Making Sense - Sam Harris - #356 — Islam & Freedom

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!

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

00:00:11.780 hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing

00:00:15.740 the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense

00:00:20.100 Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program,

00:00:25.900 where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast,

00:00:30.740 and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.

00:00:34.060 So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

00:00:45.340 I am back with Rory Stewart. Rory, thanks for doing this.

00:00:49.100 Hello, Sam. Thank you for having me back.

00:00:51.400 Yeah, so this is an unusual podcast. I haven't done one quite like this before, and obviously

00:00:59.260 this will not see the light of day unless each of us believes the conversation is useful. So

00:01:04.440 if you're hearing this, that's what we thought, for better or worse. So I'll just kind of set this up

00:01:11.420 to remind both of us and our listeners what's happening here. So you came on my podcast a few

00:01:17.020 weeks ago, and I thought we had a great conversation. We discussed many things related

00:01:22.560 to the failures of nation building, about which you know more or less everything, and the unraveling

00:01:29.540 of world order. And then afterwards, a listener surfaced some remarks that you made on your own

00:01:36.440 podcast, which I'll drop in here for listeners about, you know, 60 seconds or so.

00:01:42.360 One of the things that I've noticed recently, particularly since October the 7th, is an

00:01:47.900 increase in people making stereotypical comments about Muslims. I mean, I just did an interview

00:01:54.800 with an American podcast, a guy called Sam Harris, who was hammering me for nearly an hour saying,

00:01:58.880 yes, but surely, Rory, you have to admit there's a connection between Muslims and suicide bombers 1.00

00:02:02.980 and Muslims and terrorists. He just wouldn't let it go. And I wondered, is that something that 0.82

00:02:09.340 you've experienced? And is it something that's getting better, getting worse? How does our

00:02:14.220 society deal with it?

00:02:15.880 I think it's getting worse. Maybe it comes in cycles. But I remember, for me, 9-11 was such

00:02:24.880 a seminal moment for me, and that might sound a bit kind of selfish, coming thousands of

00:02:28.900 miles away and affected and killed so many thousands of Americans. But for me, it was a day I'll always

00:02:33.800 remember when 9-11 took place on a Tuesday, I think, and coming back from school and school bus home,

00:02:38.620 you know, the radio was on, and you can kind of hear what was going on, and the driver was

00:02:42.040 telling us to shut up because he was trying to listen to what was going on. I went home

00:02:46.120 and saw all the scenes, as you guys would have seen in the terrible, tragic and terror

00:02:50.440 attack that took place. And then the next day, I remember going to school and sitting in

00:02:53.900 form class, and the same two guys I used to sit beside every single morning and we would

00:02:58.480 talk about the things that teenage boys talk about, mainly in my case Celtic, a football

00:03:01.820 club I loved. And they were bombarding me, not with any maliciousness, they were bombarding

00:03:06.780 me with questions that I had no idea the answer to. You know, why do Muslims hate America? 1.00

00:03:10.200 Do you know who was behind it? What was it all about? I'm sitting there going, I don't 0.93

00:03:14.580 have a clue, right? And so for me, and then of course all the Islamophobia that followed

00:03:20.020 post 9-11. But I have to say my position as First Minister, and even perhaps before then,

00:03:25.380 there is definitely still a deep-rooted, systemic and endemic Islamophobia in this country.

00:03:33.780 And Scotland is absolutely not immune to that.

00:03:36.200 You were speaking with Homsa Yousaf, who's a Scottish politician who happens to be Muslim.

00:03:43.820 And I would invite people to listen to our previous conversation to form their own impression

00:03:48.540 of it. But as I told you by email, I was quite surprised that you came away feeling that I

00:03:54.280 had hounded you for an hour on the connection between Islam and terrorism. I think we spoke

00:04:00.020 about jihadism for about 20 minutes in the context of a nearly 90-minute conversation.

00:04:05.880 So anyway, people can listen to it and form their own impression. But leaving that aside,

00:04:10.720 I was surprised that you seemed to form the opinion that I was bigoted against Muslims as

00:04:17.220 people. I mean, there's really no way for me to understand what you were saying to Homsa

00:04:21.920 that doesn't entail my being a regrettable example of what he called Islamophobia. So I just wanted to

00:04:29.440 discuss this, not principally to defend myself, but to clarify the underlying issues. Because I think

00:04:36.960 the worst implication of what you were saying has nothing to do with me or with your impression of

00:04:42.280 me. From my point of view, the worst implication is that you think or seem to think that any special

00:04:48.060 focus on Islam as a system of ideas and any special concern about how these ideas produce

00:04:55.100 violence and intolerance is in itself a sign of bigotry, right? And that's something I'd like to

00:05:01.320 talk about and see if there's anything we disagree about on these fundamental issues, completely

00:05:06.000 independent of what you thought about our last conversation or what you or anyone else thinks

00:05:11.720 about me. So anyway, that's how I proposed to start. So feel free to chime in and then we'll get

00:05:17.620 rolling. Sure, Sam. Well, I mean, let me begin by apologizing and apologizing, I think, for three

00:05:23.880 things. I think the first fundamental thing is whatever I felt about our conversation, it was not

00:05:29.880 appropriate for me to express my discomfort in that way in public. And I heard in your voice and in your

00:05:39.940 response and your emails that it would have felt very hurtful to you. And so I think I began by

00:05:48.380 realizing that that was a very wrong thing to do and I shouldn't have done that. And I can absolutely

00:05:53.860 understand why hearing that call to you would have seemed very bewildering and shocking. I think the

00:06:00.020 second thing is you're absolutely right. I remembered it as being a very long conversation and I think one of

00:06:05.860 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

00:06:10.260 give your listeners something that maybe they don't get, which is the context of recording podcasts

00:06:15.300 and what a very eccentric environment a podcast is, because they listen to these kind of smooth voices

00:06:21.680 down there, down the airs, and they have no real idea of what's going on. So my day that day,

00:06:28.580 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

00:06:33.920 late in the evening. For some reason, you, I think like many other people recording high quality

00:06:38.880 podcasts, like to do it in studios. And studios always seem to be a very long way away from wherever

00:06:45.260 you are. So you slog out to a studio, you get there, you sit in a pretty hot room. And I was hoping

00:06:51.140 very much to get on to talk about international development, which was really the thing. And I noticed

00:06:55.580 that I think 55 minutes in, we were, I was still in this conversation, which you're quite right,

00:07:00.900 we had not begun with. The first half hours had been spent getting there through other things. So

00:07:05.380 it was unfair of me to say that we'd spent almost an hour on this. And you're absolutely right. We'd

00:07:09.420 spent about 20 minutes on this. And then I guess the third thing that I need to apologize for you for

00:07:13.840 is that I don't think in any way you have some animus against Muslims. What I was uncomfortable

00:07:21.380 about is slightly more complicated thing to explain. And maybe we can get into that. But I

00:07:26.080 wanted to begin with the apologies. You're absolutely right to be shocked. You're right

00:07:30.620 that I was exaggerating when I said that we talked about this for almost an hour. And you're right to

00:07:35.920 be upset at the suggestion that I think that you are somehow prejudiced against Muslims.

00:07:40.980 Well, yeah. So I appreciate the apology. And that's a good example of a good one,

00:07:45.700 just apologizing in such a straightforward way. But just to be clear, my reaction wasn't so much

00:07:51.360 of being personally offended. I mean, I, you know, I, because the truth is, I, you know,

00:07:56.200 I know I'm not a bigot. And yet, and I know that this terrain is pretty confusing, right? I know that

00:08:01.540 it's very easy. And in fact, it's, you know, I would, I'm going to argue, you know, when we touch the

00:08:06.640 concept of Islamophobia, I'm going to argue that this landscape has been engineered to be confusing

00:08:12.300 by apologists for Islam. I mean, there's a conscious effort to obfuscate criticism of ideas

00:08:21.520 with animus toward people, brown skin people coming from other countries, say. And that's just,

00:08:27.500 I just know that's not true of me. And I was surprised that you could seem to imagine that

00:08:33.020 it might be, but I'm much more... Can I summon on that? I don't think that's really what I thought.

00:08:38.500 I think it felt to me as though you were very uncomfortable with Islam. I don't think I

00:08:44.720 thought that you were... But that I am. That I am. So that... So I think, as with all these things,

00:08:54.940 there's an element of misunderstanding, and there's probably an element of some disagreement,

00:09:00.840 which is hidden under politeness. And I think the other reason that I probably was obsessing about it

00:09:07.040 in that way and talking about it in that way in my podcast is that I'd felt uncomfortable with

00:09:11.980 myself. I felt I hadn't done a good enough job standing up for Islam. I hadn't done a good enough 1.00

00:09:19.180 job standing up for my experience of living in the Islamic world. And I felt that I had become a sort

00:09:24.980 of apologist, that I found it very tiring. And I felt that I was in this position of perpetually

00:09:30.040 saying, yeah, you're right. There's a lot of, you know, very bad jihadis, but then there are other

00:09:34.320 people that are bad. And I'd give another historical example, and then we'd loop back again. And maybe

00:09:39.240 what I wanted to say is, listen, this just doesn't sit with my experience of having spent many years

00:09:45.380 of my life living in Muslim-majority countries. It just doesn't sit with my experience of Muslim

00:09:49.940 friends. And I should have been braver and less apologetic in talking to you.

00:09:55.220 Oh, great. Well, so yeah, let's just get into the issues here because, again, this is genuinely

00:10:03.760 confusing. And I think it's really interesting because I think you're a perfect person for me

00:10:10.260 to be talking to about this because I think we probably disagree. And we disagree for reasons that

00:10:16.760 will be a little hard for people to wait appropriately. I mean, for instance, I'll just

00:10:23.480 stipulate that you have much, much more experience than I do of being, much less living, to say not

00:10:32.060 to say nothing, of living in Muslim-majority countries, which I've never done, right? I've 1.00

00:10:37.140 traveled to some degree in them. But, you know, so you have, I can only imagine you have scores of,

00:10:44.020 if not hundreds of, Muslim friends. And, you know, I can't say that of myself. And so there's a wealth

00:10:51.440 of experience, everything from your speaking various native languages to your having spent time

00:10:59.020 living in the homes of Muslims. I mean, there's just no comparison, right? You're T.E. Lawrence, 0.99

00:11:04.820 you know, compared to me. And yet, I still would argue that there are certain things here that you're

00:11:10.620 very likely wrong about. And so it's worth, you know, threading this needle.

00:11:16.120 And can I also say something? Sorry, I'm going to be mean here. I'm very, very happy to do this. And

00:11:21.260 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

00:11:27.100 about your life, about your meditation, about other things. And I think one of the things that I worry

00:11:33.280 about, just as a kind of preface to this, is that neither you nor I are Muslims. And although we've both

00:11:39.580 read the Quran, I don't think either of us are deep Arabic scholars. So I think there may be other

00:11:46.520 things that we could also talk about as well as this.

00:11:49.260 Well, yeah, if we have time. But I do think there's going to be enough here to fill this

00:11:53.440 session. I can only imagine. But I'm happy to talk about anything, obviously. And I think we should

00:11:58.760 talk about this very claim as though the truth of Islam that I'm worried about, as well as the other 0.98

00:12:06.660 happier truths about it that you are more in touch with, that require the kind of expertise

00:12:12.220 that you just claimed neither of us have to find. I mean, I just, I think that's untrue. I mean, I

00:12:17.980 think, and, you know, we'll get there. But let me just make two claims, which I think could sharpen

00:12:25.220 up our whatever disagreement we're going to discover here, and just to have you react to them, because I

00:12:31.180 think it's, this will be a good lens through which to look at it. The first claim I'd like to make is

00:12:35.940 that it's perfectly possible, and I would say necessary, to speak about the ideological roots

00:12:43.600 of Islamism and jihadism, and even about the unique need for reform within mainstream Islam itself,

00:12:51.860 without lapsing into bigotry against Muslims as people, right? And without disregarding the

00:12:56.840 suffering of refugees or, you know, failing to criticize the indiscretions of Western foreign 0.95

00:13:04.800 policy or Israeli leadership or anything else that might be worth criticizing, we can do all of that

00:13:10.540 without being bigots. And as I began to say, when we started, the concept of Islamophobia has been

00:13:18.500 designed to obfuscate this. You know, someone once said on the internet that Islamophobia is a word

00:13:24.560 invented by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons. And I honestly think that's not far 1.00

00:13:32.620 from the truth. I mean, I think if you set it up in that way, you're setting it up in a difficult

00:13:39.520 light. Well, let me just... I think that phrase is a pretty unfortunate phrase. Who produced that

00:13:44.800 phrase? I don't know. I'm suspicious of that individual. It's often attributed to Christopher

00:13:49.360 Hitchens, but it was not him, but it has a very Hitch-like concision, and Barb. But my point is that 0.53

00:13:56.680 there's no question that the term is confusing people, and I think that's intentional. But leave

00:14:02.620 the intention aside. Its function, in my experience, is to conflate any criticism of Islam, which is a 0.71

00:14:11.240 doctrine of religious beliefs, with bigotry against Muslims as people. And in fact, it often equates...

00:14:17.120 And Sam, is there not... Can I just come into this? I can see the distinction, but

00:14:21.280 is it not possible that those two things are more closely connected than in practice than you want

00:14:28.540 to acknowledge? I mean, if you concluded that Islam was a uniquely, I don't know, a uniquely unpleasant 1.00

00:14:36.680 or violent or dangerous religion, and you went around emphasizing that, does that not cast some 0.65

00:14:44.460 light on Muslims? Well, let me show you how it doesn't, right? So, or in my case, so obviously,

00:14:53.720 bigotry is a real thing out in this world. There are real bigots. There are racists. There are xenophobes.

00:15:00.700 There are people who don't like Arabs. Obviously, I'd be insane to doubt any of that, and many of those 1.00

00:15:06.260 people live in my own country, right? So there are, you know, white supremacist, racist assholes who 1.00

00:15:12.020 don't want any more immigrants, who don't look like them, or talk like them, or eat the same foods, 1.00

00:15:17.720 right? So that's... That's a bit different. I think the Islamophobia is making a different

00:15:21.700 kind of claim, isn't it? It's not really... I mean, you're talking there about some form of racism,

00:15:26.880 aren't you? Islamophobia, in my experience, is often used as a kind of synonym for racism.

00:15:32.860 Maybe in the US debate. I think in the UK debate, what we tend to mean is that it's very difficult

00:15:40.920 to suggest that something that somebody believes is inherently wrong, evil, violent, and not end up

00:15:52.000 casting some moral expression on the individual that holds that belief. You know, for example,

00:15:56.960 if you... It would be difficult. Let's say, I can't quite imagine, for example, saying,

00:16:04.140 I think that Nazism is an unbelievably evil ideology, but I'm not prejudiced against Nazis. I'm not

00:16:14.320 prejudiced against people who hold that belief. I mean, Islamophobia, presumably by its definition,

00:16:19.620 is a fear of Islam. It's not a... Or a phobia towards Islam, not towards a particular group of people. I

00:16:26.300 mean, it's something that could be applied to a white Muslim, could be applied to a Bosnian,

00:16:30.720 could be... So my understanding of it is it's having a phobia towards Islam as a religion,

00:16:39.880 and what that constitutes in terms of the attitude you take to believers in that religion. So that's

00:16:45.320 why I'm using this analogy, that if I thought that Islam was an inherently evil religion, akin to 0.96

00:16:52.320 my view on Nazi belief, I would have a very profound negative moral judgment of anybody who

00:16:58.940 believed in it. I wouldn't be able to separate a claim that the religion was uniquely sinister and

00:17:06.180 evil with being able to suggest that I had a warm relationship towards people who held views that

00:17:11.960 I found that profoundly reprehensible.

00:17:14.420 Well, except, I mean, you know, realistically, there's a continuum of belief within the set of

00:17:23.820 all Muslims, right? And you're talking about 2 billion people or maybe 2.2 billion people now,

00:17:30.720 and there's just a wide range of commitments, and some are... And then to say nothing of ex-Muslims,

00:17:39.000 right? People who were born Muslim, raised Muslim, and then left the faith, and have all the ethnic

00:17:46.980 and racial characteristics that they had before they left the faith, right? So there's no... I mean,

00:17:52.120 that's a very clear way of seeing that... But we're talking here of believers. We're talking here

00:17:57.700 of people who are Muslims, not people who were born Muslim. I mean, you know, my grandfather was Jewish,

00:18:06.020 but I wouldn't self-identify as being Jewish because I don't participate in those rituals. I

00:18:10.540 don't have those beliefs.

00:18:11.460 Okay. Well, so let me just say that your associations with the term Islamophobia,

00:18:18.580 certainly from an American perspective, are highly non-standard. I mean, the way Islamophobia is used

00:18:25.480 in an American context and by an organization like CARE, the Council of American Islamic Relations,

00:18:31.300 is very much a conflation with racism and xenophobia, right? So that it's all about

00:18:38.300 castigating people as racists and bigots whenever they criticize Islam as a set of ideas, right?

00:18:46.780 Now, to take... To move to your point of... Okay, let's say... Let's purify our conception of the term.

00:18:51.940 It obviously just relates to a religion and a set of religious beliefs and those who adhere to it to

00:18:57.180 whatever degree. How can you criticize these beliefs as energetically as I do without actually

00:19:03.660 being bigoted against the people, right? You know, because if you really think these beliefs are

00:19:07.680 dangerous... And let me take it to its extreme. You kind of get my point, I guess, about Nazis, 0.82

00:19:13.120 that you couldn't imagine a situation in which we agree that that's a uniquely evil ideology. And

00:19:20.460 therefore, you couldn't really imagine saying, I think Nazism is uniquely evil ideology, but I have 0.99

00:19:26.420 nothing against Nazis themselves. Except, right? You know, if you look at... You really have to 0.50

00:19:32.580 do a little work to make the analogy run through. If you imagine people who have been brainwashed from

00:19:40.700 the moment they could understand language into Nazism, right? So they were Nazis as kids,

00:19:47.320 and now I'm talking to the 18-year-old version of themselves. I have a fair amount of compassion for

00:19:53.200 anyone who... It's analogous to what's happening in North Korea, right? The North Koreans are painfully 1.00

00:20:01.220 immured in a cult wherein they just don't have adequate information, right? They have been

00:20:07.460 effectively brainwashed. I mean, they're four inches shorter than their South Korean brothers and 1.00

00:20:12.600 sisters, and they think they're a master race. I mean, it's an insane psychological experiment that 0.93

00:20:17.520 they're party to, right? So they believe a wide range of odious things, one can only imagine,

00:20:23.880 and yet I don't really hold them responsible for it. And I view many, many Muslims, and I would view

00:20:31.180 many, many Nazis in the analogous situation along those lines. I mean, it's just that people have had

00:20:35.940 bad ideas drummed into them from the moment they could think, and now we're in this position of

00:20:42.240 talking to them and hoping to persuade them of better ideas. So Sam, I guess one issue which is

00:20:47.980 maybe central to this is the question of whether there is an Islam or whether there are what I tend

00:20:55.260 to believe, which is many different Islams. So I don't see a religion as a unitary thing which you or I

00:21:03.620 can securely define or where you and I get to regulate who is or is not a true Muslim. In fact, 0.90

00:21:12.520 the people who do that, of course, you know, both you and I would be troubled by for different reasons.

00:21:17.460 Sorry, we would both be troubled for the same reasons, but by people who went around saying,

00:21:22.120 you're not a real Muslim. My sense of religion is that it's much more of a complex set of social,

00:21:30.560 cultural practices and values. And it's much better understood through participating in those

00:21:36.620 societies and observing the way in which people relate to each other in the world. And looked at

00:21:44.060 from that point of view, I agree with you. There are people who identify as Muslims and who have a form

00:21:50.020 of Islam which is ignorant, cruel, bigoted, and monstrous, of which ISIS and Al-Qaeda and many of the 1.00

00:21:59.620 Hamas leadership have different versions of that. But equally, there are the people that I want to 0.99

00:22:05.640 speak up for, which are the, you know, I grew up partially in Malaysia, I lived in Indonesia, I lived

00:22:11.220 in Bosnia, I lived in Afghanistan, I lived in Iraq, and I was surrounded by people who were devout

00:22:16.640 practicing Muslims, praying five times a day, who were amongst the most generous, kindest, most

00:22:22.920 compassionate, thoughtful, honorable people I've ever lived among. And I think the point is that

00:22:29.200 there may be something wrong in trying to say there is this thing called Islam, and these are

00:22:34.900 real Muslims, and these people aren't, rather than accepting that there are multiple types of Muslim.

00:22:40.020 Well, I accept that, and yet that claim doesn't really do the work I think you want it to do here,

00:22:45.620 right? So let me just make my second claim that I wanted to make at the outset just to frame the

00:22:50.080 conversation, because I think it will land us in the territory where we really, where our differences

00:22:54.800 are obvious. I mean, so the first claim was that you can criticize Islam without being bigoted

00:22:59.660 against Muslims as people, and you seem to accept that quite happily, because your construal of what 1.00

00:23:05.620 Islamophobia means really does relate to the ideas and not to superficial characteristics like people's

00:23:11.160 skin color and culture and etc., which is fine, again, but that, you know, when you come to America,

00:23:16.680 I'll show you around. The second claim is that while every religion has its fanatics, right, and

00:23:24.200 there are fanatics among Jews and Hindus and every other religion, as you know, there's only one

00:23:31.840 religion on earth that now routinely seeks to impose its religious taboos on everyone else with threats 0.99

00:23:39.460 of violence, right? I mean, there's only one religion that has made it unsafe routinely. Again, you can find 1.00

00:23:45.660 corner conditions where this, where other religions have done this, but generally speaking, there's only

00:23:51.220 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. 0.61

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 0.52

00:24:23.020 some more time with ex-Muslims, even in your own society, even in the UK, because this is absolutely 1.00

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 0.99

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 0.96

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, 1.00

00:25:25.020 you now disavow the faith, and now you start having your apostasy podcast, and you will be

00:25:32.800 safe in one of those societies?

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 1.00

00:25:47.840 support for a suggestion that the government was going to kill an apostate, right? That was a society 0.87

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 1.00

00:26:04.040 views on things like apostasy. I absolutely accept that. Equally, I've just been living in Jordan for 1.00

00:26:10.280 the last year and a half, and I am pretty confident that most of my Jordanian Muslim friends would not 1.00

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 1.00

00:27:11.500 seriously than a reformed Jew or a very progressive Christian takes their holy books. I would argue 0.86

00:27:18.040 there's much less of that kind of liberalism and secularism in the Muslim world and in Muslim 0.83

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.

00:28:01.840 I mean, not just...

00:28:02.840 Okay, well, let me come in on that.

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.

00:28:20.220 Okay, on you go.

00:28:21.240 Yeah. And again, you just need, you need only spend time with ex-Muslims to know 1.00

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,

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - February 28, 2024

#356 — Islam & Freedom

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