#356 — Islam & Freedom
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Summary
In this episode of the Making Sense Podcast, Rory Stewart is joined by the First Minister of Scotland, Alistair Darling, to discuss Islamophobia in Scotland and its impact on the country's politics and culture. They discuss the impact of jihadi terrorism on Scottish politics, and the role of Muslims in the fight against it, and what it means to be a Muslim in the modern world. They also discuss the growing problem of Islamophobia, and whether or not it is getting worse, or if it is actually getting better. This episode is the first part of a two-part conversation Rory Stewart and I had with Homsa Yousaf, a Scottish politician who happens to be Muslim. The second part will be released later this week. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships/OurAdvertisers. We don t run ads on the podcast and therefore it is made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, so if you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a subscriber. You'll get access to all our ad-free episodes as well as the latest "Making Sense" episodes available on all major podcast directories and social medias including The Telegraph, The Huffington Post, The Independent, and The Telegraph's iDEY. If you're not a subscriber yet, you can get 10% off the first month's ad free trial when you sign up to our VIP membership offer. Subscribe here! Subscribe to The Making Sense podcast by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices and receive 10% discount when you become a patron! We postcode: Making Sense? Become a supporter! Subscribe at Making Sense Subscribe on iTunes Learn more at makingsensepodcast.co.uk/makingsensepodcasts/makingensepodcast We'll be giving you the chance to win a FREE 7-day VIP membership starting on 7/6/27/19/9/30/1919/19 Allowing you to access to our newest episode next week, plus a discount on our next month's Making Sense edition of our newest issue of Making Sense Magazine? Subscribe for a chance to receive a copy of our new issue of the making sense podcast, The Final Word podcast and much more! You get 7 days early access to the podcast, plus an additional discount on the final issue of The Final Words podcast!
Transcript
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
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Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program,
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So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
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I am back with Rory Stewart. Rory, thanks for doing this.
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Yeah, so this is an unusual podcast. I haven't done one quite like this before, and obviously
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this will not see the light of day unless each of us believes the conversation is useful. So
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if you're hearing this, that's what we thought, for better or worse. So I'll just kind of set this up
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to remind both of us and our listeners what's happening here. So you came on my podcast a few
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weeks ago, and I thought we had a great conversation. We discussed many things related
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to the failures of nation building, about which you know more or less everything, and the unraveling
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of world order. And then afterwards, a listener surfaced some remarks that you made on your own
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podcast, which I'll drop in here for listeners about, you know, 60 seconds or so.
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One of the things that I've noticed recently, particularly since October the 7th, is an
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increase in people making stereotypical comments about Muslims. I mean, I just did an interview
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with an American podcast, a guy called Sam Harris, who was hammering me for nearly an hour saying,
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yes, but surely, Rory, you have to admit there's a connection between Muslims and suicide bombers
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and Muslims and terrorists. He just wouldn't let it go. And I wondered, is that something that
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you've experienced? And is it something that's getting better, getting worse? How does our
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I think it's getting worse. Maybe it comes in cycles. But I remember, for me, 9-11 was such
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a seminal moment for me, and that might sound a bit kind of selfish, coming thousands of
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miles away and affected and killed so many thousands of Americans. But for me, it was a day I'll always
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remember when 9-11 took place on a Tuesday, I think, and coming back from school and school bus home,
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you know, the radio was on, and you can kind of hear what was going on, and the driver was
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telling us to shut up because he was trying to listen to what was going on. I went home
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and saw all the scenes, as you guys would have seen in the terrible, tragic and terror
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attack that took place. And then the next day, I remember going to school and sitting in
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form class, and the same two guys I used to sit beside every single morning and we would
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talk about the things that teenage boys talk about, mainly in my case Celtic, a football
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club I loved. And they were bombarding me, not with any maliciousness, they were bombarding
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me with questions that I had no idea the answer to. You know, why do Muslims hate America?
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Do you know who was behind it? What was it all about? I'm sitting there going, I don't
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have a clue, right? And so for me, and then of course all the Islamophobia that followed
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post 9-11. But I have to say my position as First Minister, and even perhaps before then,
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there is definitely still a deep-rooted, systemic and endemic Islamophobia in this country.
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You were speaking with Homsa Yousaf, who's a Scottish politician who happens to be Muslim.
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And I would invite people to listen to our previous conversation to form their own impression
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of it. But as I told you by email, I was quite surprised that you came away feeling that I
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had hounded you for an hour on the connection between Islam and terrorism. I think we spoke
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about jihadism for about 20 minutes in the context of a nearly 90-minute conversation.
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So anyway, people can listen to it and form their own impression. But leaving that aside,
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I was surprised that you seemed to form the opinion that I was bigoted against Muslims as
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people. I mean, there's really no way for me to understand what you were saying to Homsa
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that doesn't entail my being a regrettable example of what he called Islamophobia. So I just wanted to
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discuss this, not principally to defend myself, but to clarify the underlying issues. Because I think
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the worst implication of what you were saying has nothing to do with me or with your impression of
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me. From my point of view, the worst implication is that you think or seem to think that any special
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focus on Islam as a system of ideas and any special concern about how these ideas produce
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violence and intolerance is in itself a sign of bigotry, right? And that's something I'd like to
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talk about and see if there's anything we disagree about on these fundamental issues, completely
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independent of what you thought about our last conversation or what you or anyone else thinks
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about me. So anyway, that's how I proposed to start. So feel free to chime in and then we'll get
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rolling. Sure, Sam. Well, I mean, let me begin by apologizing and apologizing, I think, for three
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things. I think the first fundamental thing is whatever I felt about our conversation, it was not
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appropriate for me to express my discomfort in that way in public. And I heard in your voice and in your
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response and your emails that it would have felt very hurtful to you. And so I think I began by
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realizing that that was a very wrong thing to do and I shouldn't have done that. And I can absolutely
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understand why hearing that call to you would have seemed very bewildering and shocking. I think the
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second thing is you're absolutely right. I remembered it as being a very long conversation and I think one of
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the reasons for it is that I, and maybe we can talk a little bit more about this. I mean, it'd be nice to
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give your listeners something that maybe they don't get, which is the context of recording podcasts
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and what a very eccentric environment a podcast is, because they listen to these kind of smooth voices
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down there, down the airs, and they have no real idea of what's going on. So my day that day,
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it's not a, it's not a, it's excuse, but it's a partial explanation. I'd had a long day. It was
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late in the evening. For some reason, you, I think like many other people recording high quality
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podcasts, like to do it in studios. And studios always seem to be a very long way away from wherever
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you are. So you slog out to a studio, you get there, you sit in a pretty hot room. And I was hoping
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very much to get on to talk about international development, which was really the thing. And I noticed
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that I think 55 minutes in, we were, I was still in this conversation, which you're quite right,
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we had not begun with. The first half hours had been spent getting there through other things. So
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it was unfair of me to say that we'd spent almost an hour on this. And you're absolutely right. We'd
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spent about 20 minutes on this. And then I guess the third thing that I need to apologize for you for
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is that I don't think in any way you have some animus against Muslims. What I was uncomfortable
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about is slightly more complicated thing to explain. And maybe we can get into that. But I
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wanted to begin with the apologies. You're absolutely right to be shocked. You're right
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that I was exaggerating when I said that we talked about this for almost an hour. And you're right to
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be upset at the suggestion that I think that you are somehow prejudiced against Muslims.
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Well, yeah. So I appreciate the apology. And that's a good example of a good one,
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just apologizing in such a straightforward way. But just to be clear, my reaction wasn't so much
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of being personally offended. I mean, I, you know, I, because the truth is, I, you know,
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I know I'm not a bigot. And yet, and I know that this terrain is pretty confusing, right? I know that
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it's very easy. And in fact, it's, you know, I would, I'm going to argue, you know, when we touch the
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concept of Islamophobia, I'm going to argue that this landscape has been engineered to be confusing
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by apologists for Islam. I mean, there's a conscious effort to obfuscate criticism of ideas
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with animus toward people, brown skin people coming from other countries, say. And that's just,
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I just know that's not true of me. And I was surprised that you could seem to imagine that
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it might be, but I'm much more... Can I summon on that? I don't think that's really what I thought.
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I think it felt to me as though you were very uncomfortable with Islam. I don't think I
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thought that you were... But that I am. That I am. So that... So I think, as with all these things,
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there's an element of misunderstanding, and there's probably an element of some disagreement,
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which is hidden under politeness. And I think the other reason that I probably was obsessing about it
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in that way and talking about it in that way in my podcast is that I'd felt uncomfortable with
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myself. I felt I hadn't done a good enough job standing up for Islam. I hadn't done a good enough
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job standing up for my experience of living in the Islamic world. And I felt that I had become a sort
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of apologist, that I found it very tiring. And I felt that I was in this position of perpetually
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saying, yeah, you're right. There's a lot of, you know, very bad jihadis, but then there are other
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people that are bad. And I'd give another historical example, and then we'd loop back again. And maybe
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what I wanted to say is, listen, this just doesn't sit with my experience of having spent many years
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of my life living in Muslim-majority countries. It just doesn't sit with my experience of Muslim
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friends. And I should have been braver and less apologetic in talking to you.
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Oh, great. Well, so yeah, let's just get into the issues here because, again, this is genuinely
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confusing. And I think it's really interesting because I think you're a perfect person for me
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to be talking to about this because I think we probably disagree. And we disagree for reasons that
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will be a little hard for people to wait appropriately. I mean, for instance, I'll just
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stipulate that you have much, much more experience than I do of being, much less living, to say not
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to say nothing, of living in Muslim-majority countries, which I've never done, right? I've
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traveled to some degree in them. But, you know, so you have, I can only imagine you have scores of,
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if not hundreds of, Muslim friends. And, you know, I can't say that of myself. And so there's a wealth
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of experience, everything from your speaking various native languages to your having spent time
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living in the homes of Muslims. I mean, there's just no comparison, right? You're T.E. Lawrence,
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you know, compared to me. And yet, I still would argue that there are certain things here that you're
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very likely wrong about. And so it's worth, you know, threading this needle.
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And can I also say something? Sorry, I'm going to be mean here. I'm very, very happy to do this. And
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let's do some of this. But I'd also love to move on to some other subjects. I'd love to talk to you
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about your life, about your meditation, about other things. And I think one of the things that I worry
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about, just as a kind of preface to this, is that neither you nor I are Muslims. And although we've both
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read the Quran, I don't think either of us are deep Arabic scholars. So I think there may be other
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things that we could also talk about as well as this.
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Well, yeah, if we have time. But I do think there's going to be enough here to fill this
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session. I can only imagine. But I'm happy to talk about anything, obviously. And I think we should
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talk about this very claim as though the truth of Islam that I'm worried about, as well as the other
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happier truths about it that you are more in touch with, that require the kind of expertise
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that you just claimed neither of us have to find. I mean, I just, I think that's untrue. I mean, I
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think, and, you know, we'll get there. But let me just make two claims, which I think could sharpen
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up our whatever disagreement we're going to discover here, and just to have you react to them, because I
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think it's, this will be a good lens through which to look at it. The first claim I'd like to make is
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that it's perfectly possible, and I would say necessary, to speak about the ideological roots
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of Islamism and jihadism, and even about the unique need for reform within mainstream Islam itself,
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without lapsing into bigotry against Muslims as people, right? And without disregarding the
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suffering of refugees or, you know, failing to criticize the indiscretions of Western foreign
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policy or Israeli leadership or anything else that might be worth criticizing, we can do all of that
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without being bigots. And as I began to say, when we started, the concept of Islamophobia has been
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designed to obfuscate this. You know, someone once said on the internet that Islamophobia is a word
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invented by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons. And I honestly think that's not far
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from the truth. I mean, I think if you set it up in that way, you're setting it up in a difficult
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light. Well, let me just... I think that phrase is a pretty unfortunate phrase. Who produced that
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phrase? I don't know. I'm suspicious of that individual. It's often attributed to Christopher
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Hitchens, but it was not him, but it has a very Hitch-like concision, and Barb. But my point is that
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there's no question that the term is confusing people, and I think that's intentional. But leave
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the intention aside. Its function, in my experience, is to conflate any criticism of Islam, which is a
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doctrine of religious beliefs, with bigotry against Muslims as people. And in fact, it often equates...
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And Sam, is there not... Can I just come into this? I can see the distinction, but
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is it not possible that those two things are more closely connected than in practice than you want
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to acknowledge? I mean, if you concluded that Islam was a uniquely, I don't know, a uniquely unpleasant
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or violent or dangerous religion, and you went around emphasizing that, does that not cast some
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light on Muslims? Well, let me show you how it doesn't, right? So, or in my case, so obviously,
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bigotry is a real thing out in this world. There are real bigots. There are racists. There are xenophobes.
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There are people who don't like Arabs. Obviously, I'd be insane to doubt any of that, and many of those
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people live in my own country, right? So there are, you know, white supremacist, racist assholes who
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don't want any more immigrants, who don't look like them, or talk like them, or eat the same foods,
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right? So that's... That's a bit different. I think the Islamophobia is making a different
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kind of claim, isn't it? It's not really... I mean, you're talking there about some form of racism,
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aren't you? Islamophobia, in my experience, is often used as a kind of synonym for racism.
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Maybe in the US debate. I think in the UK debate, what we tend to mean is that it's very difficult
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to suggest that something that somebody believes is inherently wrong, evil, violent, and not end up
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casting some moral expression on the individual that holds that belief. You know, for example,
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if you... It would be difficult. Let's say, I can't quite imagine, for example, saying,
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I think that Nazism is an unbelievably evil ideology, but I'm not prejudiced against Nazis. I'm not
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prejudiced against people who hold that belief. I mean, Islamophobia, presumably by its definition,
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is a fear of Islam. It's not a... Or a phobia towards Islam, not towards a particular group of people. I
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mean, it's something that could be applied to a white Muslim, could be applied to a Bosnian,
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could be... So my understanding of it is it's having a phobia towards Islam as a religion,
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and what that constitutes in terms of the attitude you take to believers in that religion. So that's
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why I'm using this analogy, that if I thought that Islam was an inherently evil religion, akin to
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my view on Nazi belief, I would have a very profound negative moral judgment of anybody who
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believed in it. I wouldn't be able to separate a claim that the religion was uniquely sinister and
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evil with being able to suggest that I had a warm relationship towards people who held views that
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Well, except, I mean, you know, realistically, there's a continuum of belief within the set of
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all Muslims, right? And you're talking about 2 billion people or maybe 2.2 billion people now,
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and there's just a wide range of commitments, and some are... And then to say nothing of ex-Muslims,
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right? People who were born Muslim, raised Muslim, and then left the faith, and have all the ethnic
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and racial characteristics that they had before they left the faith, right? So there's no... I mean,
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that's a very clear way of seeing that... But we're talking here of believers. We're talking here
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of people who are Muslims, not people who were born Muslim. I mean, you know, my grandfather was Jewish,
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but I wouldn't self-identify as being Jewish because I don't participate in those rituals. I
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Okay. Well, so let me just say that your associations with the term Islamophobia,
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certainly from an American perspective, are highly non-standard. I mean, the way Islamophobia is used
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in an American context and by an organization like CARE, the Council of American Islamic Relations,
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is very much a conflation with racism and xenophobia, right? So that it's all about
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castigating people as racists and bigots whenever they criticize Islam as a set of ideas, right?
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Now, to take... To move to your point of... Okay, let's say... Let's purify our conception of the term.
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It obviously just relates to a religion and a set of religious beliefs and those who adhere to it to
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whatever degree. How can you criticize these beliefs as energetically as I do without actually
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being bigoted against the people, right? You know, because if you really think these beliefs are
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dangerous... And let me take it to its extreme. You kind of get my point, I guess, about Nazis,
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that you couldn't imagine a situation in which we agree that that's a uniquely evil ideology. And
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therefore, you couldn't really imagine saying, I think Nazism is uniquely evil ideology, but I have
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nothing against Nazis themselves. Except, right? You know, if you look at... You really have to
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do a little work to make the analogy run through. If you imagine people who have been brainwashed from
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the moment they could understand language into Nazism, right? So they were Nazis as kids,
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and now I'm talking to the 18-year-old version of themselves. I have a fair amount of compassion for
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anyone who... It's analogous to what's happening in North Korea, right? The North Koreans are painfully
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immured in a cult wherein they just don't have adequate information, right? They have been
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effectively brainwashed. I mean, they're four inches shorter than their South Korean brothers and
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sisters, and they think they're a master race. I mean, it's an insane psychological experiment that
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they're party to, right? So they believe a wide range of odious things, one can only imagine,
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and yet I don't really hold them responsible for it. And I view many, many Muslims, and I would view
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many, many Nazis in the analogous situation along those lines. I mean, it's just that people have had
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bad ideas drummed into them from the moment they could think, and now we're in this position of
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talking to them and hoping to persuade them of better ideas. So Sam, I guess one issue which is
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maybe central to this is the question of whether there is an Islam or whether there are what I tend
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to believe, which is many different Islams. So I don't see a religion as a unitary thing which you or I
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can securely define or where you and I get to regulate who is or is not a true Muslim. In fact,
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the people who do that, of course, you know, both you and I would be troubled by for different reasons.
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Sorry, we would both be troubled for the same reasons, but by people who went around saying,
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you're not a real Muslim. My sense of religion is that it's much more of a complex set of social,
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cultural practices and values. And it's much better understood through participating in those
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societies and observing the way in which people relate to each other in the world. And looked at
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from that point of view, I agree with you. There are people who identify as Muslims and who have a form
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of Islam which is ignorant, cruel, bigoted, and monstrous, of which ISIS and Al-Qaeda and many of the
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Hamas leadership have different versions of that. But equally, there are the people that I want to
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speak up for, which are the, you know, I grew up partially in Malaysia, I lived in Indonesia, I lived
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in Bosnia, I lived in Afghanistan, I lived in Iraq, and I was surrounded by people who were devout
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practicing Muslims, praying five times a day, who were amongst the most generous, kindest, most
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compassionate, thoughtful, honorable people I've ever lived among. And I think the point is that
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there may be something wrong in trying to say there is this thing called Islam, and these are
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real Muslims, and these people aren't, rather than accepting that there are multiple types of Muslim.
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Well, I accept that, and yet that claim doesn't really do the work I think you want it to do here,
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right? So let me just make my second claim that I wanted to make at the outset just to frame the
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conversation, because I think it will land us in the territory where we really, where our differences
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are obvious. I mean, so the first claim was that you can criticize Islam without being bigoted
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against Muslims as people, and you seem to accept that quite happily, because your construal of what
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Islamophobia means really does relate to the ideas and not to superficial characteristics like people's
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skin color and culture and etc., which is fine, again, but that, you know, when you come to America,
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I'll show you around. The second claim is that while every religion has its fanatics, right, and
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there are fanatics among Jews and Hindus and every other religion, as you know, there's only one
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religion on earth that now routinely seeks to impose its religious taboos on everyone else with threats
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of violence, right? I mean, there's only one religion that has made it unsafe routinely. Again, you can find
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corner conditions where this, where other religions have done this, but generally speaking, there's only
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one religion that has made it unsafe for people to criticize it, or indeed for its own members to leave
00:23:56.700
it, right? And in my experience only, and I've been criticizing, I really have lived on the front lines of this
00:24:04.280
for now 20 years as a fairly famous atheist. In my experience, only Muslims routinely fear for their lives
00:24:13.360
when they decide to leave their religion, right? And this is true even in the West.
00:24:18.180
And if you doubt this, you just, you know, for all the Muslims you've spent time with, you need to spend
00:24:23.020
some more time with ex-Muslims, even in your own society, even in the UK, because this is absolutely
00:24:29.020
routine to have a rational fear that you will be murdered by your own community.
00:24:35.360
Sam, let me come back to this, because I think, again, this is a question of us agreeing on a lot,
00:24:41.140
but not entirely. And again, I'd return to this idea that there are many different Islams. I don't
00:24:47.620
accept it as a general description of the religion, that the religion as a whole is a religion which is
00:24:56.360
inherently imposing itself on other people and trying to murder apostates and this, that, and the other.
00:25:02.060
I mean, as I said, I lived in Indonesia, and Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country
00:25:07.100
in the world. And that is not a reasonable description of the way in which Islam operates
00:25:13.000
in that country, or indeed in Malaysia. So it seems to me...
00:25:18.840
You think you can be an apostate in Malaysia and Indonesia? That is, you're a former Muslim,
00:25:25.020
you now disavow the faith, and now you start having your apostasy podcast, and you will be
00:25:34.660
So this is where I come back to the many different Islams. Within those societies, there will be
00:25:40.320
Muslims with very extreme violent views on apostasy. And in Afghanistan, for example, there was overwhelming
00:25:47.840
support for a suggestion that the government was going to kill an apostate, right? That was a society
00:25:53.540
with these sorts of views. So I'm not denying that those societies exist, or that there are many
00:25:58.380
Muslims, including Muslims I know, and who were friends with in Afghanistan, who had these terrifying
00:26:04.040
views on things like apostasy. I absolutely accept that. Equally, I've just been living in Jordan for
00:26:10.280
the last year and a half, and I am pretty confident that most of my Jordanian Muslim friends would not
00:26:17.160
in any way support the notion of executing people for apostasy. So I think these are questions to
00:26:24.940
degree. I mean, you may be right that there are more, that Islam may be in a more vigorous state
00:26:30.920
than Christianity or Judaism. You may also be right that the proportion of people within the religion
00:26:36.900
with more extreme and violent views may be slightly higher. What I'm holding against is an idea that
00:26:43.300
there is this thing called Islam, where the fact that an Islamist or a jihadist can read a particular
00:26:51.680
set of lines in a text means that every Muslim necessarily must hold those same beliefs.
00:26:57.060
Well, no. I mean, this really is a red herring, Rory. Obviously, there are many, many millions of
00:27:04.460
Muslims who don't even read the Quran or the Hadith, or having read them, don't take them much more
00:27:11.500
seriously than a reformed Jew or a very progressive Christian takes their holy books. I would argue
00:27:18.040
there's much less of that kind of liberalism and secularism in the Muslim world and in Muslim
00:27:23.580
communities in the West, but there's still some of it, certainly. And in addition to that, there are
00:27:28.060
many people who just want to get along in the modern world, and wherever their religion makes
00:27:33.940
that difficult, they let their religion slide, right? And that's true of every faith, right? And so
00:27:37.800
there's every variant of this. But what there isn't is a... I mean, there's two claims I would
00:27:45.200
make here that sharpen up the difference between Islam and every other faith at this moment that
00:27:49.820
I think it's important to acknowledge. One is, as I just said, there really is no other faith where
00:27:56.280
it is routine for its members to worry about what's going to happen to them if they leave it.
00:28:04.640
Rory, you keep interrupting me, and I can't... Rory, you just got to let me land the point.
00:28:08.740
I'm going to give you more to react to. Rory, you keep derailing me before I give you...
00:28:12.240
But often there are three or four different claims. Let me write it down there. I'll write
00:28:15.360
down that first claim that there's no religion that doesn't, that responds in that way to apostasy.
00:28:21.240
Yeah. And again, you just need, you need only spend time with ex-Muslims to know
00:28:25.960
how poorly advertised this experience is, but how widespread it is. And I would additionally
00:28:32.320
argue it's not an accident... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,
00:28:37.100
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