Making Sense - Sam Harris - March 12, 2016


#32 — The Best Podcast Ever

Topics
Project Islamic Reformation book sales hard conversations short books in publishing Islam and religious ideas religious freedom paradox
Hosted by
Sam Harris
Mentioned
Mayan Majid Ayaan Hirsi Ali Omer Aziz Bill Maher Wahhabism Glenn Greenwald Salafi Islam Robert Wright Mohammed Morsi Majid Nawaz Ben Affleck Muhammad Hadith Rumi Marc Thiessen Contradictory Benjamin Netanyahu Meredith Vieira Chris Hedges Shah Ahmed Raif Badawi and 8 more
#31 — Evolving Minds #33 — Ask Me Anything 4

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 36 minutes

Words per minute

189.0

Word count

18,238

Sentence count

1,218

Harmful content

Misogyny

14

sentences flagged

Toxicity

76

sentences flagged

Hate speech

115

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.
00:00:08.820 This is Sam Harris.
00:00:10.880 Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber
00:00:14.680 feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.
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00:00:28.360 other subscriber-only content.
00:00:30.280 We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support
00:00:34.640 of our subscribers.
00:00:35.880 So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
00:00:46.780 Okay, well, I'm now going to do what I said I wouldn't do, and release the whole conversation
00:00:51.940 I had with Omar Aziz.
00:00:54.080 Now, I'd like to take a few minutes to explain why I've decided to do this.
00:00:57.600 and provide some context to the conversation itself.
00:01:00.960 First, why have I changed my mind?
00:01:03.740 As I said before, I didn't want to release this podcast because I thought it was a terrible
00:01:07.420 conversation, and terrible in ways that were not actually interesting.
00:01:12.160 I was attempting something with Omar that he wasn't up to, and I failed repeatedly to get
00:01:18.400 the conversation on track.
00:01:19.920 So it was a failure on both our parts to have a productive conversation.
00:01:23.880 And I just felt that broadcasting this failure wouldn't be good for anyone, and that listeners
00:01:29.380 would find it incredibly frustrating.
00:01:32.020 But I've received an extraordinary amount of pressure, both well-intentioned and not,
00:01:36.720 to release this podcast in response to the cries of censorship I heard from Omer and Glenn 0.88
00:01:41.100 Greenwald and a wide range of silly people. 0.95
00:01:44.920 And this pressure has come not merely from the silly themselves, but from my actual supporters 0.97
00:01:50.000 who say that my not releasing the podcast is making the job of defending me much more
00:01:55.080 difficult than it needs to be.
00:01:56.320 According to many of you, even though I told Omer in advance that I wouldn't release the
00:02:01.680 podcast if I thought our conversation had been a total waste of time, my not releasing
00:02:06.240 it is too easily spun as my hiding something, and incredibly as my infringing on Omer's right
00:02:12.020 to free speech.
00:02:13.380 So many of you tell me that I am harming my cause by not releasing it.
00:02:17.800 Now, I don't know whether you're right or not, but I've decided to assume that you are.
00:02:22.080 Now, paradoxically, my claim that the podcast was too boring to release is no longer true,
00:02:29.080 right?
00:02:29.400 Because given all the controversy and given the charges that Omer has leveled at me, given
00:02:34.300 the speculation that he might have defeated me in a debate and revealed my ignorance of
00:02:38.760 all things Islamic, the podcast is suddenly very interesting to many of you.
00:02:43.460 Not to me, but to you.
00:02:46.300 So, I've decided to adapt to these changes and release the podcast.
00:02:51.040 But before I do, I want to give you a few facts.
00:02:54.380 I was absolutely clear with Omer about the format of this conversation in advance, about
00:03:00.440 my reasons for insisting upon it, and about the fact that I might ditch the whole podcast
00:03:04.900 if we proved unable to have a productive conversation.
00:03:09.220 As you'll hear, we discussed the possibility of my not airing the podcast at the very end of
00:03:14.580 the conversation in a surprisingly collegial way, given how ugly this aftermath has become.
00:03:21.360 And he seemed to understand.
00:03:23.400 Now, on this point, you should know, I've been on the receiving end of this sort of thing
00:03:28.540 many times before.
00:03:29.860 Okay, for instance, I once sat with Robert Wright, the journalist with whom I've had many
00:03:33.960 disagreements, for a two-hour interview on his video podcast, The Meaning of Life TV.
00:03:39.740 Now, to my knowledge, that conversation never saw the light of day.
00:03:43.180 Okay, I have no idea why.
00:03:45.240 It has never once occurred to me in the intervening years to cry censorship.
00:03:50.380 And Robert never explained why he didn't release the podcast.
00:03:53.400 And he never told me that was a possibility.
00:03:57.140 Okay, I once sat for an hour in the NPR studios and spoke with Guy Raz for his TED radio hour
00:04:02.260 about the talk I gave at TED on the foundations of morality.
00:04:06.580 Guy killed the episode because he had trouble finding another speaker to, quote,
00:04:10.920 balance my views.
00:04:13.040 Now, I found this annoying.
00:04:14.600 Okay, it is annoying.
00:04:16.080 But never in a million years would it occur to me to think that Guy had infringed on my freedom
00:04:22.380 of speech.
00:04:23.400 Nor would it occur to me to publish an article in Salon alleging that Guy had said some extraordinarily
00:04:29.900 hateful and embarrassing things in our conversation as a way of trying to force him to release it
00:04:35.760 as the only way to clear his reputation, which is what Omer has done to me.
00:04:42.400 Now, when Omer grows up, if he grows up, he will realize that people make editorial decisions
00:04:48.540 he doesn't always like.
00:04:49.680 And unlike the way I've treated him, they usually won't tell him about this possibility
00:04:54.740 in advance.
00:04:56.020 And they won't let him make his own copy of the broadcast and release it just because
00:04:59.840 he wants to.
00:05:01.040 Now, as I told Omer in an email exchange explaining my position before our conversation,
00:05:06.020 I once went on the Today Show.
00:05:08.220 Okay, I took two days out of my life.
00:05:10.300 I traveled across the country.
00:05:12.220 I spent 90 minutes doing a roundtable interview with a few religious people and Meredith Vieira.
00:05:16.840 And my appearance was cut down to a single sentence and a reaction shot of me looking confused.
00:05:23.960 There is no recourse when this happens to you.
00:05:26.980 People get to control their own broadcasts. 0.93
00:05:29.980 So, this charge of censorship is ridiculous. 0.87
00:05:33.700 But I've been persuaded by many of you that even though it's ridiculous, it still looks like 0.89
00:05:38.760 I'm hiding something.
00:05:40.080 And that I don't trust people to come to their own judgments about who made more sense
00:05:43.720 in my conversation with Omer.
00:05:45.780 And there is some truth to both of these claims.
00:05:49.020 Okay, first, I have been hiding something.
00:05:51.800 My decision not to publish this was, by definition, a decision to hide something.
00:05:57.740 I've been hiding a fruitless and surprisingly painful waste of my time.
00:06:03.140 Okay, and very early in this conversation, you'll hear my patience begin to fray.
00:06:07.700 In fact, I don't start with a lot of patience.
00:06:09.960 Because remember, I was talking to someone who had already proved to be a 0.99
00:06:13.700 amazingly dishonest in what he wrote about my book with Majid. 1.00
00:06:17.060 He wrote a viciously stupid review in Salon to begin with. 0.99
00:06:21.740 And this is why I wanted to talk to him. 1.00
00:06:24.300 But once I started getting wrapped around the axle with him, in attempting to discuss
00:06:28.380 his review, I got very annoyed.
00:06:31.140 And that certainly didn't help the conversation get on track.
00:06:33.840 And I absolutely consider that a failing of mine.
00:06:37.080 This is not who I want to be in the world.
00:06:38.860 And it's not who I want to be on my own podcast.
00:06:42.480 So, given that I couldn't get Omer to stay on topic, and I couldn't even get him to realize
00:06:46.960 that he ever went off topic, and I grew more and more frustrated by this, and we never arrived
00:06:52.920 at an understanding of anything of substance.
00:06:55.080 It's only natural that I didn't want to publish the result.
00:06:59.660 In fact, when I declared the broadcast too boring to release, that wasn't quite accurate.
00:07:04.600 The truth is, I found it too boring to even review.
00:07:08.860 I started to listen to it, but I found that I just could not bear to spend any more time
00:07:13.820 with Omer.
00:07:14.880 Really, with me and Omer.
00:07:16.580 I hate who I was with Omer. 0.99
00:07:18.740 But in response to this controversy, I've now listened to the whole thing for the first
00:07:24.300 time.
00:07:24.920 And most of it is terribly boring.
00:07:27.700 But parts of it aren't, actually.
00:07:29.760 And I recommend the last hour over the first two, if you're only going to listen to part
00:07:33.360 of it.
00:07:34.020 I can't say I recommend you listen to any of it.
00:07:36.360 In my view, this is a conversation that should have never happened.
00:07:39.340 I should have recognized, based on what Omer wrote in Salon the first time around, that
00:07:43.400 there was no way I could have a real conversation with him.
00:07:46.600 Now, as to the second point, about my not trusting people to come up with their own intelligent
00:07:50.800 assessment of what went on here, that's actually somewhat true.
00:07:54.760 There are many people I don't trust to do this.
00:07:58.500 In fact, I trust that they will come to the wrong conclusion about what happened here.
00:08:03.460 In fact, some already have, based on the excerpts I released in my last podcast.
00:08:07.480 Many people have declared that I broke my promise to Omer by releasing those clips.
00:08:12.260 I said I wouldn't edit him, and now I have.
00:08:14.540 But of course, I only released those clips to respond to the false charges he's now made
00:08:20.440 in multiple articles online.
00:08:22.740 In any case, you and Omer are now getting the whole podcast.
00:08:27.060 Be careful what you wish for.
00:08:29.260 But let me give you one example of how many will get confused by Omer. 1.00
00:08:34.260 Consider this a brief field guide to human stupidity. 0.99
00:08:37.880 Listen to this clip that I aired on my last podcast. 0.99
00:08:40.640 So, I mean, the problem for me, in general, just to step back before we get into the text
00:08:51.540 here, is that I understand Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi better than you understand me and Majid.
00:08:58.940 And I can actually say this with certainty, because you are absolutely wrong about me and
00:09:04.420 Majid.
00:09:04.760 And I could ascribe beliefs to al-Baghdadi at random and do a better job than you've
00:09:10.560 done here.
00:09:11.060 I could throw the I Ching and come to a better understanding of his motives than you have 1.00
00:09:16.340 come to an understanding of ours by reading and reviewing our book.
00:09:19.720 The only thing I want to say to that is I think I understand Baghdadi better than you 0.89
00:09:23.800 and Majid understand Baghdadi, because I actually factor in to account his political strategy,
00:09:28.820 his geostrategic policy that he's had in Syria and in Iraq that's allowed al-Qaeda in 0.87
00:09:34.060 Iraq, the Islamic State in Iraq, to go from being a ragtag group of rebels that was decimated
00:09:39.000 in 2011 to be this very powerful militia in 2016.
00:09:42.780 And the political factors, and I hope we get to them, those are things that you and Majid
00:09:46.520 don't discuss.
00:09:47.280 I don't see you taking an interest in.
00:09:48.980 Okay, but that's a totally separate point.
00:09:50.960 I mean, whether you understand Baghdadi better than I do, we can discuss.
00:09:54.900 I'm saying that I understand him, this person who is practically infinitely distant from
00:10:00.460 me on the moral and political and religious and intellectual spectrum, better than you
00:10:05.500 understand me and Majid.
00:10:07.220 And we have told you our motives for writing this book, right?
00:10:10.980 So that's what I find so strange here.
00:10:13.080 Sam, I don't care about your motives, though.
00:10:14.540 I don't care.
00:10:14.800 Like, for me, it's what the book says, right?
00:10:16.500 And what you said before.
00:10:17.420 You describe, or we're going to get into this, because one of the things I'm going to take
00:10:20.560 issue with very early on in your review is your description of motives to us.
00:10:25.700 Here is what actually happened there.
00:10:33.960 I made a point about how completely Omer misunderstands my and Majid's motives for writing our book.
00:10:40.400 He did this in his Salon Review, in the very opening paragraph.
00:10:44.640 I sought to illustrate this by saying that I understand Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi better than
00:10:50.440 he understands me and Majid.
00:10:52.280 It may have seemed like a hyperbolic example, but it actually isn't.
00:10:55.920 I'm claiming that is literally true.
00:10:58.340 Omer then just changed the subject and claimed that he understands Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi better
00:11:03.700 than either Majid or I do, because we ignore politics and he doesn't.
00:11:07.520 When I pulled him back to the actual topic I had raised, he claimed not to care about
00:11:12.600 our motives in the first place.
00:11:14.200 This is wrong on every conceivable level.
00:11:18.280 He changed the subject.
00:11:20.100 What he said was just a non-sequitur.
00:11:22.160 He then made a claim about Mayan Majid's ignoring politics, which is itself untrue.
00:11:27.740 It's especially untrue of Majid.
00:11:29.540 His whole focus is on political Islam.
00:11:31.780 And then when I brought him back to the topic, he denied that he cares about our motives
00:11:36.620 at all, which is also totally false.
00:11:40.720 The first paragraph of his essay directly impugns our motives.
00:11:44.640 He claims we wrote our book just to make money.
00:11:48.020 And he had said as much on a previous podcast.
00:11:50.860 So this is a small masterpiece of deflection and dishonesty, which, yes, many people will
00:11:56.340 not recognize for what it is.
00:11:58.320 Even now, when I perform an autopsy on this moment, many people will not understand what
00:12:05.580 Omer did wrong. 0.75
00:12:07.160 In fact, I've already heard from people who listened to that clip on my last podcast who
00:12:10.720 said, he really got you there on politics.
00:12:13.140 He understands al-Baghdadi better than you and Majid do.
00:12:16.080 These people are destined to love Omer's side of this podcast.
00:12:20.800 But for anyone actually paying attention, you will hear me struggling in vain to keep
00:12:28.060 Omer on topic.
00:12:29.720 He confidently asserts points, like the point about al-Baghdadi you just heard, that are
00:12:34.480 non-sequiturs.
00:12:35.840 Sometimes I follow him down that rabbit hole, and we wind up discussing these topics.
00:12:40.940 And sometimes I don't.
00:12:42.220 And when I don't, I am sure his audience will interpret that as my having conceded the irrelevant
00:12:48.280 point he just raised.
00:12:49.500 But as you'll hear all too clearly in places, I found the resulting conversation deeply frustrating.
00:12:56.420 If there is anything in this podcast that embarrasses me, it's just how annoyed I let
00:13:00.980 myself get, and very early on, merely having a conversation with another human being.
00:13:06.900 And not to demonize Omer, I think that most of this behavior on his part is probably unconscious.
00:13:12.400 Most of the time he's going off point and being effectively evasive, I don't think he even
00:13:16.960 knows what he's doing.
00:13:17.880 He's very articulate, and he has these chunks of language on the hard drive he wants to download.
00:13:23.280 But the true things he says are usually irrelevant.
00:13:27.360 And the relevant things he says are usually false.
00:13:30.580 And that is a toxic combination, especially for me.
00:13:34.660 I mean, that is my kryptonite.
00:13:36.640 So you will hear me at my least patient.
00:13:39.600 And I'm not proud of who I was in those moments.
00:13:42.720 And you will also hear a fair amount of despair from me at points.
00:13:47.060 This is not the despair of someone who was worried he was losing a debate.
00:13:51.720 Now, on the contrary, if you want to view this as a debate, there are several moments where
00:13:54.960 I appear to win it outright by full knockout.
00:13:57.880 True to form, Omer didn't realize he had been knocked out.
00:14:00.860 But you will.
00:14:03.080 I wasn't trying to have a debate.
00:14:05.280 I was trying to have a truly honest conversation.
00:14:08.640 And the despair you hear, especially at the end, was over the discovery that this just wasn't
00:14:13.740 possible.
00:14:14.660 But here's what you will not find in this podcast.
00:14:17.540 You will not find any of the things that Omer says you would find there.
00:14:21.680 Virtually every word in his recap of our conversation on Salon is a lie.
00:14:27.500 He claims that I said things I didn't say.
00:14:29.720 He read into my silences other things I don't believe and would never say.
00:14:33.860 He claims to have demonstrated my ignorance on topics about which I'm not ignorant and
00:14:37.960 which were among the many irrelevant points he raised and we barely touched.
00:14:42.220 But most incredible of all, he said that somewhere in this conversation you are about to hear,
00:14:47.980 I, quote, demonized Muslims to such an extreme degree that it verged on bloodlust and that 0.93
00:14:54.640 I communicated in some way that, quote, Muslim-looking or brown-skinned bodies were of no human value 0.98
00:15:01.640 to me.
00:15:02.580 Now, I don't know how he thought he could get away with that.
00:15:05.940 The man, and he is a man, he's not a teenager.
00:15:09.960 He's a journalist in his 20s getting his law degree at one of the best law schools on
00:15:14.420 earth.
00:15:15.220 He's published in the New Republic and the New York Times.
00:15:17.980 He's an adult and he is attempting to destroy my reputation by alleging that I said things
00:15:24.380 I didn't say in a conversation that was recorded.
00:15:29.120 And I have the recording, which I can choose to release, as I'm doing now.
00:15:34.780 And he did this so that I would release it.
00:15:38.320 What on earth was he thinking?
00:15:41.160 Well, I'll tell you what I think he's thinking.
00:15:43.520 I think Omer understands that he is writing primarily for an audience that does not care
00:15:50.600 whether or not he is honest.
00:15:52.560 They just want to see the people they disagree with demonized.
00:15:56.380 And this is the audience that Glenn Greenwald writes for and Chris Hedges and Reza Aslan.
00:16:01.540 And I'm afraid Omer is right. 1.00
00:16:03.460 But that's not my audience.
00:16:06.160 And when you guys tell me that I've done something that makes me look less than honest, that matters
00:16:10.460 to me.
00:16:11.200 A lot.
00:16:12.420 And what's more, it quite obviously matters to you.
00:16:15.540 I'm often charged by people like Glenn Greenwald with having a cult of followers who just agree
00:16:19.620 with everything I say.
00:16:20.580 As far as I can tell, your tolerance for me appearing to be intellectually dishonest is
00:16:25.860 non-existent.
00:16:27.320 And I wouldn't have it any other way.
00:16:29.580 And the fact that so many of you thought it looked shady for me not to release the full
00:16:34.100 podcast, that really bothered me.
00:16:36.860 So here it is.
00:16:38.400 As you might imagine, I've elected not to spend the $500 to $1,000 it would have cost me to
00:16:43.560 clean up all the breaths and mouth noises.
00:16:45.660 Because we've edited out all the big Skype glitches and bathroom breaks and coughing fits.
00:16:50.680 And there were many moments when Omer and I were talking over one another, which on Skype
00:16:54.280 just becomes a total mess and you can barely understand what's being said.
00:16:57.660 And the same thing winds up being said a moment later once one person just stops trying to
00:17:01.280 interrupt the other.
00:17:02.420 So in the interest of preserving your sanity and your hearing, we cut those bits as well.
00:17:07.580 But just to be clear, every meaningful sentence of our conversation has been preserved.
00:17:12.860 And now, for better or worse, I give you Omer Aziz.
00:17:23.380 I've got Omer Aziz on the line.
00:17:25.460 Omer, thanks for coming on the podcast.
00:17:27.500 Thanks for having me, Sam.
00:17:28.820 I expect this will be a difficult conversation.
00:17:32.520 In fact, I'm pretty sure it's going to be difficult.
00:17:35.240 But hopefully it will also be useful.
00:17:37.080 But before we get into it, please tell our listeners a little about yourself and where
00:17:42.080 you're from and what you're doing now.
00:17:44.820 Sure.
00:17:45.520 Well, first of all, thanks for having me on.
00:17:47.360 I'm looking forward to exploring our areas of disagreement and potentially of agreement.
00:17:53.720 So I'm a law student at Yale Law School.
00:17:56.660 I focus on human rights and foreign policy.
00:17:59.460 First and foremost, I consider myself a writer.
00:18:01.780 I studied in England and France and Canada and now the U.S., born to a Muslim family that
00:18:08.560 originally came from Pakistan.
00:18:10.180 And I'm interested in all of these issues around religion, around human rights, around
00:18:14.340 foreign policy, and exploring fundamentally the best way forward.
00:18:18.460 So in a nutshell, that's what I'm about.
00:18:20.500 So you're getting your JD now at Yale, right?
00:18:23.260 That's right.
00:18:24.000 So what did you do your undergraduate in and where'd you do that?
00:18:26.420 So I did my undergraduate in politics, but really more so in books, because I spent it
00:18:32.880 more not going to class, of course.
00:18:35.240 And I did it in Canada at Queen's University.
00:18:38.160 I did my master's in international relations in Cambridge.
00:18:42.640 But again, I didn't go to class.
00:18:43.960 I spent my time traveling throughout the Middle East.
00:18:46.980 And I think that was really where my perceptions of Islam and the Muslim world changed a lot.
00:18:51.800 I think before that, I was reacting, as many people come out of religious families do, towards 0.94
00:18:56.940 sort of the religion and culture of their birth.
00:18:59.820 And so I probably would have agreed with you more at that point.
00:19:02.140 But then I went to Iraq and Jordan, for example, and did some reporting and saw it for myself,
00:19:07.060 and then went and came to Yale to begin my JD.
00:19:10.940 Are you a practicing Muslim?
00:19:12.740 You were born into a Muslim family and have been identified as a Muslim all your life?
00:19:17.280 Or you say you came to your commitment to Islam later in life?
00:19:22.400 Yeah, well, I mean, I come from an interesting family that I think is representative, really,
00:19:26.800 in terms of one of my parents being very secular and very skeptical, one of my parents being
00:19:31.380 very believing, but not proselytizing.
00:19:34.420 And so I was practicing at one point.
00:19:36.400 I don't like that term now.
00:19:37.620 I identify culturally as a Muslim and was within the community of Islam because it was part of
00:19:43.140 my upbringing.
00:19:44.080 You know, when Eid comes around once a year, I want to be with my family and want to celebrate.
00:19:48.620 But I'm philosophically agnostic.
00:19:50.460 And so you could say I might even agree with you on the question of whether God exists.
00:19:54.100 Right, right.
00:19:54.940 Okay.
00:19:55.680 Well, I'm talking to you now because of the book review you published in Salon, my favorite
00:20:00.980 website, in which you wrote very critically and dismissively about the book I wrote with
00:20:05.220 Majid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance.
00:20:08.220 And so rather than just talk to you about the review in general, I'm going to have you read
00:20:12.720 it out loud on the podcast so that we can discuss it point for point.
00:20:16.320 Now, you've agreed to do this, but under some duress.
00:20:18.980 You told me by email you think this is a terrible idea.
00:20:21.860 But I want our listeners to understand why I've structured the conversation this way.
00:20:26.820 Now, first, you can say anything you want.
00:20:29.780 I mean, I'm simply insisting that you also read every word of your review so that our listeners
00:20:33.960 can hear it and I can respond to it.
00:20:36.000 But you can make any caveats or supporting points you want, and we can talk about anything
00:20:39.860 under the sun, I just want to deal with your review first and pretty systematically.
00:20:46.740 So just to be clear, there's absolutely nothing about this that is closing down debate or
00:20:52.880 conversation.
00:20:53.920 I'm not going to edit anything you say unless you ask me to.
00:20:56.500 So here is why I want to focus on the review.
00:21:02.460 First, it's a very common experience for a person to read a review like this or even to
00:21:08.320 write one and to have no idea what the target of this kind of criticism could or would say
00:21:14.260 in response because there's simply no good format in which to answer charges like this.
00:21:19.980 And so as an experiment, I want to use my podcast for this, if only just this once.
00:21:24.260 And in particular, I want our listeners to know what it's like, and I want you to know
00:21:29.300 what it's like for me to read a review like this, actually almost in real time, sentence
00:21:35.580 by sentence.
00:21:36.920 Because it seems to me you can't possibly know how fully this essay of yours misfires from
00:21:43.380 my point of view.
00:21:44.180 I mean, you took the time to write it.
00:21:46.520 Presumably, you think your statements are clear and accurate and that you've built a very
00:21:50.240 damning case against me and Majid, in particular me.
00:21:53.600 But there's almost no single sentence here that survives scrutiny.
00:21:57.800 And I want to demonstrate this for you.
00:22:00.000 Yeah.
00:22:00.340 And let me just make a quick point.
00:22:01.620 My initial reservations to doing it in this format, and I highlighted this when you said
00:22:05.700 it's never been done before.
00:22:07.040 And my suggestion that it's never been done before is because this could descend into a
00:22:11.600 kind of Talmudic parsing of, you know, single sentences and words that won't be helpful
00:22:15.960 at all.
00:22:16.440 Now, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say that's not going to happen.
00:22:20.400 On the second point, I think in an earlier podcast, you said that I really hate you and
00:22:24.920 or I hate Majid and I hate you even more. 0.59
00:22:26.900 And I want to correct that.
00:22:28.320 I don't hate you and I don't hate Majid.
00:22:30.360 I find some of your ideas to be repugnant and I was responding to those.
00:22:34.200 I didn't call you a racist.
00:22:35.400 I didn't call you a bigot at all.
00:22:36.960 I didn't call you any names.
00:22:38.360 I'm merely contending and responding to the ideas that I read in your book.
00:22:42.080 And so that was my intention, at least.
00:22:43.980 Okay, well, that's fine.
00:22:45.880 And we'll get into what you said specifically and its implications.
00:22:49.340 And again, it's not going to be a rabbinical parsing of every word, but I do want to move
00:22:53.620 through it systematically.
00:22:55.260 And I want to also make clear that my goal isn't to embarrass you and my goal really isn't
00:23:00.280 even to debate ultimately.
00:23:01.900 I'm trying to bridge the gap between your essay and the cynicism that it communicates to
00:23:09.180 me and what I would consider a real conversation.
00:23:11.920 But I think doing this is going to take some real work because it's, you know, I think
00:23:17.060 we're very far apart on the page.
00:23:19.340 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.
00:23:28.320 And I can only assume that even if you kept your opinions about me as they are, you would
00:23:32.660 probably phrase a few of these points differently in the context of an actual conversation.
00:23:36.860 So I think one thing to make clear up front is that your insults don't matter to me.
00:23:42.860 I mean, I don't take anything you've written personally.
00:23:45.680 Good, you shouldn't.
00:23:46.400 The problem is I don't take anything you've written to heart at all because it's as though
00:23:50.800 you're writing from another universe here.
00:23:53.000 And this is what I find so troubling.
00:23:54.440 And this is why I want to have this conversation.
00:23:56.020 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
00:24:19.420 here.
00:24:19.780 I could throw the I Ching and come to a better understanding of his motives than you have come 1.00
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 0.89
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
00:24:55.080 don't discuss.
00:24:55.860 I don't see you taking an interest in.
00:24:57.760 Okay, but that's a totally separate point.
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
00:25:14.120 me and Majid.
00:25:15.180 And we have told you our motives for writing this book, right?
00:25:18.880 So that's what I find so strange here.
00:25:20.880 Sam, I don't care about your motives, though.
00:25:22.360 For me, it's what the book says, right?
00:25:24.400 And what you said before.
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.
00:25:33.400 But again, let me just step back for a second.
00:25:35.160 You're a very smart person who is capable of writing about these issues honestly.
00:25:39.960 I mean, in fact, I told you by email that you had a piece in The New Republic about jihadism.
00:25:43.920 I think it's called The Soul of a Jihadist. 0.58
00:25:45.540 That I totally agreed with, right?
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
00:26:03.640 nothing but your own confusion and prejudice.
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
00:26:47.780 about relevant points.
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,
00:28:19.300 and then we'll talk about it.
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,
00:28:39.060 A Dialogue with a Former Radical by Omar Aziz. 0.93
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 1.00
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, 0.97
00:29:37.860 my ideas are bankrupt, that I am haughty, ignorant, and chauvinistic. 0.97
00:29:42.180 And I pointed this out in my last interview with Salon. This, this is the behavior of 0.95
00:29:46.040 a tabloid. I mean, no real magazine or newspaper does this, but in any case, just, just get
00:29:51.840 into the article.
00:29:52.720 Yeah, sure. So let's start.
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. 1.00
00:30:16.660 Second, make your agenda clear at the outset by criticizing what is ailing Islam and Muslims. 1.00
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
00:30:44.760 it, your hard-earned cash. Voila, Sam.
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.
00:31:38.640 I mean...
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 0.92
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
00:33:45.260 ground- You're filibuster- 1.00
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.
00:34:13.480 Viable to whom?
00:34:14.720 Viable-
00:34:15.080 Viable to whom? To Muslims? 1.00
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
00:34:45.180 daily basis?
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 1.00
00:35:15.280 hurt, that's one thing. But let's have an actual discussion of the merits of what reformation looks
00:35:19.660 like.
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 1.00
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 0.95
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 0.62
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 1.00
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?
00:37:44.580 I'm not sure. You tell me.
00:37:46.280 There was no advance, right?
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 1.00
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. 0.76
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...
00:38:38.560 It's one of my points.
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 1.00
00:39:20.500 that Affleck made sense, right? And honestly, I've spent much of the last year doing that. 1.00
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 1.00
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 1.00
00:40:32.260 you know, I love watching his show, but he compared Islam to the fucking mafia. Those are his words. 0.99
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, 0.99
00:41:33.700 do you think that anyone pays a lot of money to hear me come tell their students or employees 0.98
00:41:41.420 that Islam is a terrible religion? 1.00
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 0.95
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
00:42:26.820 hear that.
00:42:27.520 You're wrong about this. Okay, you're wrong about this. I have five New York Times bestsellers
00:42:33.600 under my belt now.
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 0.65
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?
00:44:17.160 I didn't call you a bigot once again.
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 0.94
00:45:32.020 rich. They're going to get feted in chauvinistic circles. And it's just going to be a gravy train 1.00
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 1.00
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 1.00
00:46:39.360 scrutiny because it is an extreme statement.
00:46:44.180 Okay.
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 1.00
00:46:55.420 is illegal and ultimately there's going to be a two-state solution. Now, as a brown-skinned Muslim 0.99
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, 0.96
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?
00:49:27.780 Yes.
00:49:27.940 Okay, so it's lucrative.
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
00:50:34.860 very few opinions in the Muslim world.
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.
00:50:50.860 We have sold some books.
00:50:52.420 Yes, yes, from a blog post.
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.
00:51:40.820 And I can assure-
00:51:41.640 The fourth point-
00:51:42.640 Listen to me, Omer.
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. 1.00
00:53:10.640 It just isn't.
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,
00:53:40.640 you still won't back off an inch.
00:53:44.520 Yeah, look, I've seen the books that have come out according to what I call Project Islamic 1.00
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. 1.00
00:55:04.380 Yeah. Well, look, we've already established that there is a market for this and a readership for 0.99
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
00:55:42.380 you.
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
00:55:47.240 individual.
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?
00:55:56.720 Well, soon to be my first.
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
00:57:33.940 a deeper and longer study?
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.
00:58:22.500 But the problem is, you are...
00:58:24.940 That's not the people you should be addressing, are they? You want to address Muslims, not the 1.00
00:58:28.980 person who doesn't know anything about Islam.
00:58:30.640 It's a separate topic. All right, let's...
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
00:58:42.760 false.
00:58:43.600 And you conceded all the factual points about the market existing, about you making money
00:58:47.280 off of it.
00:58:48.080 No. This is a stupid little trick that you have to stop using because it makes you 1.00
00:58:52.140 look terrible, all right? To falsely summarize what someone has conceded is not only annoying, 1.00
00:58:58.220 it is effective only with stupid audiences, right? It's going to get you fucking nowhere. 1.00
00:59:03.060 So just listen to me. 0.99
00:59:04.300 I didn't concede that point.
00:59:05.420 Sam, don't speak to me in those tones.
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. 0.99
00:59:28.020 Well, no. Even the worst people on the right with whom I have no connection aren't saying 0.97
00:59:34.480 that. But I'm certainly not saying that. No one is saying they're all jihadists, and
00:59:38.680 no one is saying they're all bloodlusting.
00:59:41.380 Well, I mean, you did say the Muslim world is utterly deranged by its religious tribalism, 1.00
00:59:44.980 so that gets very close to it.
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 0.97
00:59:56.720 in a way other religions do not. Is that Islam, or is it ISIS, or are they the same thing? 0.86
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.
01:00:19.220 But you have dug in so deeply here.
01:00:21.820 Okay, a simple question for you, Sam. Is there money to be made, or is there not,
01:00:25.500 in publishing a criticism of Islam?
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
01:01:00.260 anything but what we're 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. 0.79
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
01:01:32.420 in general. This is a unique problem to Islam. 1.00
01:01:35.440 If I took all your words that we replace Islam with Mormonism, I'm sure that you would get some 1.00
01:01:39.760 very strong rebukes from the Mormon community.
01:01:41.980 Nothing analogous to what happens with Islam, but let's continue. We literally just went through 1.00
01:01:47.540 one paragraph.
01:01:48.580 Yeah, okay, let's continue. So we are at, let me just turn the page here.
01:01:54.140 The books.
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 1.00
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.
01:02:48.080 Okay, well.
01:02:50.260 Let's talk about this.
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, 0.63
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 0.99
01:03:46.020 major criticism. That's not true. I do that across the board every time I raise the issue. That's
01:03:50.320 just simply untrue, but- Really? Okay.
01:03:52.360 Yes, I talk about ideas- Is Islam the motherlode of bad ideas, or is Wahhabism the motherlode of bad 1.00
01:03:56.320 ideas? Is Islam- does Islam marry religious ecstasy and sectarian hatred, or does Wahhabism marry 0.95
01:04:01.600 religious ecstasy and sectarian hatred? It is- well, as- 0.92
01:04:04.520 Is Islam especially belligerent in your words and inimical to the norms of civil discourse, 1.00
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, 1.00
01:04:19.900 and the fact that you would circumscribe it just to Wahhabism is a real problem, right? So I want to
01:04:25.800 get into- Wahhabism is the prime mover of it. 1.00
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-
01:04:52.880 I quote you and I quote her words.
01:04:54.520 Omer. 0.73
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 0.92
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 1.00
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 1.00
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 0.99
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 1.00
01:06:02.740 probably a good idea to make her situation even more dangerous by attacking her as a bigot. 1.00
01:06:08.720 Okay, I mean, you want to talk about opportunism? The opportunism is on the side of the Islamist 1.00
01:06:13.000 assholes that the Council of American Islamic Relations care, who try to get Ayaan disinvited from 0.98
01:06:18.620 speaking at universities and pretend that she, okay, one of the most persecuted public intellectuals 0.97
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 0.74
01:07:02.580 with Islam. She said that we should bomb the lands of Islam. To me, her personal story now is irrelevant. 1.00
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 0.83
01:07:51.120 after I have gone after Wahhabism, actually. But I think anyone who supports that, including the 1.00
01:07:56.020 Saudis who are now funding an institution at Yale, should be barred from doing so and should be 1.00
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 0.99
01:09:03.560 recently she's called for Benjamin Netanyahu to win the Nobel Peace Prize. I hope that's a position 0.99
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, 1.00
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 1.00
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 0.53
01:10:51.560 the Muslim world by violent theocrats, and lives every minute of her life under the shadow of their 0.95
01:10:59.240 threats. She is in the Muslim world arguably more than you are. She's certainly not perceived to be, and 0.92
01:11:05.960 she's not perceived to be an honest interlocutor because of her very militaristic views. Yes, okay, 0.93
01:11:09.960 but that says a lot. Forget her militaristic views. She's not- No, they're central, they're not- 1.00
01:11:15.240 No, but they're not central to why she's not perceived as an honest interlocutor. She's not 0.87
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 0.99
01:11:29.320 an apostate, right? Everything is backwards for you. Yes, certain fascist groups, Islamic fascist groups- 0.99
01:11:37.960 It's not just certain fascist groups are after her. The level of support for the killing of 0.91
01:11:44.360 apostates in the Muslim world, as you undoubtedly know, is shockingly high, and it's not limited to 1.00
01:11:51.080 Wahhabism, okay? Way too high. And look, people are- do you want to talk about apostasy now or do you 1.00
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 0.75
01:12:52.920 been done to me endlessly. The Islam is the mother load of bad ideas statement on Bill Maher's show. 1.00
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 0.94
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,
01:13:39.880 no, Islam, period. That's a clear statement. 1.00
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 1.00
01:13:59.160 religion. I have made no secret of that. I have said things just like that. Islam has to be defeated. 1.00
01:14:05.320 I'll say it now. Islam has to be defeated. Why? How is it that that kind of statement 0.99
01:14:10.680 should not be perceived? I think all religion has to be defeated, 0.91
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. 0.97
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? 1.00
01:15:39.240 Well, that's your position, right? 0.98
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, 0.81
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- 1.00
01:17:34.600 What do you mean by that, Islam has to be defeated? Let's tease this out. 0.99
01:17:37.400 Well, because I can say that I think religion has to be defeated. I think- 1.00
01:17:40.840 Yeah. How do you defeat Islam? 1.00
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- 1.00
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 1.00
01:18:01.320 to do. I think it goes nowhere worth going. I think the harms produced by this attitude are obvious, 1.00
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. 0.96
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, 0.98
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? 0.94
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 1.00
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 0.69
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
01:20:59.880 statements.
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 1.00
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... 1.00
01:21:42.360 And most of those polls are bullshit too. 0.99
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 1.00
01:21:48.280 you an answer...
01:21:48.920 I'll tell you why.
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. 1.00
01:21:53.160 But let me just finish this point. I don't think we should spend a lot of time 0.98
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 0.82
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
01:23:15.480 rather unlucky circumstance for women. 0.99
01:23:17.960 Marc Thiessen Contradictory as well, right? Schizophrenic, you could say. Intellectually schizophrenic. 0.98
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. 0.99
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, 0.91
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.
01:25:03.960 But no one is limited to...
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 1.00
01:25:22.280 able to apostatize. That is free speech.
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, 1.00
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. 0.97
01:25:54.840 Now, A, they think this is the word of God, apparently, according to you. They think it's 0.76
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, 1.00
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, 0.95
01:26:33.880 that 99% of them or 80% of them think that apostates should be killed. And that's the end of 0.93
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 0.87
01:26:51.720 blasphemy on the books, they're willing to kill blasphemers or kill someone who is merely rumored to 0.96
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 0.96
01:27:04.200 societies, right? Suborn their murder with fatwas that now have global reach. That is a problem that is 0.63
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. 1.00
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 0.99
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 0.80
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 1.00
01:30:46.760 amount to high treason anymore. So Muslims should be free to leave and to, of course, to enter the 1.00
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. 0.93
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. 0.99
01:32:01.000 We have to kill them, right? There is no paradox there if you understand religious freedom to be 1.00
01:32:05.400 your own religious freedom. So let's break this down logically. So like these Salafis, 1.00
01:32:08.920 who I hope you appreciate, are not the majority of in these countries. So these Salafis believe that 1.00
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
01:32:33.080 this would surprise you.
01:32:34.120 Ah, we have agreement.
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% 0.84
01:33:04.680 of Egyptians would kill Ayaan with their own hands, right? 0.98
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. 0.99
01:33:38.040 Yeah, so the numbers are bullshit, Sam. 0.98
01:33:40.280 Every one of these numbers matters. It's just because the people who will say apostates should 0.99
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. 1.00
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
01:35:02.520 or infidels or polytheists, whether or not they… 1.00
01:35:05.320 Right, and takfir for 1400 years was not practiced, and when it was practiced, it was by a very highly
01:35:10.840 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,
01:35:32.360 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
01:35:44.360 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.
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