose the titles.
00:29:14.100
I'm not saying you're apologizing for yourself, but it's not a title that you stand behind.
00:29:18.280
Let me just point out, in case this blew by people too quickly, you know, as with almost
00:29:22.460
every other Salon article about me, there isn't even a pretense of journalistic objectivity here.
00:29:27.600
I mean, there's, there's clearly an editorial policy there to make me look as bad as possible.
00:29:32.340
And here the reader is told, just straight out told, that my work is detestable,
00:29:37.860
my ideas are bankrupt, that I am haughty, ignorant, and chauvinistic.
00:29:42.180
And I pointed this out in my last interview with Salon. This, this is the behavior of
00:29:46.040
a tabloid. I mean, no real magazine or newspaper does this, but in any case, just, just get
00:29:54.380
There are a few get rich quick schemes left in modern publishing, but one that persists
00:29:59.000
could be called Project Islamic Reformation. Writing a book that fits in this category is
00:30:04.340
actually quite easy. First, label yourself a reformist. Nevermind the congratulatory self-coronation
00:30:10.940
the tag implies. It is necessary to segregate oneself from all the non-reformists out there.
00:30:16.660
Second, make your agenda clear at the outset by criticizing what is ailing Islam and Muslims.
00:30:22.640
The Quran is a good place to start because Muslims, especially in the Middle East,
00:30:27.000
surely treat their holy book more like a military instruction manual than anything else.
00:30:32.300
Third, propose a few solutions. Lest you be accused of nuance, the more vague and generic
00:30:38.100
these are, the better. Fourth, soak up the inevitable publicity that awaits, and with
00:30:48.260
Okay. So you actually believe that writing a short book like this about reforming Islam
00:30:53.900
for Harvard University Press is an extremely lucrative thing to do? I mean, if you do,
00:31:00.420
I need to educate you about the reality of publishing.
00:31:02.520
I don't think it's lucrative. Maybe it's lucrative. It's easy, though. It's simple. It's intellectual
00:31:08.820
fast food, Sam. You describe this as a get-rich-quick scheme, okay? And even if this were a great way
00:31:15.600
to make money, which it isn't, you actually think that money would be our primary motive
00:31:19.940
in writing a book like this? I'm not sure what your primary motive is. I know that if I were to dish
00:31:24.560
out a book about Islam and use the words reformation and terrorist, I could get a book deal in about
00:31:29.020
five seconds. In fact, I could write that kind of book in my sleep. It's not that difficult to do.
00:31:34.240
This is, to me, this is intellectual fast food, and frankly, I think you guys could have done better.
00:31:39.020
It's a different point. Okay, I understand you don't like the book, and you think we could have
00:31:42.620
written a better book. You're ascribing motives to us here, right? This is the first paragraph of
00:31:48.140
your piece. You describe this as a get-rich-quick scheme. Now, I'm talking about your understanding of
00:31:54.360
what Majid and I are up to. Now, I find your cynicism here fairly breathtaking. I mean,
00:31:59.820
you think Majid's career as a reformer, okay, as a former Islamist who spent years in an Egyptian prison
00:32:06.560
and who now seeks to deprogram Islamists and jihadists, incurring massive security concerns
00:32:11.800
as a result and foregoing every other opportunity he might have, you actually think that this is a
00:32:17.720
get-rich-quick scheme on his part? You think this is how he thinks he can make the most money?
00:32:21.680
Look, I tell you that there's been a litany of books that have been published very recently.
00:32:26.600
They're not scholarly tracks that repeat the same slogans over and over again. They're short
00:32:31.600
pamphlets. And yes, I mean, maybe it's not get-rich-quick, but it's get-rich-soon, at least.
00:32:35.960
You build a platform on it. You accumulate a mass following based on people who love the idea of
00:32:41.760
saying, telling Muslims that they should reform by cutting out verses of their holy book, which no other
00:32:46.120
religion has been expected or demanded to do. And yes, I mean, I don't think it's a serious,
00:32:50.520
serious intellectual exercise. And- Again, again, Omer, it's a different point. We can talk about
00:32:56.020
whether it's a serious intellectual exercise, but- Do you think it's difficult to call for a reform of
00:33:00.620
Islam in America today? Do you actually think it's difficult? Does it threaten your security?
00:33:04.560
Absolutely. We will get into this. This is why we have to be- One of the major parties of the
00:33:07.380
democracy are calling for, have been calling for this in very fascistic tones. I don't think it's
00:33:11.220
an intellectually brave thing to do. I'm sorry. Omer, we got to move through this systematically,
00:33:15.700
all right? I'm talking about your description of motive. You are making assumptions here,
00:33:20.240
which are flat wrong. First of all, there's Majid's case of being a reformer and-
00:33:25.200
Yeah. Very little standing in Muslim communities.
00:33:27.500
The price he's paid for this, all right? So, you know, the fact, I mean, he lost a wife and son
00:33:32.260
over this, all right? And you are describing him as an opportunist who's just out to make a buck,
00:33:37.260
okay? Now, and I want to return to that. I think a problem with right-wing organizations
00:33:41.760
is probably why I would do that. I mean, there are plenty of reformists that are working on the
00:33:45.980
Every single day. I'm not filibuster. I'm explaining-
00:33:48.660
I'm trying to get back to the first point you're jumping off of, right? Which is the
00:33:52.520
description of motive. Now, speaking personally, I'm giving you information you don't actually have
00:33:57.500
about me, all right? Speaking personally, right? The challenge for me is to make the work I do on
00:34:03.120
this topic, the topic of Islam, remotely viable, and not to have the resulting damage done to my
00:34:09.080
reputation by people like you, not close the door to other opportunities.
00:34:16.660
No, no, no, no. To even get paid for it, okay? You describe this as a get-rich-quick scheme,
00:34:22.600
right? But you realize that having people call you a racist and a bigot and a chauvinist and an
00:34:30.240
Islamophobe isn't good for your career, right? Okay, I mean, you realize there's a cost to this.
00:34:35.820
Do you realize that many people who agree with me on these issues, just across the board, won't
00:34:40.320
touch this topic because they don't want to deal with the defamatory nonsense I deal with on a
00:34:46.240
Look, there are many white, non-Muslim authors that have written books about Islam. This is not
00:34:50.660
about you in particular. And you don't have the kind of offensive language in here that you've said
00:34:55.660
before in terms of we are at war with Islam or all kinds of, yes, chauvinistic viewpoints. But I
00:35:00.840
mean, back to my earlier point, I think that doing something like this is not difficult. And yes,
00:35:05.620
it does make one money. In fact, I've been offered to do it myself. And I'm not afraid of being called
00:35:10.420
anything. And I am critical of Islam. So I mean, if you want to complain about having your feelings
00:35:15.280
hurt, that's one thing. But let's have an actual discussion of the merits of what reformation looks
00:35:19.960
It has nothing to do with having my feelings hurt. Again, I have to linger on this point because you're
00:35:24.680
so far from reality here and you're so satisfied that you're in touch with it. So just listen to
00:35:30.980
me for a second. Again, I'm talking about me, my career as a best-selling writer and scientist,
00:35:36.940
right? You've made certain assumptions here and they're totally wrong.
00:35:40.360
Sam, you made your career by attacking religion and that's totally fine. What were you doing before
00:35:43.340
you wrote The End of Faith? Seriously, you were a PhD neuroscientist, right? You made a lot of money
00:35:47.020
off of this. Here is a fact. Focusing on Islam, right, to any degree, writing this book with
00:35:52.980
Majid, having you on my podcast now, okay, alienates a significant percentage of my core
00:36:00.140
audience. I mean, even the people who know I'm not a bigot, the people who see no more merit in
00:36:05.100
defamatory salon articles than I do, right, don't want to hear me talk about Islam and Islamism because
00:36:10.740
it's the most boring thing in the world. Now, I can tell you that there is almost no one in my
00:36:16.800
core audience who wants me to spend any more time reiterating my concerns about Islam. And yet you
00:36:23.140
seem to think that I am pandering to a huge audience for mercenary reasons. There's not a
00:36:29.280
scintilla of truth to this charge. You just conjured it out of just an unfriendly act of imagination.
00:36:35.880
Yeah. Well, I mean, look, if I look at your career and the things that you said before
00:36:38.960
Sam Harris became waking up in meditation, Sam Harris, it's all been attacks on religion. And
00:36:45.300
that's fair. But some of the things, of course, that you said about Islam before, which garnered
00:36:49.400
a lot of controversy, rightly so. And I hope we can talk about that, your rhetoric. Those are
00:36:54.980
things that you should expect to be criticized for. And look, I don't want to talk about Islamism
00:36:59.660
either. I've got a wide variety of interests and creative pursuits that I'd rather be doing. So
00:37:04.760
this is on me as well. And if your listeners are going to be alienated by an opposing point of view...
00:37:11.100
They're not going to be alienated by an opposing point of view. It's your assumption that Majid and
00:37:16.440
I... I mean, it's especially egregious with Majid, but I'm focusing on my part for the moment. It's
00:37:22.760
your assumption that I am pandering to an audience that is hungry to hear me reiterate the problems
00:37:31.980
with Islam and that this is a lucrative thing to do. What sort of advance do you think Majid and I got
00:37:38.240
for this book? I mean, you've probably heard that bestselling authors get six-figure or seven-figure
00:37:42.000
advances for books. What do you think we got here?
00:37:47.700
Yeah. And how much... And can I ask you... I mean, look, I don't want to go into your finances.
00:37:51.320
That's your personal business. But look, this is Islam and the future of tolerance. You weren't
00:37:57.240
talking about reformation of Islam five years ago or four years ago. You were just talking about
00:38:02.280
attacking Islam. And this was originally supposed to be a blog post.
00:38:05.840
If I'm not mistaken, let me just make one quick point. This was originally supposed to be a blog
00:38:11.040
post. And this reads like a long email exchange between two people. I can't believe I spent $20
00:38:15.840
on it or whatever the price was. And Majid proposed that it be a book. And I think part of the reason
00:38:21.600
for that, it's fair to assume, is that you would have made more money by publishing as a book than
00:38:26.140
you would have by publishing it freely on your blog. People pay a premium to read something that
00:38:31.480
should not be... that should not have a premium price attached to it. This is my point here.
00:38:35.640
Okay. Well, no, that's not your point. Again, you're...
00:38:39.120
You're just... you're not in touch with reality here. You're not in touch with the cost,
00:38:44.420
professionally, reputationally, for touching this issue. You think that there are windfall
00:38:49.720
profits for anyone who wants to say something negative about Islam. That's just simply not the
00:38:55.540
case. So let me just give you another example here. When Ben Affleck called my comments about
00:39:00.240
Islam racist on Bill Maher's show last year, okay, I was trying to launch a book about meditation and
00:39:05.620
the nature of consciousness and a rational approach to spirituality. And that's a book that I actually
00:39:10.440
had been paid a fair amount to write, okay? And there was literally not a moment for the rest of
00:39:16.020
my book tour where I could talk about my book, okay? Instead, I had to deal with idiots who thought
00:39:20.500
that Affleck made sense, right? And honestly, I've spent much of the last year doing that.
00:39:25.000
Now, do you think... just consider this with fresh eyes for a moment. Do you think that when you're
00:39:30.520
trying to launch a book about spirituality and meditation and a scientific understanding of
00:39:35.480
consciousness, do you think that having to endlessly beat back charges of racism and bigotry
00:39:40.760
is a good thing for marketing that book? Is that a moneymaker?
00:39:44.600
Two points. The first is that there is a huge audience in the United States for right-wing
00:39:51.740
politics and right-wing views about Islam. This is not new, right? I'm sure that you are aware of
00:39:58.040
this. And you encounter it all the time in the media and half of American democracy, at least one of
00:40:02.980
the two major parties, has been caught up in this. The second point is that the reason why people were
00:40:08.040
so critical of you and asking you all those questions is because on that appearance on Bill Maher's
00:40:12.840
show, you called Islam the motherlode of bad ideas. You threw out a number that at the time, I think
00:40:18.480
that this is where some of your critics were unfair, where they said you pulled it out of thin air
00:40:23.060
and I don't think I give you more credit than that. But you called Islam the motherlode of bad ideas
00:40:27.900
and the guy next to you, Bill Maher, who I also really like, I think he's a funny comedian and
00:40:32.260
you know, I love watching his show, but he compared Islam to the fucking mafia. Those are his words.
00:40:37.040
Now, what do you? You expect people not to raise those questions when you're going around?
00:40:39.960
The point I'm making is that there is a cost for this. This is not a self-serving, opportunistic,
00:40:47.500
profitable thing to do. And most people who agree with me won't go near this topic because of all
00:40:54.080
the pain it causes them. There is no upside to it. Now, yes, there are a few right-wing areas of
00:41:00.940
publishing where a couple of people can sell books pandering to what you might call, I think more
00:41:08.540
legitimately call, a racist or xenophobic or bigoted audience. But that is not the market
00:41:15.780
for Majid and me. And I mean, it's just, it's incredible that you're not seeing this, okay?
00:41:22.720
So I am someone who deals with many other topics, whose audience wants him to deal with other topics.
00:41:28.900
At this point, almost anything but Islam, right? I mean, just picture this, right? I mean,
00:41:33.700
do you think that anyone pays a lot of money to hear me come tell their students or employees
00:41:44.380
No, I mean, look, I'm not sure what your sources of income are and who pays you and who doesn't pay
00:41:50.220
you. But I'm certain that if tomorrow or in sometime in 2016, you were to say expand the part
00:41:57.300
of the end of faith dedicated to Islam and write out the most withering critique of Islam that you
00:42:02.840
could possibly write, I'm sure that would sell very, very well, especially in the United States,
00:42:07.780
especially in Europe, where people are getting very antsy about Islam. I mean, look, if you think that
00:42:12.920
criticizing Islam and doing it when very heated rhetoric doesn't sell well, then honestly,
00:42:17.580
dude, you're deluded, man. Like it sells extremely well. You get platforms, you can go on the media,
00:42:22.920
you can market your books, and you get more followers and more readers, and people want to
00:42:27.520
You're wrong about this. Okay, you're wrong about this. I have five New York Times bestsellers
00:42:35.060
The first one being The End of Faith, The Criticism of Religion, which started it all.
00:42:38.940
Yes. Okay, but there's much more to the book than that, and it is not focused on Islam. And it was the
00:42:45.500
first book in a wave of, quote, new atheist books that started this publishing trend. You couldn't
00:42:52.720
publish the same book today and hope to get lots of readers. And my book with Majid was never expected
00:43:00.120
to be a New York Times bestseller, hasn't been a New York Times bestseller, was not written because
00:43:05.540
we thought this was a great angle to make a lot of money. It was written to communicate specific
00:43:11.640
ideas, which I hope we will get into. And it was written as an example of a conversation that succeeded,
00:43:18.680
right? Majid and I started out far apart when we first met, and we converged in a very happy
00:43:25.440
collaboration. And we're putting it out there as an example of how a conversation on this topic
00:43:31.420
could and we think should start. Now, the fact that you don't understand the reputational costs
00:43:38.360
to this, the fact that you don't understand how much damage has been done to our public conversation
00:43:43.360
on this topic by articles like the one you just wrote, right? And by periodicals like Salon that
00:43:48.780
title them the way they title them. It's flabbergasting to me. And I'll draw the picture even wider for you
00:43:54.760
here because you really just, you do not understand the implications of this. I mean, do you think
00:43:59.800
that when it comes time to get your kids into elementary school, okay, after handing in an application,
00:44:05.760
right? Do you think that having to warn the director of admissions that a Google search on
00:44:12.080
daddy might just turn up charges of racism and bigotry that aren't true, right?
00:44:19.220
Chauvinist is in the title of the article, right? I'm just saying that-
00:44:23.540
I hope they would move past the title, which is what an informed reader is supposed to do.
00:44:26.780
But you're deliberate- well, they don't. But first of all, you're deliberately missing the
00:44:31.640
point here. The reality is that to deal with this topic, okay, especially as a white guy,
00:44:36.880
but even Majid doesn't escape charges of bigotry and even racism. Even Ayaan Hirsi Ali doesn't
00:44:42.960
escape charges of bigotry and racism. I mean, Sam, the reason that- okay, finish your point.
00:44:48.000
The point is that to broach this topic is to guarantee a whirlwind of unjustified charges of
00:44:57.720
bigotry, chauvinism, racism, xenophobia directed at you and an endless trail of this online. And
00:45:06.480
this is something that self-respecting public intellectuals, public intellectuals who value
00:45:13.020
their time and their sanity are avoiding at almost any cost. Okay. I know these people. They're my
00:45:19.960
colleagues. And the fact that you not only don't see this, just see it as just pure upside. For
00:45:28.540
anyone who wants to defame Islam, they're just going to get a book deal. They're going to get
00:45:32.020
rich. They're going to get feted in chauvinistic circles. And it's just going to be a gravy train
00:45:38.040
of bigotry that they can ride for the end of their days. That is insanity.
00:45:42.520
There are always costs to entering the marketplace of ideas, regardless of what those ideas are. And
00:45:48.400
there are, of course, benefits as well. And it's in my estimation, the benefits in this case of
00:45:53.080
attacking Islam and attacking Muslims, there are greater than the cost. And there should be
00:45:58.100
criticism and there should be withering criticism of people like yourself and of Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
00:46:03.440
who basically call for war against Islam. Let's boil this down because you're not an impartial
00:46:09.420
arbiter or peddler of sophisticated arguments. You have said some very chauvinistic things and
00:46:15.500
you have rightly been criticized for them. Now, no one should be attacking you personally. No one
00:46:19.860
should be threatening you. No one certainly should not be threatening your livelihood or your life.
00:46:24.920
But people should have the right and the responsibility and I think the obligation to
00:46:28.860
offer withering rebuttals to that kind of rhetoric. When someone says that it is time we admitted
00:46:34.600
that we are not at war with terrorism, we are at war with Islam, that deserves extreme
00:46:45.800
Do you disagree? Look, if I came out, let me reverse this quickly. Let me reverse this quickly,
00:46:51.000
right? I think Israel has a right to exist and I think that its occupation in the West Bank
00:46:55.420
is illegal and ultimately there's going to be a two-state solution. Now, as a brown-skinned Muslim
00:47:00.480
name person, I am aware that if I came out and said, you know, we are at war with Judaism or with the
00:47:07.440
Jewish people or with Zionism, what do you think the response would be?
00:47:10.580
I just don't understand how you're missing this point. Okay. So, we can talk about all of that.
00:47:16.460
All right. I am still stuck on this get-rich-quick scheme, this attribution of motive,
00:47:22.320
this picture you have of everything in the marketplace.
00:47:25.940
How much money did you make off the book? I mean, since you claim that there's only costs
00:47:31.740
associated with targeting Islam. Okay. What's interesting, okay, so here's a nice question.
00:47:36.260
How many Twitter followers have you gotten since then? These are all things that accumulate on
00:47:39.180
your platform. Nice question. So, since we didn't get an advance for the book, right, then it's all
00:47:45.220
about royalties now. I should be very concerned about book sales. How many times do you think I've
00:47:51.520
checked with the publisher to see how many books we've sold? I don't know, Sam. I don't know.
00:47:56.900
That's right. You don't know. Zero. Zero is the number you're looking for there. So,
00:48:01.680
you made zero dollars off of this. No, I'm sure we've sold some books. I have no idea how many
00:48:06.560
we've sold. So, this was a blog post that turned into a book. So, you went from zero dollars to X.
00:48:13.760
That's greater than zero, right? So, you made money off of this. And look, to me, that's a secondary
00:48:17.060
point, but you want to focus on it. No. The point is, your attribution of a sinister,
00:48:23.320
mercenary, opportunistic, cynical motive to something that is a pure effort to have a publicly
00:48:31.440
valuable conversation, that is what I'm focusing on. I mean, Omer, honestly, your reluctance to
00:48:37.500
concede this point, okay? Your reluctance to concede that you actually had no information
00:48:43.400
about publishing here, or about our motives, or about how much money we were going to make,
00:48:49.480
that you were just saying something that sounded right to you, that you wanted to believe is true,
00:48:54.860
but now actually want to give you information. You have just admitted that you made money off
00:48:58.100
of this, number one. Number two, it was originally supposed to be a blog post. And number three,
00:49:03.440
you know, the new atheist books, The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, End of Faith, of course,
00:49:07.980
as you mentioned, would not be published today. They've already been published. But,
00:49:11.500
would you deny that Project Islamic Reformation, books on demanding reformation, are not in vogue
00:49:16.360
now? That articles calling for reformation don't go viral every two days? Would you deny this,
00:49:21.560
that there's a great market, and a great readership, and a great listenership for these kinds of ideas?
00:49:29.020
No, no, I would deny it. It is the least lucrative and most costly thing I could be doing,
00:49:37.320
right? And I'm informing you about this. I don't expect you to know this,
00:49:41.500
but what I'm saying is true. And your reluctance to step back at all from your get-rich-quick
00:49:48.600
scheme claim says a lot about you, all right? I mean, this is, you're getting your JD at Yale,
00:49:55.040
all right? I mean, what could you possibly hope to do as a lawyer if you're showing this little
00:49:59.880
concern, not only for the truth, but for the perception of your commitment to the truth?
00:50:06.040
Look, my commitment to the truth is completely independent from, and I think should not factor
00:50:12.720
in, financial profit of any kind, right? I think it's a corrupting motive, number one. And number
00:50:17.740
two, as an attorney and someone who is actually interested in reforming many communities and
00:50:24.200
inducing cultural liberalism, I want to work with these communities, which is apparently what Majid wants
00:50:29.260
to do. And here's something, I'll tell you, that this book is going to influence and change precisely
00:50:37.900
Again, you're changing the subject. Omer, the truth I'm talking about here is you made a claim
00:50:43.440
about our motives that is demonstrably false. Okay, I've given you several reasons why you should-
00:50:48.400
You just admitted that you've made money off of it.
00:50:54.880
Originally, I thought we could do a blog post. It became such a substantial conversation,
00:51:00.200
and it was taking so much of our time, and we wanted to do it right, and we wanted to spend
00:51:05.040
more time doing it, that it justified the further effort to make it a book, right? So then we wrote
00:51:11.020
a book together, and it was a great collaboration that many, many people have found valuable. We haven't
00:51:16.800
even gotten into the substance of the book yet, because I'm trying to get you to concede that the
00:51:22.680
information that you thought you had about our motives and about the reality of publishing and
00:51:28.580
about the lack of security concerns that people like Majid and I have, right? All of that was
00:51:34.380
delusional, okay? And I've given you several reasons to recognize that your charge is false.
00:51:43.260
I'm going to quote you in my own words. What I exactly said was,
00:51:47.060
soak up the inevitable publicity that awaits, and with it, your hard-earned cash. You have
00:51:50.940
received plenty of publicity for this book, and you have already conceded that you have received
00:51:55.460
cash for this book. So I'm not sure what your equivalent is. Is it with the facts?
00:51:59.900
No, no. You describe it as a get-rich-quick scheme. I've heard you on another podcast
00:52:04.520
confidently describe it as a get-rich-quick scheme. You describe-
00:52:08.260
There's a lot of money to be made. You already said there's a big market for it.
00:52:10.840
No, I did not. It is the worst possible market for me. And it comes with massive costs. Security
00:52:19.180
costs. It comes with reputational costs. It comes with the cost of having to try to take
00:52:24.340
people's words out of your mouth. It comes with the cost of a conversation like this that many
00:52:28.920
people could find excruciatingly boring. I mean, this is all bad news from my point of view,
00:52:35.240
and yet I do it because I think it's an important topic to raise. And the reason why I'm having this
00:52:39.900
conversation is not just to deal with the topic of Islam and Islamism and our disagreements here,
00:52:45.460
but I'm trying to have hard conversations like this because I find the inability of people to get
00:52:52.180
through hard conversations and to converge, right? The inability of people to have their minds changed
00:52:57.440
in real time. The inability for people to admit that they were wrong in real time. That, I think,
00:53:04.460
is actually the biggest social problem we have. It's much bigger than the problem of Islam or religion.
00:53:11.060
No, racism is the biggest social problem we have, but maybe this is a close second.
00:53:14.440
I would seriously disagree with you there. But the point is, is that two people have to be able to
00:53:19.740
disagree and find some way of talking about that disagreement in a way that's productive.
00:53:25.680
And even on this point, right, where I have all the information, right, where I know about the
00:53:30.980
economics of publishing, where I know what I get paid and when I get paid and when I don't,
00:53:35.460
when I know about the reputational costs and the security costs, and you know none of these things,
00:53:44.520
Yeah, look, I've seen the books that have come out according to what I call Project Islamic
00:53:49.020
Reformation, both yours and Majid's as well as Ayaan Hirsi Ali's. I recognize that there is a market for it
00:53:54.980
because I could very easily enter this market and make money off of this kind of project. And
00:53:59.420
you've already admitted that you made money off of this. And so look, to me, this is a secondary
00:54:03.400
point. But if you cannot concede the fact or admit that there is money to be made and readers to be
00:54:08.660
had by criticizing and denouncing Islam or calling for an Islamic Reformation, then I don't think we
00:54:13.560
live in the same world. I mean, it's so clearly...
00:54:16.320
My point, Omer, is not that there's no money to be made. My point is that this is the least
00:54:23.160
good way for me to attempt to make money. And Majid could make much more money doing something
00:54:30.420
else. Ayaan Hirsi Ali could make much more money doing something else. We'll get to those because
00:54:34.980
later in your article, you make charges against them that I want to address. But here, we're still
00:54:40.040
on the first paragraph here, right? This is the problem, all right? I've given you several reasons
00:54:45.920
to recognize that this charge, that we're involved in a get-rich-quick scheme, is false. And I can
00:54:52.720
assure you that our listeners will recognize it to be false. And you're tenaciously holding to it
00:54:59.160
past the point where its falsity is obvious to everyone, makes you look like an asshole.
00:55:04.380
Yeah. Well, look, we've already established that there is a market for this and a readership for
00:55:09.820
this and that it is a trend. You know what you should have done then? If you don't want to create
00:55:14.140
a perception of trying to make money, if you and Majid don't, go and do a scholarly, serious study
00:55:19.000
of Islam and what needs to be done, rather than a 128-page pamphlet. And this creates the perception
00:55:26.540
of a financial interest, which is just as bad as having a financial interest.
00:55:30.140
No, no. I'll tell you about why the book is short. Why the book is short is because people
00:55:35.740
love short books now. And the reason why there aren't more of them, and again, let me just educate
00:55:42.860
Please do not speak to me in such domineering tones, okay? I do not need to be educated. I'm an educated
00:55:47.980
This is something you can't possibly know because everything you say suggests you don't know it.
00:55:53.800
So let me just tell you, how many books have you published?
00:55:58.300
Okay, well, let me tell you a dirty little secret about why there aren't more short books
00:56:03.320
in publishing, okay? There are not more short books in publishing because publishers can't
00:56:08.320
figure out how to make a lot of money publishing short books. They want to publish a 300 or 400
00:56:14.080
page book and charge you $30 for it. This is the way the costs scale in publishing. And if
00:56:19.400
you publish the 100-page version of a book that really doesn't have to be any longer because
00:56:25.820
it's a very short argument and you would just be padding it to make it longer. And it's
00:56:29.780
actually what people want to read because they can read it in a single sitting and they
00:56:32.980
don't have to decide whether or not they can sacrifice that much time to the book. They
00:56:37.620
can just sit down and read it. Publishing has not solved the problem of how to publish those
00:56:42.900
books. And contrary to what you assume, this is a money-losing move from a publishing point
00:56:49.720
of view. To publish a short book and sell it for $17 or $18 is much worse from a publishing
00:56:56.780
point of view than selling a big $30 book. And that's why more people don't do it. And
00:57:02.160
when Majid and I write a short book because we think it should be a short book that we want
00:57:07.140
people to absorb in a single sitting, we are pushing against the merely mercenary, merely
00:57:13.520
cynical, merely profit-seeking attitudes in publishing, contrary to what you assume.
00:57:20.580
Let me just ask you a question then. Do you think that writing a book about Islam, which
00:57:25.320
encompasses a quarter of the world's population, as you know, and over a billion people, as
00:57:29.020
you also know, and the subjects of tolerance and the future, do you not think that merits
00:57:36.140
It merits a century of conversation. And Majid and I have made absolutely no pretense to
00:57:44.340
delivering the last word on this subject. We're trying to deliver a starting point, a novel
00:57:49.920
starting point, which we did. But the price you pay for writing a comprehensive, scholarly,
00:57:57.540
endlessly footnoted book is that you lose the people who can't invest that much time and energy
00:58:03.960
into reading that book. And that's totally understandable. There's a place for both sorts
00:58:08.220
of books. And we tried to write the book that you could hand to your friend who's been worried
00:58:12.740
about this topic, but hasn't spent any time thinking about it, and say, listen, just take
00:58:17.720
an hour and read this. Okay? And that was our goal. And it's the goal we've accomplished.
00:58:24.940
That's not the people you should be addressing, are they? You want to address Muslims, not the
00:58:32.360
No, it's the same thing. We're talking about who's going to read your book, and what's
00:58:34.920
the project that you want to accomplish, which is reform.
00:58:37.560
All I've been talking about thus far is you're ascribing motives to us that are completely
00:58:43.600
And you conceded all the factual points about the market existing, about you making money
00:58:48.080
No. This is a stupid little trick that you have to stop using because it makes you
00:58:52.140
look terrible, all right? To falsely summarize what someone has conceded is not only annoying,
00:58:58.220
it is effective only with stupid audiences, right? It's going to get you fucking nowhere.
00:59:06.820
You're becoming an incredibly frustrating person to talk to, and because you're wandering,
00:59:12.060
endlessly wandering off the point, and you're pretending to be a mind reader. I mean, everyone
00:59:17.700
on the left these days is pretending to be a mind reader. So you're in good company.
00:59:21.320
On the right as well, who think Muslims are bloodlusting, violent jihadists, all of them.
00:59:28.020
Well, no. Even the worst people on the right with whom I have no connection aren't saying
00:59:34.480
that. But I'm certainly not saying that. No one is saying they're all jihadists, and
00:59:41.380
Well, I mean, you did say the Muslim world is utterly deranged by its religious tribalism,
00:59:46.620
If you want to read all of that in context, then we can talk about what I actually said.
00:59:50.980
Again, religious ecstasy, sectarian hatred, and a triumphalist expectation of world conquest
00:59:56.720
in a way other religions do not. Is that Islam, or is it ISIS, or are they the same thing?
01:00:00.240
Again, you're changing the subject. I hope to get into those subjects. I can only aspire
01:00:04.700
to get into those subjects with you. But you're digging in here. This should be the easiest point
01:00:11.180
we discuss, right? The point where you really have no information, and I have all the information,
01:00:16.460
right, in terms of what it's like to publish on this topic.
01:00:21.820
Okay, a simple question for you, Sam. Is there money to be made, or is there not,
01:00:27.220
If you sell a single copy of your book on macrame, there is technically money to be made
01:00:35.120
selling one book on macrame. Fine. That is a point that has absolutely no relevance to our
01:00:43.040
conversation. The point I was making, and I'll continue to make as it comes up here, if Majin
01:00:49.140
and I were trying to get rich, if we were trying to make money in a way that was as painless as
01:00:55.020
possible and as lucrative as possible, we would not be doing what we're doing. We would be doing
01:01:02.220
Making money in the intellectual sphere, in the publishing world, does involve criticizing
01:01:07.720
Islam, or criticizing Islam is one way to do it.
01:01:09.820
It does not, but publishing on other topics does not involve these endless charges of bigotry and
01:01:15.360
racism. It does not involve the security concerns you reap when you deal with this topic. I could
01:01:20.660
write books about Mormonism and never look over my shoulder, never worry about security concerns,
01:01:26.620
never worry about being attacked as a racist or a bigot, and make the same points about religion
01:01:35.440
If I took all your words that we replace Islam with Mormonism, I'm sure that you would get some
01:01:41.980
Nothing analogous to what happens with Islam, but let's continue. We literally just went through
01:01:48.580
Yeah, okay, let's continue. So we are at, let me just turn the page here.
01:01:55.060
Okay, yes. The books that make up Project Islamic Reformation are not works of scholarship or even
01:02:01.900
well-crafted popular texts. They are almost exclusively political pamphlets of a very personal nature
01:02:07.720
that often begin as biography and end as self-help, except the self in this case includes a quarter
01:02:14.180
of the world's people and the help may or may not come at the end of a missal. Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
01:02:20.680
who deserves empathy for her personal ordeals but not her conclusions, released such a book earlier
01:02:26.340
this year with neat, Manichian categories delineating good and bad Muslims, as well as the expected
01:02:32.920
checklist of proposed reforms. More tracks will certainly follow because publishers love a good
01:02:39.280
reformist, and the affluent Western audience that consumes these books loves having most of their
01:02:44.780
pre-existing beliefs confirmed rather than challenged.
01:02:51.160
Okay, again, so you pay lip service to Ayaan deserving some sympathy.
01:02:56.320
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's not. I would never attack her personally. I think that she went
01:03:00.620
through a tremendous ordeal, and the people who do attack her personally for what she went through
01:03:05.020
or deny the immense ordeals that she went through are lacking in moral empathy.
01:03:09.740
Okay, but you still cynically imply that her work as a critic of the very ideology that produced
01:03:16.820
this misery for her is purely opportunistic and driven by a desire to make money. I mean,
01:03:21.880
you realize- I think you hit the nail on the head perfectly there when you said that the ideology
01:03:27.500
that put her through this ordeal, because you and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other people, what you guys do is
01:03:34.080
you do not distinguish between a particular political ideology, which is fascistic and totalitarian
01:03:40.800
and Wahhabist and Salafist and very violent, and the doctrine and religion of Islam, and that is the
01:03:46.020
major criticism. That's not true. I do that across the board every time I raise the issue. That's
01:03:52.360
Yes, I talk about ideas- Is Islam the motherlode of bad ideas, or is Wahhabism the motherlode of bad
01:03:56.320
ideas? Is Islam- does Islam marry religious ecstasy and sectarian hatred, or does Wahhabism marry
01:04:01.600
religious ecstasy and sectarian hatred? It is- well, as-
01:04:04.520
Is Islam especially belligerent in your words and inimical to the norms of civil discourse,
01:04:09.200
or is Wahhabism and violent jihadism especially belligerent and inimical to the norms of civil discourse?
01:04:14.900
We will get into that, but as you know, the problem is bigger than Wahhabism,
01:04:19.900
and the fact that you would circumscribe it just to Wahhabism is a real problem, right? So I want to
01:04:26.960
I want to get into that, but I'm just now focused on Ayaan. I want to move through this systematically,
01:04:31.780
because what should be interesting from your point of view as a writer, and should be interesting,
01:04:36.660
I hope, to our listeners, is just how this piece of yours that you took the time to write,
01:04:43.440
and that you think just makes the case clearly against us, communicates nothing to me but your
01:04:49.840
misunderstanding of the situation. And that is a mis-
01:04:55.280
What in that paragraph did you- do I not understand?
01:04:58.220
You're a treatment of Ayaan here. So you say, yes, she's had this terrible experience, but again,
01:05:04.660
she is just an opportunist who's out to make money in this Reform Islam program. And just consider her
01:05:11.140
circumstance for a second. I mean, you realize how much easier her life would be if she were part of
01:05:16.820
the herd that just refuses to engage these issues. I mean, do you realize how talented she is? Do you
01:05:22.440
realize that when a person starts out as an uneducated Somali girl who doesn't speak a word
01:05:27.820
of Dutch, and in a few short years gets a degree in political science and becomes a member of
01:05:32.480
parliament, and who speaks half a dozen languages at that point, you realize that there are other
01:05:37.280
things she can do in life if she just wants to get ahead and make money beyond just pissing off a
01:05:42.840
mob of religious maniacs. And then having to suffer not only their threats, but just the condescending
01:05:50.260
stupidity of critics who don't have a fraction of the courage she has, who haven't suffered any of
01:05:56.680
the abuse she has, who haven't taken any of the risks she has, but who then decide that it is
01:06:02.740
probably a good idea to make her situation even more dangerous by attacking her as a bigot.
01:06:08.720
Okay, I mean, you want to talk about opportunism? The opportunism is on the side of the Islamist
01:06:13.000
assholes that the Council of American Islamic Relations care, who try to get Ayaan disinvited from
01:06:18.620
speaking at universities and pretend that she, okay, one of the most persecuted public intellectuals
01:06:24.740
in living memory, is the one infringing on people's civil rights.
01:06:28.440
Yeah, I mean, look, that's nonsense. And when she was supposed to speak at Yale,
01:06:31.440
I think it was either canceled or there was some kerfuffle about that. And look, I'm a free speech
01:06:36.000
fundamentalist, and I defended her right to speak as Bill Maher or anyone, because the marketplace of
01:06:41.700
ideas should not have this kind of estrangement. But look, you're peddling a fallacy here,
01:06:47.660
because basically what you are saying is that because of her personal ordeals, that exonerates
01:06:53.260
or excuses the words that she has spoken, her arguments. This is what I'm focusing on,
01:06:57.440
the arguments that she has made. She said Islam must be defeated. She said that we are at war
01:07:02.580
with Islam. She said that we should bomb the lands of Islam. To me, her personal story now is irrelevant.
01:07:08.480
I'm focusing on exactly what she has said. And to me, that is a deranged, deluded conclusion.
01:07:12.760
And that if you do not speak up against that, I think that, well, your morals and ethics should
01:07:17.460
be questioned. If anyone else said it, you wouldn't say, oh, look at all these things that
01:07:20.420
they've done. Look at the personal ordeals that they went through. Look at their CV. No,
01:07:24.020
it's absolutely nonsense. You'd attack the arguments.
01:07:26.640
People are not attacking her arguments. First of all, you just conceded that the work of an
01:07:31.780
organization like CARE that tries to get her deplatformed, right, that goes after her rather
01:07:37.260
than going after the theocrats who are hunting her.
01:07:39.900
I'm not I'm not a representative of CARE, Mr. Harris. No, I understand. Why go after Ayaan
01:07:44.780
and not go after the core problem here, which I mean, you you limited to Wahhabism, but why not go
01:07:51.120
after I have gone after Wahhabism, actually. But I think anyone who supports that, including the
01:07:56.020
Saudis who are now funding an institution at Yale, should be barred from doing so and should be
01:08:00.160
criticized very loudly, loudly and roundly. But also an obligation of a writer and an intellectual
01:08:05.360
and someone in the public sphere is to stand up for minorities, the people who would be bombed under
01:08:10.240
Ayaan Hirsi Ali's policy, the people who we would be at war with do not have a voice in this debate.
01:08:14.840
Ayaan does not have a policy of bombing the Middle East. Ayaan's probably more hawkish than you are.
01:08:22.100
I'm probably more hawkish than you are. But if Ayaan's views have been treated to the
01:08:28.240
misrepresentations that mine have, and I'm sure they have, I've, you know, I have I followed this
01:08:33.780
reasonably closely, I have no confidence that you even know what her views are. And certainly you're
01:08:39.640
not disposed to give a charitable reading of something in context or something that she might
01:08:45.080
have said in an interview that didn't come out exactly right, and that a further examination of
01:08:50.640
her views in her books or in other interviews would give you a bigger picture of what she said.
01:08:54.660
The editors of Reason Magazine were bewildered when she said this, and they asked her to clarify
01:08:59.600
in the most charitable way that they could, and she still didn't. In fact, she doubled down. And
01:09:03.560
recently she's called for Benjamin Netanyahu to win the Nobel Peace Prize. I hope that's a position
01:09:08.360
you disagree with. She's a great supporter of Sisi, who has launched a war not only on Islamists,
01:09:12.980
remember, but on atheists as well, and killed more people than Morsi did, probably more than Mubarak has.
01:09:18.480
And so this is a support, she's supporting right-wing dictators in one case, a right-wing, extreme right-wing
01:09:24.320
chauvinistic politician in another case, and then calling for wars with Islam. I mean, at this point,
01:09:29.360
the personal ordeal and her immense tragedy is irrelevant to me. As much as I empathize with
01:09:34.800
it, I'm focusing on her arguments, and you should too, instead of defending and giving her cover if
01:09:38.880
you're a serious intellectual. Listen, I do focus on all of these specific claims, and all of them are
01:09:46.480
incredibly complex to get into. No, no, no, let's get them. Well, we will get into them, but the fact
01:09:52.320
that we can't even get through the simplest of all possible disagreements, where information
01:09:59.680
is very clear to put forward, right, doesn't give me much hope that we can deal with deeper issues
01:10:04.640
here. Take, for instance, your claim here, and this, again, this is why I want to move through
01:10:08.560
your review systematically. You have this line about Manichean categories, right, delineating good and
01:10:13.520
bad Muslims. Okay, what are you saying here? Are you doubting whether there are good and bad Muslims,
01:10:20.000
or tolerant and intolerant strands of Islam? I don't think you can be, right? No, no, no,
01:10:24.720
what I'm saying is that someone from the outside putting Muslims into a category of Mecca and Medina
01:10:29.920
Muslims is ultimately unhelpful and counterproductive. It's not going to reach anyone, the people you want
01:10:35.160
to convince are not going to listen to you, and in general, I think it's a Stalinist technique when
01:10:39.740
people from the outside begin categorizing. She's not from the outside, she's from the inside.
01:10:44.840
She's an ex-Muslim, right? Okay, she has lived in the Muslim world as a Muslim, was driven out of
01:10:51.560
the Muslim world by violent theocrats, and lives every minute of her life under the shadow of their
01:10:59.240
threats. She is in the Muslim world arguably more than you are. She's certainly not perceived to be, and
01:11:05.960
she's not perceived to be an honest interlocutor because of her very militaristic views. Yes, okay,
01:11:09.960
but that says a lot. Forget her militaristic views. She's not- No, they're central, they're not-
01:11:15.240
No, but they're not central to why she's not perceived as an honest interlocutor. She's not
01:11:19.000
perceived as an honest interlocutor because she's an apostate. People are not trying to kill her
01:11:23.720
because of her militaristic views. People are trying to kill her before she had any views because she was
01:11:29.320
an apostate, right? Everything is backwards for you. Yes, certain fascist groups, Islamic fascist groups-
01:11:37.960
It's not just certain fascist groups are after her. The level of support for the killing of
01:11:44.360
apostates in the Muslim world, as you undoubtedly know, is shockingly high, and it's not limited to
01:11:51.080
Wahhabism, okay? Way too high. And look, people are- do you want to talk about apostasy now or do you
01:11:57.240
want to talk about it later? No, it'll come up later, but you can't just say way too high, way too high.
01:12:02.040
You just tried to limit the problem to Wahhabism. You just tried to paint Ayaan as being someone who
01:12:08.840
has been marginalized for her hawkish views, right? Which you still have not characterized accurately.
01:12:14.600
I quoted you her words directly. That Reason interview is a famous instance of someone
01:12:19.960
misspeaking, not giving a full context for her views. I mean like, look, how do I respond to something
01:12:24.520
like that? If you say something chauvinistic and militaristic, you misspeak. It's an unfalsifiable-
01:12:29.000
It is impossible. No, it is falsifiable because she will not hide her views when you talk to her
01:12:35.480
at length, right? She has written about these things. She's been interviewed again. I've interviewed
01:12:40.120
her trying to put her comments in context. You could throw back at her what she said about Anders Breivik,
01:12:46.520
right? That has been distorted and spun and used as a way of lying about her actual beliefs. This has
01:12:52.920
been done to me endlessly. The Islam is the mother load of bad ideas statement on Bill Maher's show.
01:12:58.520
I have already said I misspoke there. I should have said it was a mother load of bad ideas. And I can
01:13:04.440
talk to you for an hour about why I think I should have said that. But there are still people who want
01:13:10.360
to hold me to, it is the mother load of bad ideas, as though there is no other source of bad ideas on
01:13:16.360
earth, right? You either want to understand where someone is coming from or you don't. And-
01:13:21.000
No, it's not that. It's that you should hold people accountable for their words.
01:13:24.360
You don't hold them accountable for their misstatements that they then clarify.
01:13:27.960
How is it a misstatement? This entire interview, which I hope your readers and listeners read from
01:13:33.640
2007 in Reason Magazine, she says that Islam must be defeated. Do you mean radical Islam? And she says,
01:13:43.960
Okay, I have said the same things. It doesn't require textual,
01:13:45.640
hermeneutical interpretation here. It's very clear.
01:13:47.560
No, it does. Because what does it mean to say Islam has to be defeated? Islam is a set of ideas.
01:13:52.920
She's not calling for genocide there. She's calling for defeating the ideas. I think Islam is a dangerous
01:13:59.160
religion. I have made no secret of that. I have said things just like that. Islam has to be defeated.
01:14:05.320
I'll say it now. Islam has to be defeated. Why? How is it that that kind of statement
01:14:10.680
should not be perceived? I think all religion has to be defeated,
01:14:14.120
all right? I'm an atheist. Okay, but an idea is not merely defeated.
01:14:17.720
You're talking about the people who believe in this idea. I have written an article titled
01:14:22.120
Science Must Destroy Religion, okay? So these are ideas that we can talk about.
01:14:27.080
And it never will. I mean, on that point, it never will.
01:14:29.720
Listen, the problem here is an unwillingness on your part to enter an open-ended conversation
01:14:39.400
about ideas, about what your partner, your opponent, in this case, thinks that is proceeding on the
01:14:45.800
basis of a modicum of charity, where you actually want to understand what the other person's view is.
01:14:52.280
No, because look, the game is rigged. There's a double standard here. If someone criticizes you
01:14:55.960
or Iyan, we're attacking your motives or we're being uncharitable. But if you say militaristic,
01:15:01.400
chauvinistic things, then you're misspeaking. Absolutely not. No, no, no.
01:15:04.760
She misspoke. You misspoke. It's the same thing over and over again.
01:15:07.720
I rarely misspeak, okay? I occasionally misspeak, but I rarely do. And I rarely, obviously,
01:15:15.000
miswrite. But I am increasingly on my guard through cruel experience, I've been taught this,
01:15:22.360
against people who are only pretending to want to have a conversation on this topic,
01:15:28.600
and are just trying to defame another person. Now, Iyan, you are talking about her as though
01:15:35.400
she would execute a nuclear first strike on the Muslim world, right?
01:15:40.760
That is a position that has been ascribed to me by utterly dishonest people, right? Now,
01:15:46.440
I hope you were joking. No, I mean, there were certain preconditions that, of course,
01:15:52.600
that you gave. You didn't say, please correct me if I'm wrong, that we should have a nuclear
01:15:56.280
first strike against any country. But if an Islamist regime came to power and had nuclear weapons,
01:16:01.960
that's a possibility you would entertain. Is that a clear understanding of your view?
01:16:07.160
Well, certainly not the way it's situated in your brain. It's not. Again, this is something
01:16:12.200
that will be obvious to our listeners. I mean, the fact that you think you're entering this
01:16:16.680
conversation in a way that is intellectually honest, and open to having your views challenged,
01:16:23.400
and responsive to evidence that you didn't have a moment ago. I mean, it's as pure an act of
01:16:28.840
self-deception as I've witnessed in a long time. You are so defensive. There is nothing I could say to
01:16:35.480
you about the reality of publishing, or about my experience as an author, or about the opportunity
01:16:41.080
costs, or the security costs, or anything else that only I, in this conversation, am in a position
01:16:46.440
to talk about. There's nothing I could say to you that modified your view of my opportunism and get-rich
01:16:53.640
quickery even slightly. And now we're proceeding on to much more difficult ground, right? Now we're
01:16:59.000
talking about Ayaan, now we're going to talk about Islam and apostasy. I mean, this is not how you
01:17:03.960
have a conversation with another human being. You have this, you repeat this mantra over and over
01:17:09.960
again as if you are the arbiter of truth. I've quoted you your own words, you dismissed them.
01:17:14.920
I've quoted you Ayaan's words, you dismissed them. You said it only, okay, well you were very
01:17:19.560
condescending, let's just say. And you don't want to engage with the text of your own words that I'm
01:17:25.240
quoting back to you now. Of course I will engage with it. And I can justify saying something like,
01:17:30.600
Islam has to be defeated, right? Please do. As you notice-
01:17:34.600
What do you mean by that, Islam has to be defeated? Let's tease this out.
01:17:37.400
Well, because I can say that I think religion has to be defeated. I think-
01:17:43.320
You're asking a different question now, you're asking how. You think it's-
01:17:46.360
Well yeah, Islam must be defeated. You think it's an unrealistic-
01:17:48.600
I wonder what you mean by that statement, otherwise you're going to say I'm misquoting you.
01:17:50.760
I think believing in revelation is intrinsically dangerous. I think that believing that one of
01:17:55.560
your books was dictated by the creator of the universe is a stupid, divisive, dangerous thing
01:18:01.320
to do. I think it goes nowhere worth going. I think the harms produced by this attitude are obvious,
01:18:09.720
undeniable, and among the worst harms that humanity has ever suffered. And we have to get out of this
01:18:15.560
business of believing in revelation. Now, how do you do that? As you rightly observe,
01:18:20.680
I have spent a lot of time focused on that problem. It's not exclusively what I focus on,
01:18:26.840
and less and less do I want to focus on it, because I am just repeating myself. I have said
01:18:31.800
more or less everything I think on that topic. So it's both boring for me and boring for my listeners.
01:18:37.160
But I think, yes, we have to get out of the religion business. We have to defeat religion.
01:18:42.360
I can say it in a nice way, and I can say it in a provocative way, but I can certainly defend
01:18:48.120
the claim, and I've said it every which way. Now, I also have justified ad nauseam a focus on
01:18:55.640
specific religions on specific points where they present specific liabilities. I think that
01:19:01.240
individual religions are not interchangeable. They have very different theologies. They have different
01:19:06.120
ideas. They make different behavioral and logical commitments.
01:19:10.200
Can I just respond to what you said before? Because, yeah, okay. So you look,
01:19:13.560
saying that the Quran has problematic and violent verses, that is a statement of fact. Okay,
01:19:18.280
anyone who disagrees with you there is lying. But saying that we are at war with Islam,
01:19:23.080
saying that the central message of the Quran is jihad, these are value judgments. And in my mind,
01:19:28.040
in my opinion, in my estimation, they're very ill-informed ones, and they're ultimately going to be
01:19:32.600
lead to counterproductive strategies. And this, for me, this boils down to what do you think Islam is?
01:19:36.840
Is it just the text, the jihadist verses in the Quran, or is it more capacious than that?
01:19:42.360
Earlier, I mentioned scholarly work, serious scholarly works on Islam. I'll give you the
01:19:46.200
name of one that just came out from a very serious scholar, PhD in history, who died recently. He was
01:19:51.320
fluent in eight languages, traveled throughout the Middle East. His name was Shahab Ahmed,
01:19:55.160
and he wrote a book called What is Islam? And his definition of Islam was the capacious live
01:20:00.200
tradition of tradition of Muslims throughout history and how it actually exists today. So that includes,
01:20:06.440
for example, poetry, that includes wine. I hope that you would not want to defeat either wine
01:20:11.080
or poetry. It includes music, and includes a whole host of legal and political and spiritual
01:20:18.920
motivations that are inherent in the lived tradition. It's not just about jihads. When you say
01:20:24.120
Islam must be defeated as a kind of blanket statement, that to me is ultimately a very dangerous
01:20:31.400
and ill-conceived one, because you're not getting at, A, the heart of the matter, which is a political
01:20:35.480
ideology that I refer to as Wahhabism and is a state ideology of our ally Saudi Arabia that propagates
01:20:41.640
this and that did not exist before a specific period in history, did not exist. And number two,
01:20:47.640
I think you denigrate or deny or reduce the actual tradition that people live in to this kind of slogan
01:20:54.280
of jihad that the extremists are parroting. And so we miss the nuances when we use these kind of blanket
01:21:05.320
The pause you hear from me is I'm trying to figure out how to proceed here, because given how we have
01:21:11.000
foundered on very simple points, I'm reluctant to just set sail on a rougher part of the sea here.
01:21:18.920
So briefly, Islam is many things. And on one level, you can define it as Islam is the way 1.6 billion
01:21:27.000
Muslims live it. It's whatever they think it is. And now we know a fair amount about the moral and
01:21:33.880
political and theological attitudes of Muslims based on a lot of polls. And most of those polls are
01:21:39.640
frankly terrifying, both in the Muslim world and in...
01:21:43.960
No, I don't know how you would know that. If you ask 50,000 people a question and they give
01:21:49.480
I don't know where you stand, but no, but the reason...
01:21:51.480
No, no, no. Let me tell you why the polls can be bullshit.
01:21:53.160
But let me just finish this point. I don't think we should spend a lot of time
01:21:57.160
right here, right now. The problem for me about revelation, and this is why I focus on the text,
01:22:02.840
is that the texts are essentially a software program for rebooting a worldview. I mean,
01:22:10.280
so we could forget about Islam for a thousand years and someone could discover the full text
01:22:16.280
of the tradition, the Quran and the Hadith and the biography of Muhammad in a cave somewhere and
01:22:22.040
read it and accept its most straightforward, most literalistic claims. I mean, just to give a very
01:22:28.120
plausible, literal reading of what they have there and essentially reboot Islam for themselves. And
01:22:34.840
it would be a particular kind of Islam. It would be an Islam that would not at all be influenced by
01:22:40.040
anything else surrounding them because all of that would have been lost. There'd be no
01:22:43.880
architecture, there'd be no art, there'd be no tradition, there'd be no food, but they would have
01:22:48.680
the texts. And if they understood the texts in a plausible way, my problem is that what they would
01:22:54.680
get is something very much like Wahhabism and a lot less like Rumi, okay? And that's a problem.
01:23:02.920
A plausible reading of the text, I'm not saying it's the only reading, and again, Majid and I get
01:23:07.400
into this in real detail, but a plausible reading gets you something totalitarian, intolerant, a
01:23:17.960
Marc Thiessen Contradictory as well, right? Schizophrenic, you could say. Intellectually schizophrenic.
01:23:21.400
No, but not as contradictory as one would hope. It's not as contradictory as Christianity or
01:23:26.920
Judaism. And that's a problem. There's no compulsion in religion and the sword verses.
01:23:31.560
Yes, okay. But if you have a doctrine of abrogation that makes sense of that, then you're in a smooth
01:23:37.400
sound. Of course, many people don't adhere to that. What you're basically parroting here is the Salafist
01:23:41.880
version of Islam, which is a particular interpretation that comes out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 17th,
01:23:47.880
18th century, and is led by a totalitarian radical who's not trained in Islamic tradition
01:23:53.000
at all. And the West and the Ottoman Empire tried to put it down until it grew. So look,
01:23:58.440
this is a specific political interpretation. If I give you a text, Sam, it doesn't matter what it is.
01:24:03.400
If I give you a text and I tell you you can interpret this however you want,
01:24:06.520
you're going to interpret it according to your political ideology.
01:24:08.760
No, no, no. But there are more and less plausible interpretations of any text. And what is problematic...
01:24:15.320
And who says that the 99% of the Muslims who interpret it and live peacefully is less...
01:24:19.320
It's not because it is not 99% who have peaceful attitudes that are commensurate with the values of
01:24:27.000
a open civil society. That's simply untrue. How many people are in ISIS? 20,000 maybe?
01:24:31.480
99% of Muslims are supportive of Ayaan's right to apostatize. 99% of Muslims are supportive of the
01:24:41.480
rights of cartoonists to cartoon anything they want about Islam. Are you telling me you believe that?
01:24:46.120
So on the point of free speech, that's actually more of a cultural issue than it is of a theological
01:24:51.720
issue. And I hope we can make that distinction. There's nothing in the Quran that says, nothing in
01:24:56.120
the text or the tradition, the history even, that says that you cannot depict the prophet. In fact,
01:25:00.360
black and Shia Islam, and throughout Islamic history, there were depictions of the prophet.
01:25:05.960
No, I'm clarifying for you. I'm clarifying this point for you so we can get into the nuances.
01:25:09.080
No, but you're also making a tendentious, illegitimate move. You're limiting it to a
01:25:12.920
depiction of the prophet. That's not the free speech issue. The free speech issue is,
01:25:17.240
I should be able to say that Islam sucks, and I should be able to say that as a Muslim. I should be
01:25:24.840
Yeah, yeah. And look, you can do that in the West.
01:25:28.520
And you can get your head cut off in any Muslim society on earth. And many Muslims,
01:25:34.040
many, many Muslims, in many cases, majorities support that.
01:25:38.520
A fundamental principle of every human being in terms of their dignity is to have whatever
01:25:43.080
private theological views that they want. Now, whether that translates into a public
01:25:49.240
political view is another matter. Egyptians say 86% of them think that apostates should be killed.
01:25:54.840
Now, A, they think this is the word of God, apparently, according to you. They think it's
01:25:58.680
the word of God. They don't go out and they don't kill ex-Muslims. They're friends with them. You can
01:26:02.440
go to Egypt and go to Cairo and you see that they had the opportunity to vote and put in apostasy
01:26:07.560
into their legal code. They didn't do it. They didn't do it in Pakistan either, where there was an
01:26:11.560
election. Haven't done in Iran either. So people can have all kinds of dangerous, diluted,
01:26:17.320
backwards views. And you have the right to that, as many evangelicals in America do. But to translate
01:26:24.920
that into a political program is something that's very different. And I think that we should be
01:26:28.840
mindful of that distinction, rather than saying that, oh, these people over here are so backwards,
01:26:33.880
that 99% of them or 80% of them think that apostates should be killed. And that's the end of
01:26:39.480
the story right there. No, it's a little bit more complicated than that. And I want to bring that to
01:26:43.240
light. Again, this is a distinction without a difference. When you have a lynch mob that's
01:26:47.240
willing to enforce their religious attitudes, whether or not there's a formal law against
01:26:51.720
blasphemy on the books, they're willing to kill blasphemers or kill someone who is merely rumored to
01:26:57.400
have burned a Quran or kill someone who was apostatized or hunt them to the ends of the earth in other
01:27:04.200
societies, right? Suborn their murder with fatwas that now have global reach. That is a problem that is
01:27:11.480
bigger than the statutes that were written or not written in any society.
01:27:16.120
5% of Saudi citizens are convinced atheists. And more than that, about 15% or probably
01:27:22.840
6 million, about 60 million, around 20% are not religious people. Are there lynch mobs against
01:27:28.200
them? Are they being beheaded? Yes, Omer, I hear from these people. They're in hiding.
01:27:32.360
They can't even tell their parents they have doubts about God for fear of being murdered by their own
01:27:36.920
families. And many of them are open. Many of them are open. You go to the cafes of Cairo,
01:27:41.000
you go to Riyadh, you go to Amman, you meet openly critical people, you meet openly agnostic and
01:27:46.360
atheistic people. So it's not as simple, it's not as simple, Sam, saying that 86% of Egyptians
01:27:51.720
think apostates should be killed. Therefore, all those 86% are all backwards people.
01:27:55.880
So if we did the same thing to the United States, we think that 85...
01:27:59.640
Omer, please. You're telling me that Raif Badawi is one of the 5% of Saudi atheists who's just free to
01:28:07.480
be an atheist? Stood up for him many times when other people on the left did not. And I don't
01:28:13.000
deny that there needs to be a liberal and constitutional revolution in the Middle East
01:28:18.360
and South Asia. In fact, I want to bring this back to the broader point that I'm making,
01:28:23.160
is that your strategy and Ayaan's strategy of telling Muslims we have to excise verses,
01:28:28.280
let's just say even if it's the most intellectually honest position that anyone could have. Let's assume
01:28:33.560
that. Strategically and politically it's never going to happen because people believe in the
01:28:38.280
Quran and their tradition and they're not going to take a razor to their holy books. What I want
01:28:42.920
to see happen is a liberal and democratic and constitutional revolution that happens across
01:28:47.960
the Middle East and South Asia where we support the left, the progressive opposition that exists
01:28:53.480
in every country, the democratic opposition that exists in every country. But because of US foreign policy
01:28:59.000
and because of domestic tyrants and because of religious tyrants, the religious right, that
01:29:03.720
hasn't been allowed to emerge. And when that opposition comes in, the cultural change they'll
01:29:08.280
implement will be permanent. And so that is basically my view on this. How do you engender those liberal
01:29:15.320
attitudes when a majority of people believe, as is written in the books, whether you're talking about
01:29:24.200
the Quran or you're talking about the Hadith or you're talking about the biography of Muhammad,
01:29:28.840
they believe things like women are essentially the property of the men in their lives, or at the
01:29:34.120
very least second class citizens, or they believe things like apostates should be put to death, or they
01:29:40.040
believe things like infidels and polytheists are forever your enemy, right? You have attitudes that can be
01:29:51.400
lifted directly out of the texts based on not only a plausible reading, I would say on certain of these
01:29:58.120
points, the most plausible reading, even on certain of these points, the only plausible reading. And you
01:30:04.680
are saying that these texts are forever to be held sacred, one can never disavow any line in them.
01:30:11.960
Yeah, I mean, like, look, they're not, here's the thing, if you were to present this to a
01:30:17.160
actual believing, you know, liberal Muslim, who believed every word of it, what they would basically
01:30:22.440
do, it doesn't matter what, and I've engaged in this exercise many times, and probably ended up as
01:30:27.400
frustrated as you have, what they would basically do is that a, they would contextualize it to the
01:30:32.280
point, and then they would contextualize it first, and then they would neutralize the view, right? So
01:30:36.600
they would say, for example, that apostasy, leaving Islam in the ninth century, when the Quran was revealed,
01:30:42.760
would amount to high treason, because the Islamic community was very small. Now, that doesn't
01:30:46.760
amount to high treason anymore. So Muslims should be free to leave and to, of course, to enter the
01:30:52.200
faith. I think the second thing that they would do is to highlight the importance of interpretation.
01:30:57.720
The fact that 86% of Egyptians are not going out and killing apostates, who are in many cases,
01:31:03.560
their friends, signifies to me that mentally, they've already excised those verses. They've already
01:31:09.160
neutralized those verses. They're focusing on the part of the Quran, the tradition, broadly speaking,
01:31:14.360
the Rumi, and the poetry, and the music, and the spirituality, which I know that you are a fan of,
01:31:19.960
at least in some contexts. They're focusing on those elements of the religion. I think we should be
01:31:24.360
mindful of that. And look, the polls are contradictory as well. Across the board, you see 97% of South
01:31:30.440
Asians and 85% of Middle Easterners say religious freedom is a good thing. A higher number of Palestinians
01:31:36.600
believe in evolution than evangelical Protestants do. So let's stop with that first poll result.
01:31:42.200
That's not actually the paradox you make it out to be. People can answer that question saying that
01:31:47.960
religious freedom is a good thing purely as it applies to me. I want to be free to practice my
01:31:53.800
Salafi Islam, right? Religious freedom is a good thing, okay? Should apostates be killed? Oh, of course.
01:32:01.000
We have to kill them, right? There is no paradox there if you understand religious freedom to be
01:32:05.400
your own religious freedom. So let's break this down logically. So like these Salafis,
01:32:08.920
who I hope you appreciate, are not the majority of in these countries. So these Salafis believe that
01:32:13.800
the Quran is the literal interpretation of God. Their reading of the Quran is the most plausible.
01:32:19.720
They think that if you do not, if they do not implement God's will, that they will be sinners.
01:32:24.200
So why don't they go and do it? Is it fear of secular law?
01:32:28.120
Just to back up, let me concede a point you made, which I have made many times before. Perhaps
01:32:35.320
There is some distance between what people profess they believe and what they actually believe,
01:32:41.000
or people hold these beliefs to greater or lesser extents. And they're the things they think
01:32:47.720
are probably true, and then they're the things they will bet their life on, the things that are just
01:32:51.960
absolutely going to rule their behavior and emotion whenever that belief becomes relevant.
01:32:57.640
So to have 86% of Egyptians say that apostates should be killed, that doesn't tell you that 86%
01:33:04.680
of Egyptians would kill Ayaan with their own hands, right?
01:33:08.520
Nor would they vote for someone who had that as their platform, which is the important part.
01:33:13.480
But what percentage would? What percentage would vote for that platform?
01:33:17.000
I don't know. In the Egyptian elections, 48%, 49% voted for the liberal. And the party,
01:33:23.960
Mohamed Morsi's party, the Freedom and Justice party had 50 years of political organization
01:33:28.600
and development, and they still could only muster 53%.
01:33:31.320
I'm agreeing with you that these numbers come down when you actually ask people to take concrete steps.
01:33:40.280
Every one of these numbers matters. It's just because the people who will say apostates should
01:33:45.560
be killed are on the wrong side of this free speech issue. They're doing nothing good for
01:33:50.840
free speech, and what they're doing is quite harmful. And many of these people, maybe not 86%
01:33:55.480
in the case of Egypt, but some intolerable percentage would vote the wrong way and would
01:34:02.760
just stand by and watch a mob kill a so-called apostate.
01:34:07.160
Is everyone in the mob who isn't helping someone who's about to be lynched, is everyone in the
01:34:14.040
mob culpable, equally culpable? Well, no, not equally. They're the people who are actually
01:34:17.960
doing the lynching. Then they're the people who are just standing there with their cell phones,
01:34:21.560
right? But all of these people are part of a problem, okay? And yes, there are gradations of
01:34:26.680
belief. There's gradations of support for terrorism. There's gradations of commitment to jihad.
01:34:32.040
This was the concentric circle image that I talk about in the book and that I tried to talk about
01:34:36.920
on Bill Maher's show. There are the people at the absolute center of the bullseye who, yes,
01:34:41.000
they are strapping on the sea for now because they're going to do an operation today. Let's say
01:34:47.000
a Sunni who wants to blow up a Shia mosque, right? That is a full commitment.
01:34:51.400
And where's the theological prerequisite or injunction for that?
01:34:56.360
The whole phenomenon of takfirism and the whole phenomenon of judging other people to be apostates
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or infidels or polytheists, whether or not they…
01:35:05.320
Right, and takfir for 1400 years was not practiced, and when it was practiced, it was by a very highly
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institutionalized and legalized profession of scholars. The independent takfiri fatwas only begin
01:35:17.960
in the 18th century and are perfected by Bin Laden. Again, specific political ideologies,
01:35:23.000
specific political circumstances, and specific political actors.
01:35:25.960
We can get it. We can get into history if we ever get there. But the issue is that today,
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every one of these degrees of commitment to attitudes and behaviors that are totally hostile
01:35:37.880
to everything we care about in an open civil society, there are degrees of commitment to those
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noxious and divisive and dangerous beliefs and behaviors that one can draw directly out of
01:35:51.080
scripture. And yes, undoubtedly, there are Muslims who want to live in open, creative, peaceful societies.
01:36:00.680
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