#55 — Islamism vs Secularism
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1 hour and 14 minutes
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160.49493
Summary
Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He s published widely in other journals, and he's written a wonderful book entitled Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World. And we get into all of these issues, as you ll hear from Shadi, in which he doesn t totally align with either of his co-hosts, Majid Nawaz and Peter Bergen, in their views on the role of religion in human affairs. We don t run ads on the podcast and therefore, therefore, are made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. If you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a subscriber. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you ll need to subscribe to our private RSS feed, where you ll get access to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. Thanks for listening to the podcast, and we appreciate what you re doing! Sam Harris This is a note to say that if you re not a subscriber, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation, so consider becoming one. I ve been wanting to subscribe at Samharris.org, where I ll be able to listen to the second part of the conversation. I ll find out more about what he s been up to in the next episode of the making sense podcast, so check it out there. -Sam Harris . And I know you re a good friend of mine, and I ve noticed my happy meeting with Ben Affleck and I ll let you know that's good to find out about that on my blog post on that s good to hear about that - Thank you, too by in the making Sense Podcast : I hope you ll be a friend of me on the other place? v= Vaynerchand, , & so on and so on... -- (p. ) ... ) -Ben Affleck, I ve got a good one too -- Thank you to you, Ben ? Thanks, Ben Azzad is a good to have a good thing, , and so much so that I ll do that too,
Transcript
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Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber
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feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.
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In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at
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There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with
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We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support
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So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
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Shadi is a senior fellow at Brookings, and he's a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and
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Most recently, he's written a wonderful book entitled Islamic Exceptionalism, How the Struggle
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His analysis, as you'll hear, doesn't totally align with mine or with Majid Nawaz's.
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And I've been wanting to get Shadi on the podcast for a while, because he really is a novel voice
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A real political scientist who doesn't make the usual political science noises on the topic,
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especially on the role that religion plays in inspiring human violence.
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So, without further preamble, I give you Shadi Hamid.
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Tell our listeners a little bit about your background and the kind of work you've been
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So, currently I'm a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
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I work on Islamist movements and, more broadly, the role of Islam in politics.
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And I'm born and raised in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
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I mean, there's a lot more to say about how I sort of came to do what I do.
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But I guess two of the crucial moments for me were 9-11 and then the Iraq War.
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So, I went, you know, before 9-11, I probably, I think I did actually want to just be an
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investment banker or something normal like that.
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9-11 happens and that sort of sets me along the path that has led me really to where I
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And you have this really illuminating book, Islamic Exceptionalism, how the struggle over
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Islam is reshaping the world, which we will get into.
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Is this your first book or you have a book before this?
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My previous book, which came out in 2014, it's called Temptations of Power.
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And it's more focused on Islamist movements before and after the Arab Spring and their
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Before we get into the book, how would you describe yourself politically and religiously
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So, I consider myself on the left, on the liberal left.
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And, you know, I'm, as you can probably guess, I wasn't a Donald Trump supporter and probably
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I consider myself, I self-define as a Muslim, as an American Muslim.
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And although I think I write more as a analyst or a political scientist who happens to be
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But I think as of late, because events in the Middle East and in the U.S. with the rise of
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someone like Donald Trump, some of my work, I think, has become more personal.
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And I think I've become more comfortable, you know, speaking as not just an analyst,
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but as an American Muslim who is directly affected by some of the proposals that are
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out there on things like, you know, a Muslim registry, for example.
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So, I think more of that personal side has come out in my work.
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And there's actually more of that in the new book compared to, say, the previous one.
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I don't know how familiar you are with my work in general, or what I've said about Islam
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You certainly won't find a friend of Donald Trump in me.
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I know you noticed my happy meeting with Ben Affleck because you mentioned it in the
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I expect we'll disagree about a few things, but I want to start on a point where we really
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And that's the link between sincere religious belief and behavior.
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And I actually want to read a passage from your book.
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In a September 2014 statement, the Islamic State spokesman Abu Musab al-Adnani expounded
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In this sense, religion matters, and it matters a great deal.
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As individuals, most, although not necessarily all, Islamic State fighters on the front line
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are not only willing to die in a blaze of religious ecstasy, they welcome it.
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It doesn't particularly matter if this sounds absurd to us.
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But this basic point about intention and motivation applies not only to extremist groups, but to
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mainstream Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood that, in stark contrast to the
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Islamic State, contest elections and work within the democratic process.
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As one Brotherhood official would often remind me, many join the movement so they can, quote,
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Discussing his own reasons for joining, he told me, quote,
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I was far from religion and this was unsettling.
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We might be tempted to dismiss such pronouncements as irrational bouts of fancy, but if you look
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at it another way, what could be more rational than wanting eternal salvation?
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It would be a mistake then to view Islamist groups as traditional political parties.
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It is such a relief to see someone talking honestly about this.
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And I want to talk about the reasons why people become obscurantists on this point.
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But I mean, are you aware of the novelty here of seeing someone like yourself both for two
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reasons, both having an academic background as a political scientist and being a Muslim?
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To see people in either of those camps calling a spade a spade here is a deeply novel phenomenon.
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Well, I think it's sort of sad to me that it's novel.
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But look, there's a lot of discomfort in talking about religion.
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And I see that especially with my colleagues on the left, who I think are very well-intentioned
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And I have to say that when I heard Ben Affleck on that, you know, now famous program with
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you and Bill Maher, my initial reaction was to cheer him on.
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I was happy that here's someone, a famous actor and director who's actually defending
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But then when I thought a little bit more about what he was saying, I could realize that
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And so he pretty much said, you know, Muslims are just like us.
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They and the part that sort of amused me, which I mentioned in the book is and they want to
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As if you as if, you know, wanting to eat sandwiches and wanting to implement Islamic law are two things
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I know people who do eat sandwiches, but also believe in the implementation of Sharia.
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So I think but I have to say that I've changed myself over time.
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So if you had talked to me, I think six or seven years ago, I would have, I think, focused
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less on religion as a kind of contributing factor.
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But after spending so much time in the Middle East and spending hundreds of hours really talking
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to Islamist members and leaders and really trying to get to know them on a personal level
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and immersing myself in their world, I, you know, it started to become more and more clear
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that religion matters more than I think a lot of us are comfortable admitting.
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And I think this the statement you just quoted from the Brotherhood official, it's really stuck
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Um, I think he probably told me that, yeah, that was pre Arab spring.
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And it stays with me now, because when I think about my own graduate work, um, in political
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science seminars, we never talked about paradise.
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And we're and we don't know how to talk about paradise because it's not tangible.
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But, um, so that's why I think, you know, we have to sort of bring religion back into the
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conversation, but in a nuanced way, in a careful way.
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And I should also kind of offer a disclaimer here.
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And I think, you know, I mentioned this in the first chapter of the book.
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I'm, I'm slightly uncomfortable with some of my own conclusions.
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And that's why I do think a lot about how to present the arguments of the book to a popular
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Because when I started writing it, it was before the Trump moment.
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It was before anti-Muslim bigotry got as bad as it currently is.
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And I'm just, I want to be attuned to the risk that some could misuse my arguments for
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Well, you and, you and I both have that particular liability.
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So yeah, I want to be sensitive to that as well.
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I want to linger on this point of why people systematically discount the role of religion here,
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because it strikes me as the first problem that we need to overcome.
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Until you can reason honestly about what's going on in our world and what is actually
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motivating people who are hostile to the most basic values of civil society, there's just
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no way to even move forward with it with a plan about how to address this problem.
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We'll just see if we differ in the kinds of remedies we imagine are possible.
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But the first issue here is that, and that you discuss this a little bit in your book,
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most secular academics and journalists and, you know, otherwise smart people have no idea
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what it's like to really believe in God, much less in a paradise that awaits martyrs after death.
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So it seems to me that they just, this leads to a very basic failure of empathy.
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I mean, they just doubt that anyone actually believes this stuff.
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And perversely, no demonstration of sincerity is sufficient.
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I mean, it is apparently insufficient for there to be an endless supply of suicide bombers,
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for there to be an endless supply of people who are willing to get on video and talk about
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their expectation of paradise and then blow themselves up.
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That, as I've, you know, long lamented, I mean, now it's been 15 years that I've been
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talking about this, that is somehow rhetorically insufficient to establish somebody's sincere
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What you have in the social sciences generally, and just among non-religious people or people
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who are religious in a very liberal and moderate sense that would be unrecognizable to most people
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in the Middle East, you have people assuming that everyone is motivated by rational concerns
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and that all rational concerns are, at bottom, terrestrial concerns.
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But one thing you point out, which is very important to distinguish, is that if paradise exists, right,
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or if you really believe that paradise exists, trying to get there is perfectly rational.
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In fact, one could argue it's the only rational aim, right?
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Anything that happens in 70 years here can't be of much consequence when put on the balance
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So the dividing line isn't between reason and unreason necessarily here on this point.
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It's just if you buy into these beliefs, your rational priorities are, by definition, otherworldly.
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And that is something that people who think everything at bottom must be economic or political
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just fundamentally discount or overlook or otherwise deceive themselves about.
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I spent most of my time, at least in the U.S. and in major cities.
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And it's so striking how few people are in those kinds of liberal elite circles, if you will,
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can really relate to the kind of, to the, it's not just to the role of religion.
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It's the everyday magic of religion for people who believe in it.
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And this is why sometimes I struggle to describe it,
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because unless you're actually immersed in that world and spend time with people
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who understand the world in those terms, it can be hard to relate to.
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And I think that even if you spend time with Christian evangelicals, that will help in some
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ways, but, and this gets to, you know, one of the main arguments of my book, that Islam
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So that will get you maybe halfway there or something, but Christianity isn't quite the
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And I almost feel sort of, I almost feel, feel a little bit weird or foolish in saying
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that because it's kind of self-evident that different religions are different from each
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But even that I think can, can be controversial in some circles.
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But I think then the real challenge for those of us who come from a secular background, who
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are born and raised in the West is to kind of go outside of our comfort zone and make an
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extra effort to understand those who are coming from a different religious vantage point.
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The other thing that I would say is, even the way we're talking about this, and we can't
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help it because we have to use words, we have to use a certain vocabulary, even the way we
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distinguish between quote unquote religion and quote unquote politics is itself problematic
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in my view, because the two, at least from the standpoint of Muslim believers in say the
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Middle East, the two are endlessly intertwined.
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And that's, and that's something that I had to sort of come to understand a little bit more.
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So if you ask a member of, let's say the Muslim Brotherhood, to give an example, why are you
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Why are you participating in these parliamentary elections?
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Why are you going to this protest against the Mubarak regime?
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Is it because of religious motivations or is it because of political motivations?
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That person will almost certainly struggle to make a clear distinction between the two,
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because in his or her own mind, the two cannot be separated the way that I think we as products
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And it's so implicit or even explicit in the way we talk about these things in the media,
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in public discourse in the US or Europe, that we don't even realize that we're doing it.
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Well, I want to get into, it's the heart of your thesis, this, what makes Islam exceptional?
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And so we need to differentiate it from other religions and perhaps Christianity in particular
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But I want to linger with this fundamental lack of empathy or lack of understanding of just
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how deep and self-consistent and on some level rewarding a religious worldview is in this context.
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You were almost one of these people who couldn't get a handle on what was going on there.
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And I want to read another passage in your book, which just struck me as just, again, novel for its
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insight into what is actually going on and the cognitive and imaginative work people outside of these
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cultures have to do in order to understand what's going on.
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So you say here, despite my best efforts, however, the one element I continue to struggle with
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is what might be called the willingness to die.
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If I had joined a protest in a not-so-democratic country and the army was moving in with live
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And that's why my time interviewing Brotherhood activists in Rabbah just days before the massacre
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took place was at once fascinating and frightening.
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It forced me to at least try to transcend my own limitations as an analyst.
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And then you go on with a Brotherhood spokesman who told me that he was very much at peace,
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And I knew that he and so many others weren't just saying it because many of them, more than 800,
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And then you go on to wonder about where this willingness to die comes from.
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This is a passage where, you know, even to my eye, you fall, however subtly, into the trap of one
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And so you write, where does this willingness to die come from?
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One Brotherhood activist, now unable to return to Egypt, told me the story of an activist who was
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standing on the front lines when the military began dispersing the Rabbah Sidon.
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A bullet grazed his shoulder. Behind him, a young man fell to the ground. The man had been shot to
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death. The activist looked over to see what had happened and began to cry. He could have died a
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martyr. He knew the man behind him had gone to heaven in God's glory. This is what he longed for.
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And it had been denied him. Aspects of the story were, I assume, apocryphal.
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But the basic point is an important one. This wasn't politics in the normal sense of the word.
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Now, your assumption that the story was apocryphal, I don't know if there were other
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cues to suggest that, but there's no reason to think it was generically. I'm sure you've read
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Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower. Those stories of Al-Qaeda essentially doing the same thing,
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just weeping tears of envy over their fallen comrades in Afghanistan, and even taking absurd risks
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in an apparent attempt to get themselves martyred. I mean, those stories are a dime a dozen. It's just
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a sincere belief in paradise gets you there in so far as you manage to embrace it.
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So, yeah, you're right. I do struggle with this still. So I guess one distinction I would make is that
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members of Al-Qaeda, or ISIS for that matter, they are more actively trying to die in a sense.
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So, and they're not just willing to die, they're also willing to kill, which is a difference as well.
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So when I'm talking about brotherhood activists in a primarily peaceful protest situation,
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these are not people who are necessarily going there to die. That's not their primary objective.
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Their primary objective was to try to get the new military government after the coup of 2013
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to go back to the barracks and to reinstate Muhammad Morsi, the elected Islamist president,
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back into office. So for them, there was a very tangible political goal. And I have no doubt that
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they thought, at least initially, that if they held out for long enough and they had large enough
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protests and sit-ins in various parts of the country, that this would put enough pressure
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on the military. So I think understanding how the political goals intertwine with the very real
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religious goals, which are mentioned in the passage, are still important. And, you know, I also,
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people want to retroactively make sense of something after the fact.
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So I can't be 100% sure of what these one or two individuals were thinking in the exact moment.
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But I know it because I too do this sometimes, that in retrospect, I invest certain acts with
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more meaning than they actually had at the time, because we all want to make our lives
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grander in a way. All of us are searching for a kind of epic meaning, for a kind of narrative arc
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to our own stories. So when this Brotherhood member is telling me this story, either before the fact
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or after the fact, so I left Egypt two days before the massacre happened, and I talked to people
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afterwards, right? And they were trying to make sense of what happened. And they're trying to offer
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a narrative arc, not just to me, but I think also to themselves, if that makes sense.
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I would certainly grant you that there is a significant distinction between the Brotherhood
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and the kinds of people who would be likely to join it, and a group like Al-Qaeda or ISIS or any
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other classical jihadist group. And it's a distinction, as you know, that you put a lot of weight on,
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because you almost talk about the Brotherhood as the mainstream alternative to jihadism. Some version of
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this Islamism needs to be embraced, or at least accepted. And I think that's, we will definitely
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get there, because that is a controversial and interesting point. But again, I just want to linger
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on the Western secular liberal doubt about this phenomenon, because I'm not even, I'm not sure
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you understand how delusional this skepticism is among academics and how deep it runs. So for instance,
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I noticed that you cite the work of the anthropologist Scotta Tran at various points
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in your book. I can see why you would do that. He's certainly said several useful things in this
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area. But I mean, he is also, has been a reliable obscurantist on this point. And he and I once got
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into what almost amounted to a fight on a panel at the Salk Institute. It was about 10 years ago. And I
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mean, I just couldn't believe the kinds of things he was saying about the irrelevance of religious
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belief to the phenomenon of jihadist terrorism. And he just was going to the mat for religion being
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So at one point, we found ourselves in the men's room together. And I just looked at him and I said,
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Scott, you mean to tell me that nobody has ever blown himself up with the expectation
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of arriving in paradise? Is that what you actually think? And he said, yes, that's right. Nobody
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Okay. So Sam, I have to, I have to ask you because I do, I do actually remember very vividly
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And I remember actually tweeting it, I think. And I had to read it several times because I
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couldn't actually believe that Scott at Tran. It's hard for me to believe that he would actually
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believe that. And I, I, I can't make sense of it. So if you have any insights into what,
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what he was trying to tell you, I mean, that would be interesting.
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Well, on some level, he was just trying to tell me to fuck off. I mean,
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the only exculpatory interpretation or the only interpretation that I can
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make of what he said, which is compatible with his sanity really, is that he was telling me
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to fuck off in terms he knew I would see as provocative and that it was not an honest
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statement of what he believes. But in fact, when, when you look at how he's attacked me for things
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I've said about Islam, and when you look at the points of debate we've had in public, it is in line
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with everything else he said. I mean, so he went on at the SAW conference to say that the best predictor
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of whether someone was going to join a jihadist cell was not their religious beliefs or any,
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you know, prior indoctrination, but whether they were a member of a soccer team, right?
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So it's, I mean, his thesis is that it's affiliation among, quote, fictive kin, you know,
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young men who bond and care about the esteem that with which their co-evils hold them. And that's
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what gets you to, you know, push the plunger on your suicide vest. Now, I don't need to spend a lot
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of time on a tran here, but I've pointed out previously all the moves he makes to discount
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the very obvious emergence of religion as a variable even within his own data. Even when he's
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got jihadists telling him about God, he manages to ignore all that. But yeah, no, he clearly thinks,
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and there are other people like this. He's just, I just mentioned him just because I saw him in your
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book. He clearly thinks that this is a matter of the quasi-terrestrial concern of caring about your
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reputation among your friends. And I would never discount that as an important variable in conflict
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or in war. I mean, it obviously is. It's something that could get a totally secular or atheist person
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to sacrifice his life in combat, you know, in defense of his fellow soldiers. I mean,
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this is very ordinary psychological motivation that can lead to heroic self-sacrifice. But if you
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are going to deny that the doctrine of Islam is in any way relevant to the phenomenon of jihadism,
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then it's just God's own miracle that we're seeing more Muslims than Amish or Anglicans
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blow themselves up in these kinds of conflicts, right? It's just, it makes no sense. Or, you know,
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the cartoon controversy. Why is it, you know, why isn't the Book of Mormon leading to the headings
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in Times Square after it gets staged, if every religious ideology was equally likely to produce
00:26:52.640
Yeah, exactly. But, you know, I think it's, in my effort to empathize, let's say, I agree with you that
00:26:58.880
it's, it seems really absurd to me that anyone could discount religion as an important variable.
00:27:06.400
But I also get where it's coming from in the sense that these are liberal academics,
00:27:12.240
who I think are generally well-intentioned. And I think they want to make Islam into something it's
00:27:19.360
not. They want, or to put it a little bit differently, they want Muslims to be just like
00:27:24.320
us, in quotation marks, us. And that's what Ben Affleck was trying to do as well, that we have
00:27:29.840
become so uncomfortable with acknowledging difference, as if the fact that we could be
00:27:36.080
different from each other is itself a problem. And that doesn't just apply to how we view
00:27:42.640
practicing or conservative Muslims, but also how we even view Trump voters, this unwillingness
00:27:49.120
to think that they are motivated by understandable or rational things. And instead, we dismiss them
00:27:56.240
as a bunch of bigots, racists and deplorables. So in that sense, I do see some parallels with this
00:28:04.160
kind of liberal faith in universal values that are not in fact universally held, and not just in the
00:28:12.480
Middle East, but also increasingly, as we're seeing here in the US or in Europe. And I think one of the
00:28:18.720
main challenges going forward is how do we come to terms with difference?
00:28:25.040
Yeah, well, I'm going to want to defend universal values, but I think we should talk about Islamic
00:28:33.840
exceptionalism and talk about difference first. But before that, I just want to talk about this
00:28:40.320
obscurantism and the role it has played politically of late, because it's in large measure, and I've said
00:28:47.600
this in the podcast, in large measure, this explains the rise of Trump, or at least this is one of
00:28:52.800
several variables for me that, had it been different, wouldn't have given us Trump. The most troubling
00:29:01.280
side of this, and this is the, we have this failure of empathy, we have secular people who just don't
00:29:06.000
get it. But then we also have Muslims who very likely do get it. I mean, I'm not saying they're
00:29:13.680
closet Islamists or jihadists, but these are Muslims who actually understand Islam, who reliably lie about
00:29:21.840
its tenants. So the fact that in the immediate aftermath of any terrorist atrocity, you will see
00:29:29.440
someone from CARE jump on CNN and then just lie about Islam, talk about how there's no link between
00:29:36.720
any of its doctrines and jihadism. Jihad is just an inner spiritual struggle, for instance. And then to
00:29:43.520
immediately sound the bell of concern about Islamophobia, right? This word that, as far as I can tell,
00:29:51.600
has been consciously engineered very cynically to prevent the very observations of a sort that you have
00:30:00.880
made in your book and that I've been making here, that there is a link between specific ideas, specific
00:30:07.840
doctrines, and specific behaviors that, as we should, as I always remind people, victimize Muslims themselves
00:30:15.600
more than anybody else. I mean, the most common victim of jihadist terrorism is a fellow Muslim who
00:30:22.400
was standing close to the bomb when it went off, right? It's not, you know, non-Muslims who are,
00:30:27.280
for the most part, victims of theocracy and oppression and sectarian violence, as we see it in the Muslim
00:30:33.200
world. So it's this dishonesty. And again, this sort of touches close to home because I noticed, you know,
00:30:38.880
Reza Aslan is one of your blurbists. I can't hold you responsible for who blurbs your book. But I mean,
00:30:44.080
Reza, again, is someone who, honestly, I think he has probably never managed to speak five sentences
00:30:52.640
in succession about Islam without shading the truth or lying outright about it. I mean,
00:30:58.560
I've been in debates with him, I've seen him in interviews on, again, on CNN as a prime offender,
00:31:04.320
and it's just guaranteed obscurantism. Now, it's either, he's either, he's either confused,
00:31:09.200
which seems incredibly unlikely, given that he'll, he also can't go five minutes without
00:31:13.680
emphasizing that he's a scholar of religion. But the list of this rogues gallery is quite long.
00:31:18.880
You have Dalia Mogahed, you have all these people who are reasonably prominent, who will not speak
00:31:25.200
honestly in the way that you have. I would take issue with the word lying. And I, and the idea that
00:31:32.000
people are being dishonest. I don't, I don't, I don't have any sense that, that Reza doesn't believe
00:31:40.640
what he's saying. And the same goes for Dalia. I think, I think the difference, I can only speak
00:31:48.160
for myself, the way that I approach it is perhaps a little bit different than say, someone who's part
00:31:54.960
of a Muslim civil rights organization. So after a terrorist attack, it's understandable to me
00:32:01.680
that someone whose job, if your job is to make Islam look good and to protect the rights of the
00:32:07.760
community, you want to disassociate between ISIS and Islam. I, however, because, you know, and I,
00:32:15.520
I say this very, very straight up, I am an analyst. I have to be faithful to my findings,
00:32:21.280
even if they make me uncomfortable. And it's not my job to make Islam look good. So I actually get
00:32:27.680
this criticism from Muslim friends and family. And even sometimes my mom, she'll tell me, Shadi,
00:32:32.960
you know, when you talk about ISIS, you should be a little bit more careful so people don't get the
00:32:38.160
wrong idea. And we have this ongoing debate and I totally get where she's coming from. Because I know
00:32:44.480
that she believes that ISIS is a total 100% distortion perversion of Islam as she knows it.
00:32:53.440
And for her, it's personal. It's her religion. Right. And I would say the same for myself as an
00:32:58.080
American Muslim. I do believe that ISIS is interpretation is a distorted interpretation
00:33:06.160
of Islam as I understand it. Right. So I don't, that's why I think that, and it's sort of my
00:33:13.920
policy in general, when I get in Twitter debates and any kinds of debate, I want to assume that people
00:33:20.320
are not being dishonest and that there is, there is a real or rational or reasonable motivation for
00:33:29.440
them arguing the way that they do. And we just happen to disagree on this point.
00:33:34.000
Let me just emphasize my agreement here. I think this principle of charity is incredibly
00:33:40.080
important. I mean, it's the basis of any actual civil conversation about, you know, hard topics.
00:33:46.560
So I totally take your point there. When I call out someone like Reza Aslan, I've seen him violate
00:33:53.280
these norms and the expectation of honesty so often, both in public and in private. His capacity for
00:34:01.680
dishonesty is, again, as plain a fact of reality as any other you're going to find in human behavior.
00:34:09.120
So I don't expect you've focused on him as much as I have. But there's a phenomenon of
00:34:14.560
a reliable shading of the truth here. Again, it's not always conscious dishonesty. It could just be
00:34:20.400
confirmation bias or just fear that, as you say, Muslims will be tarred broadly with the same brush.
00:34:28.720
The fear is obviously that if we admit that there's any connection between the behavior of
00:34:35.280
a group like ISIS and actual tenants of the mainstream religion of Islam, well, then there's
00:34:42.560
nothing to stop a slide into, quote, Islamophobia or, you know, more bigotry against Muslims.
00:34:48.160
And we have a president of the United States who's clearly operating under that assumption and who will
00:34:53.200
never say anything honest about the link between religious ideology and jihad. And, you know,
00:35:00.800
Hillary Clinton is, I mean, one of the reasons why I think her candidacy was so flawed was that
00:35:05.920
she was the sort of candidate who in the immediate aftermath of the Orlando massacre, which was,
00:35:11.440
you know, it took about 15 minutes to figure out that was an instance of jihadist violence.
00:35:16.640
All she could speak about were our gun laws and sanctimoniously warn us about a rise in Islamophobia.
00:35:23.760
So Donald Trump, as odious a character as he is, I would argue is one of his saving graces.
00:35:32.960
And again, perhaps I'm unusually in touch with this because I've spoken so much about Islam that I
00:35:39.200
have a, you know, a fan base that insofar as there was a single issue voter out there who was just
00:35:44.080
concerned about speaking honestly about this problem of jihadism and Islamism, I'm in touch
00:35:49.760
with those people. And I can tell you, there are a lot of people out there, including some Muslims,
00:35:54.080
including my friend, Azra Nomani, who you may know, the journalist who supported Trump because
00:36:00.000
of this issue alone, because he just stood up and said, listen, I don't understand Islam, you know,
00:36:04.400
any better than you do, but there's clearly something going on here. And we have a president who's lying
00:36:09.920
about it. Now that, as big of a con man as Trump is, that statement taken on its own was, you know,
00:36:18.240
a true breath of fresh air. Now it, you know, it's connected to a policy prescription that doesn't make
00:36:24.320
a lot of sense and probably would cause immense harm, you know, attempting not to let any Muslims
00:36:29.120
into the country. But still, this is where political correctness has gotten us on this topic. And it
00:36:37.040
remains a huge problem. My concern now with the rise of Trump is that because of everything that's
00:36:43.920
wrong with, you know, the right-hand side of the political spectrum, we are going to witness a pendulum
00:36:49.520
swing leftward. And there will be more dishonesty on this point from the left rather than more honesty.
00:36:56.880
And you'll have everyone doubling down on, essentially, lies about the motivations of
00:37:03.600
jihadists. And I've been saying this for years and years, that if the only honest talk about jihad is
00:37:09.680
coming from the right, you are going to push increasingly fearful people rightward, no matter
00:37:16.080
how ugly the right is on every other topic. And we're witnessing this with the migrant crisis in
00:37:21.360
Europe. We're witnessing it with, you know, I would argue with Trump in large measure. So like the
00:37:26.880
Southern Poverty Law Center, right, which if ever we needed the Southern Poverty Law Center to occupy
00:37:33.680
the moral high ground and to be sane and ethical and wise, we need them now with a super empowered
00:37:39.760
white nationalist movement in the U.S. for the first time in a generation. And yet, they just added
00:37:47.200
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Majid Nawaz to a list of so-called anti-Muslim extremists, right? So,
00:37:52.720
you know, in addition to the KKK, we should worry about Majid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
00:37:57.120
It's complete insanity. And yet, this is what the left has done to us on this topic.
00:38:01.520
Well, that's why I think it's incredibly crucial right now for us to find a middle ground. And that's
00:38:07.600
really what, you know, I'm trying to do with this book is there's got to be something in between the
00:38:13.120
kind of political correctness of the left and what I consider to be the very problematic approach of
00:38:20.560
some on the right who want to make Islam into some kind of Islam is the problem or even Islamism is
00:38:29.520
the problem and to fail to make what I think are important distinctions. So I think there's something
00:38:34.960
in between. And I realize that it's not a very popular place to be, which is why this book has
00:38:45.280
pissed off people on both sides of the spectrum and kind of in between as well. But I feel like
00:38:52.080
I want to do what I can to find that middle ground and encourage other people to search for it. And I'm
00:38:59.280
not under any illusion that people are going to agree with the entirety of my argument. But I hope
00:39:09.040
that we can at least start to have that conversation. And, you know, with I mean, because these issues
00:39:14.240
will be an issue pretty much pretty much for the rest of our lives. We will be facing the scourge of
00:39:20.880
terrorism and extremism for as long as we live. I don't believe terrorism is something you can
00:39:26.720
eliminate. It's something you can reduce to the best of your ability. But we're going to have to
00:39:32.480
deal with a lot of this. And we have and that's why we have to have this conversation, you know,
00:39:39.120
sooner rather than later. Yeah. Well, so I want to talk to you ultimately about this,
00:39:43.840
this very provocative comment that that not only can't Islam be the problem, but perhaps Islamism can't
00:39:50.640
even be the problem. And that's where you seem to take a slightly different path than than I take,
00:39:56.080
or that, you know, my friend and colleague Majid Nawaz takes. We got to get there. But before we do,
00:40:00.640
I want you to educate us a little bit on a few points. And this goes to really the first principle
00:40:07.200
of your thesis, that Islam is in some way exceptional. And so you say things like, for instance,
00:40:12.560
there's nothing equivalent to Sharia in Christianity. Talk a little bit about that.
00:40:18.240
Yeah, sure. Well, one thing I should just mention, which may be of interest, is that
00:40:24.080
because of the political correctness around this topic, the book's title was actually going to be
00:40:29.680
different until like the very last moment. What was it really? It's, it's kind of a lame title.
00:40:38.720
I mentioned it elsewhere. So I can tell you, but we were going to call it the last caliphate,
00:40:43.920
which sounds kind of poetic and literary, but what the heck does it mean? I had an idea about what it
00:40:49.840
meant. But ultimately I, I wanted the argument to be right there and I wanted to own it. I thought,
00:40:57.360
look, I'm going, I'm spending a big part of my life writing this book. I can't hide away from my
00:41:04.400
own argument. So let me own it. Even though, even the very notion of exceptionalism is going to anger
00:41:12.560
a lot of people, especially in academia where, oh my God, exceptionalism,
00:41:17.200
Shadi is a neo-Orientalist or an essentialist. And I've gotten those charges. But anyway,
00:41:22.320
the argument that I'm making, um, to put it, I guess, simply is that, um, Islam is in fact
00:41:28.640
exceptional and, but not just in any way, because I think it should go without saying that all religions
00:41:33.520
are different from other religions in some way. But I'm arguing that Islam is exceptional in a
00:41:39.680
specific set of ways that matter 14 centuries after its founding. So specifically in, in its relationship
00:41:48.160
to law, politics, and governance. And what that means in practice, but also in theory is that Islam
00:41:56.000
has proven to be resistant to secularization. And I would argue it will continue to be resistant to
00:42:02.320
secularization for the foreseeable future for reasons that we can't easily dismiss. And we can
00:42:09.360
talk about some of them and the implications of that I think are important because what it does mean
00:42:14.560
is that hopes for some kind of future reformation or some kind of linear trajectory where Islam goes
00:42:24.640
through what Christianity did. So reformation, then enlightenment, then secularism towards the end
00:42:31.600
of history of liberal democracy. I don't think that's a helpful way of looking at Islam because why,
00:42:39.600
why would Islam follow the same trajectory as Christianity if it's a different religion, right?
00:42:46.080
And this goes to your point about there being no equivalent of Sharia and Christianity, which is why
00:42:51.840
I think it is very hard to talk about Sharia in America or Europe because it's just really different
00:42:58.960
and it's really complicated. And, um, the closest equivalent, at least in Catholicism is canon law,
00:43:05.760
but canon law, first of all, doesn't quite cover nearly as much as Islamic law does. But canon law is
00:43:12.080
fundamentally about the internal organization of the Catholic church and its sort of immediate surroundings.
00:43:18.880
Um, it's about managing a hierarchy. It's about, um, it's about church building more than state
00:43:25.520
building. And that's even the case in the medieval era where there was this clear, maybe at least clear
00:43:32.640
in theory, distinction between civil law and ecclesial law. So there is a kind of inherent dualism,
00:43:39.840
I would argue, in the Christian tradition, not just today, but going back many centuries.
00:43:44.960
Well, it also just falls right out of the line in Matthew, render unto Caesar,
00:43:48.720
those things that are Caesar's unto God, those things that are God's.
00:43:51.440
Exactly. And even if you look at, you know, parts of the New Testament, when, when, um,
00:43:57.680
where Paul says, you know, Christ, um, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law
00:44:03.040
by becoming a curse for us. So even the attitude towards law, there isn't much public law in the New
00:44:10.480
Testament. And the reason for that, I think is actually, you know, I don't want to say it's,
00:44:16.480
it's a hundred percent clear, but one of the main reasons is that Jesus was a dissident against a
00:44:22.080
reigning state. So he had never, he never had to contend with governance. So naturally the New
00:44:29.280
Testament is not going to talk a lot about that because that's not what the early Christians were
00:44:35.600
dealing with at the founding moment of the religion. And this gets me to another key
00:44:41.520
distinction with Islam is that, Hey, let's be honest about it. I mean, prophet Muhammad was not
00:44:46.880
just a dissident. He was actually, and he wasn't just a prophet or a religious figure, but he was also
00:44:54.640
a politician and he was specifically, and this is in some ways even more important. He was a head of
00:44:59.920
state. So naturally if you're a believer, right? And if something is coming from God as revelation,
00:45:07.920
then naturally the Quran is going to have to have something to say about law and governance. If
00:45:13.280
that's what the early Muslims are dealing with. Otherwise, how, how would prophet Muhammad be guided?
00:45:20.400
Right. And even, but putting that aside, even if we're just approaching it from a purely analytical
00:45:25.600
or academic perspective as outsiders, we would also say that any book has to address the needs of the
00:45:33.520
time. So if we all can agree that prophet Muhammad and the early Muslims were dealing with these
00:45:39.760
questions of state building, then the Quran naturally will have more to say about such issues.
00:45:45.280
Yeah. And one of the problems obviously is that once you accept the principle of revelation,
00:45:51.680
once you accept the fact that this is, this book is not merely the product of its time, but the product
00:45:57.120
of God's omniscience, well then its edicts need to stand for all time. So they constrain the politics.
00:46:05.520
If there are political edicts in there, they constrain the politics of this and any future time.
00:46:11.280
And, you know, that, that's certainly perhaps not the only possible reading, but it, it's a natural
00:46:16.720
one. And it's the reading many people, you know, attempt to take in, in every revealed religion.
00:46:22.880
And following kind of directly on that point, what's the significance of the Quran being the
00:46:28.480
actual speech of God? Can you make that? Because obviously many, many Christians believe the measure
00:46:35.360
of being a fundamentalist Christian is if you believe that the Bible is perfect in all its parts and the
00:46:42.240
actual word of God. But that's not, still not quite the same thing as the Quran being the actual
00:46:50.640
speech of God. And many people, I think even most fundamentalist Christians who don't doubt that
00:46:56.240
Salafists or truly traditional Muslims believe every word of their holy book, even our own
00:47:03.040
fundamentalists don't understand that you can go one better and believe that the holy book has a,
00:47:08.960
itself as a kind of magical status. Yeah. So this was actually one of the fascinating aspects of
00:47:16.800
writing this book. And there's, there's nearly an entire chapter on the evolution of Christianity and
00:47:22.480
its attitudes towards politics. So I really had to dive into Christian theology and talk to
00:47:29.280
pastors and scholars and theologians and do my best to relate to a tradition that is in some ways
00:47:35.680
foreign to me. Again, like growing up in the Northeast, you don't, I didn't have a lot of
00:47:42.240
friends who took the Bible that seriously. So, you know, this, and so it really, it really struck me
00:47:50.800
in my research, what an important difference this was. So if you talk to far right evangelicals today,
00:47:57.360
they will say that the Bible is the word of God. Muslims will also tell you that the Quran is the
00:48:04.720
word of God, but they go one step further and they say that the Quran is God's actual speech.
00:48:11.360
And this is not some side thing or some incidental part of the religion, but it's actually a creedal
00:48:17.600
requirement of the religion. So similar to how Christianity loses theological content or meaning
00:48:24.160
if you take Christ out of it. So if you say that Christ is some ordinary guy, then you can find,
00:48:30.320
that's fine. You can be nominally Christian or culturally Christian, but there's not a lot of
00:48:34.880
theological content there because Christ is pretty central to Christianity. So similarly, and the Quran
00:48:43.360
being God's actual speech is central. And what that means is, is that it's not just inspired by God,
00:48:51.280
it's not preserved or protected by God only, but it's, it's every word and letter is directly from
00:48:59.360
God. So it's his speech in the quite literal sense of being his speech. So in other words, there's no
00:49:05.680
human, there's no human role or human authorship. So Muhammad didn't write a certain part of the Quran.
00:49:12.880
Um, on the other hand, even evangelicals will acknowledge because as a factual matter, it's true
00:49:19.760
that various parts of the Bible have been written by different authors, including people like Paul,
00:49:25.280
who I mentioned earlier. Um, but evangelicals would, would say that it's still in a sense,
00:49:31.520
the word of God and it's protected by God. And it's in that sense, free from falsehood,
00:49:36.960
but they would never, they would never pretend that the Bible or the New Testament, let's say,
00:49:43.200
more specifically, is directly from God in the way that Muslims would say the same about the Quran.
00:49:50.480
If I'm not mistaken, the only part of the Bible that God can be said to have written are the, the
00:49:58.480
two variant Ten Commandments. He etched those into stone, apparently, but those have a different status
00:50:05.760
than everything else in the book. Exactly. And in the New Testament, there are, you know,
00:50:10.800
there are obviously places where Jesus is quoted and that, you know, that, so in that sense, those
00:50:17.040
parts of the New Testament, which, which aren't a huge part of it are, are, um, divine speech in a
00:50:23.280
sense, but most of the New Testament is not directly Jesus's words or God's words or whatever. Exactly.
00:50:29.120
Yeah. So this leads to, for among other reasons, to the problem that there hasn't been the same kind of
00:50:38.160
textual analysis of the Quran academically that you have had of the Bible for now, probably at least
00:50:44.640
200 years. Subjecting the Quran to the normal critical treatment that one, one sees in the ivory
00:50:53.520
tower, has really been either forbidden or anathematized. Traditionally, I remember my
00:51:01.680
foundation in part sponsored a conference in Germany that was, you know, for the first time in, in
00:51:07.760
anyone's memory, subjecting the Quran to very ordinary kinds of hermeneutics and linguistic analysis
00:51:16.640
that the Bible has been subjected to for two centuries. And this was actually obviously a
00:51:23.040
risky thing to do. I mean, most of the scholars publishing this work were working under pseudonyms,
00:51:27.920
and it's just a completely paranoid exercise in very ordinary academic behavior. Can you say anything
00:51:34.480
about that, about what, what, what hasn't been done to the Quran that could or, or should have happened?
00:51:39.840
So I think that what was done with the Bible can't really be done with the Quran in the sense that
00:51:47.920
there, this is not just an issue of evangelicals today, but, you know, as I, as I say in the book,
00:51:52.800
I mean, there's, there has never been a major sector denomination within Christianity that has argued
00:51:59.600
that the New Testament is God's actual speech, right? So there, there has always been a readiness to
00:52:05.760
have more, more of a critical engagement with the integrity of the text, because most people can
00:52:13.040
agree, even Christians, that most of the Bible was written by men. Now you just will not, so if you
00:52:25.200
want to bring, if you want to bring Muslims on board and get, you can't, so this is also, we have to be
00:52:32.640
pragmatic. Um, if, if someone goes to a group of even fairly broad-minded Muslims who are open to
00:52:40.560
progressive interpretations and you tell this group, well, hey, you know, there has to be
00:52:47.680
a critical engagement with the text that even starts to dismantle some of the things that are dear to
00:52:57.040
the vast majority, if not all believing Muslims, um, then, you know, it's a non-starter, and I, I just don't
00:53:04.080
know. So even if, even if you believe that, or other people believe that, um, how productive is that?
00:53:12.640
There was a time, I should point out, that the Catholic Church attempted to quash this. I mean, there was a
00:53:19.760
movement under the Catholic Church called modernism, where scholars were encouraged to look closely at
00:53:26.880
the Bible using all the modern tools and put it on as firm a scholarly footing as they could, and
00:53:34.640
they quickly found that this had the effect of eroding rather than, than bolstering their faith,
00:53:39.920
because they were finding errors or inconsistencies, or just learning more about the process of
00:53:45.920
inclusion or, or rejection of various texts. You know, it revealed that whole generations of
00:53:51.760
Christians had lived with certain books being canonical, which are no longer thought to be
00:53:57.040
canonical, and, and vice versa. So it was just this carnival of, of errors and, you know, merely, you know,
00:54:04.880
all too human efforts to put together a tradition that they exposed, and so the Catholic Church
00:54:11.120
tried to stop it at a certain point. But I don't know if you remember that story that came as,
00:54:17.040
now again, something like 10, 15 years ago, where this scholar who I believe still goes by,
00:54:22.880
by the pseudonym, I think it's Christopher Luxembourg.
00:54:26.720
Yeah, he found, he found that there was a passage in the Quran relating to the, the virgins that martyrs
00:54:33.840
and other lucky, lucky people are supposedly going to get in paradise, that the word for virgin,
00:54:39.520
excuse my non-existent Arabic here, but I think it's, it's hur or huri, actually meant, at the time,
00:54:47.520
based on textual analysis, white raisins, which were supposedly a delicacy. So rather than getting,
00:54:53.600
there were a lot of jokes, you know, among which I told at the time, rather than getting 72 virgins,
00:55:00.080
you get a fistful of raisins when you get to paradise. But that's, again, this, this is a,
00:55:05.040
a scholar of Middle Eastern languages, forced to live under a pseudonym and publish obscurely,
00:55:12.640
or not publish at all, for analyzing the text. But you make the obvious point that the,
00:55:19.440
what one finds when one analyzes text in these ways is that because these books are almost certainly the
00:55:27.280
product of merely human speech, you find evidence of that fact. And you find that parts of the Quran
00:55:32.960
are actually swiped from preexisting literature and, and all the rest. And that's, there is something
00:55:38.240
in principle seditious and destabilizing about that. But why is it that you, you close the door to
00:55:45.760
the possibility of that project ever working the same magic it worked on Christianity?
00:55:50.960
Well, so I should say that, I mean, most Muslims aren't literalists and how they engage with the
00:55:56.800
text. So I don't really see that as the, I don't think the primary problem within Islam and among
00:56:04.240
Muslims is that the vast majority of Muslims pick up the Quran and subscribe to a very literalist
00:56:11.840
reading. So one way of putting it is that Muslims take the Quran as God's literal speech,
00:56:20.640
but they don't necessarily interpret that speech literally, if that makes sense.
00:56:25.920
And actually, so I was, I was brushing up on my, uh, my copy of your book with Majid,
00:56:31.120
Islam and the Future of Tolerance. And, um, and I was reminded that there are,
00:56:37.520
there were parts where I was like, huh, um, imagine and I, you know, we, we have friendly disagreements,
00:56:43.360
but we definitely do just disagree on a number of issues. But I, as I was kind of going back,
00:56:49.120
I was like, huh, I like how Majid is putting it here. So he has, he has a section where he talks
00:56:55.760
about the method of interpreting the text and the importance of Muslims acknowledging that there's no
00:57:03.520
one true reading of the text. And I think that's important that none of us is as fallible human
00:57:10.400
beings have access to God's will. We don't know what God really wanted. Um, when he, you know,
00:57:19.920
um, in certain verses of the Quran, right? So we can try our best to divine his intent or will.
00:57:27.120
And there's actually a whole, um, classical and academic literature on how to do that kind of
00:57:34.160
interpretation, which is very rich and diverse and complex, but there's no way to know for sure.
00:57:40.640
So I think there is already quite a bit of room to operate. And just to give one example
00:57:46.000
that comes up a lot for understandable reasons, the Hadud punishments. So the religiously derived
00:57:52.160
criminal punishments, and I should, um, I should offer the disclaimer that this is only a small part
00:57:58.480
of Islamic law. And we should be careful not to say that, Hey, Sharia is just about cutting people's
00:58:04.240
hands off, but they are there, right? You know, and let's not pretend that they aren't. Um, so there,
00:58:12.720
there are progressive interpretations. And I think Majid would probably subscribe to these, um,
00:58:19.280
that, and we have to be honest to, and, and say that this is a minority interpretation.
00:58:25.360
So what I, what I'm about to tell you now, I, the, the majority of scholars would not agree with me,
00:58:31.760
but you know, that the Quran, the Quran was revealed in a particular time and place in seventh
00:58:39.120
century Arabia. So there were different norms and values then. So something like cutting off the hands
00:58:44.800
of thieves did not offend the sensibilities of, of people at that time. And so the idea there was,
00:58:53.200
so what was God's intent? Some scholars will say that God's intent or the objective of those verses
00:59:00.000
is to have a deterrent effect. So the goal is to stop people from stealing. And that was an effective
00:59:08.000
way of doing that back then. But today we live in a different era. And if we want to achieve a similar
00:59:16.000
deterrent effect, there's other ways to do that besides chopping people's hands off, right?
00:59:21.840
I would argue there's probably no better way. I mean, it still would have, it would have a marvelous
00:59:26.800
deterrent effect still. And if God's goal is to deter theft, well then, you know, why not keep chopping?
00:59:36.720
You can see how what's, what's unstable about that kind of pirouette and why it can easily fall back to
00:59:43.200
the more straightforward and seemingly honest reading of the text, which is,
00:59:49.440
if it was good enough for God in the seventh century, it's good enough for God today. And he would,
00:59:53.520
and God in his wisdom would have put it differently if he meant it differently.
00:59:58.640
What you're basically saying, and again, I mean, you know, obviously, you know, I love Majid and
01:00:02.480
I certainly hope the project of, of reconstruing everything offensive in the tradition succeeds. But
01:00:09.200
the reason why this is an asymmetric battlefield is that the straightforward, literal, and good for
01:00:17.760
all time interpretation is always available to the person who wants to pick up the book and say,
01:00:24.560
well, listen, you know, what I'm hearing from Majid and Shadi and all these other overeducated
01:00:29.920
Muslims is that they know better than what God literally said. They, they know, they know what
01:00:38.080
God meant more than God did. No. Okay. But I don't think that I do. So, so I'll say this. Um,
01:00:44.800
I don't know if I'm right. Um, and that's why I don't. So, you know, sometimes people basically ask me
01:00:52.320
for fatwas. I'm not a theologian. I'm not in any position to tell people what God may have or may not
01:00:59.600
have meant with certain verses. This is just my, this is just me speaking as a citizen, as a person,
01:01:06.320
right? As an individual. And I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I'm wrong. And God
01:01:14.160
does in fact want people in this world to cut off the hands of thieves. I don't, I, I don't like that
01:01:23.600
idea. It makes me uncomfortable. And I also have, I also not to get into them, have somewhat complex
01:01:29.840
views on the nature of justice and something that you and Majid actually get into in, in your book as
01:01:36.560
well, which is this question of the created versus the uncreated Quran. I don't want to get into all of
01:01:43.120
that, but I'm someone who would like to think that God, that God, God is not going to commit
01:01:51.520
injustice. God is incapable of being unjust because he is supposed to be the most just.
01:01:59.520
So I consider certain things like, for example, like, um, husbands, um, I don't know, marital rate
01:02:08.000
to give one example, or husbands beating up their wives over a disagreement. Um, I'm not,
01:02:14.880
I'm not comfortable believing in a God that is okay with domestic abuse because that would undermine
01:02:23.360
one of God's qualities, which is being the bearer of justice.
01:02:29.440
Obviously, I can see the ethical wisdom in, in wanting to parse it that way. But again, it's,
01:02:36.880
it's open to the eternal quibble, which is, you're talking about an omniscient author here. If he
01:02:45.360
wanted to say it more clearly, he could have, right? And he's perfectly clear on, on apostasy
01:02:52.160
being a bad thing. Now he doesn't spell out the penalty for it in the Quran, as you know,
01:02:57.040
we need the hadith for that. But yeah, he's absolutely clear that this is not good and that
01:03:03.360
you should, you should fear and revile and, and in no ways befriend atheists and apostates and
01:03:11.040
blasphemers and anyone who would doubt the, the perfect veracity of this book. And that's a problem.
01:03:19.440
It's a social problem. It's a, it's a civilizational problem. It's a problem we have to figure out
01:03:24.160
how to overcome. And so, you know, interfaith dialogue and finding some way to moderate
01:03:30.800
that kind of sectarianism, you know, that's all progress in, in the 21st century sense.
01:03:36.800
But it's just very easy to see how that will keep falling back to the more straightforward
01:03:42.240
interpretation, which is, no, no, it's, it's clear here on virtually every page that God hates infidels,
01:03:50.000
right? And he's prepared a hell for them to go to. It's the whole point. It's the whole point of this
01:03:55.200
universe is to figure out how to get infidels into hell, right? If God had wanted to guide them,
01:04:00.480
he would have, right? And so he's in any sane ethical view, this is a totally perverse psychological
01:04:07.200
experiment. You know, you, you, you put, imagine putting stupid people into giving them a puzzle they
01:04:13.120
can't solve, right? Making it just too hard for them to solve, giving them no help at all. In fact,
01:04:18.480
giving them further reasons to be confused about the right solution and then punishing them with
01:04:24.480
an eternity in fire for failing to solve the puzzle you made that was too hard for them.
01:04:29.600
That's essentially the universe we live in if you're a Muslim or, you know, arguably if you're
01:04:34.960
a Christian as well. And so that's from a, the point of view of a non-believer, the whole thing is
01:04:41.360
absurd. But more consequentially and more relevantly to this discussion, it seems that the fundamentalist,
01:04:47.600
for lack of a better word, always has the advantage of saying, listen, just read the book and honestly
01:04:55.120
grapple with what it says here and absorb the fact that God had infinite freedom to put it any way he
01:05:02.400
wanted. If he wanted to tell you the universe was billions of years old, he could have told you that.
01:05:07.600
If he wanted to tell you about the importance of learning mathematics, he could have told you that.
01:05:12.800
But no, he's told you to treat women like property, right? Or continue the practice of slavery under
01:05:21.280
these, you know, more refined conditions or whatever it is. That's a problem. That's why
01:05:27.120
the Islamic State really is the crystalline version of the retort to any kind of modernizing efforts.
01:05:35.200
Sorry guys, we're going to, we're going to show you what the project actually looks like
01:05:40.880
But, but if the fundum, if the fundamentalist or literal literalist reading of scripture was the
01:05:47.600
default setting, then the majority of Muslims today would be fundamentalists and that they aren't.
01:05:53.760
I think that's a false conclusion. It's understandable. But the truth is, is that most Muslims happily
01:06:01.200
are human beings first. Insofar as they may believe in paradise, they're not sure of it,
01:06:08.240
say. They're not committed to just seeing this world as a loathsome moment of temptation on the way to
01:06:16.720
a sublime eternity. They want a nice life in this world for understandable reasons. And so their
01:06:22.720
commitment, either they're just not especially educated about what Islam is, and, but this,
01:06:27.840
this is not just Muslims we're talking about. We're talking about religious people in general.
01:06:31.280
This is true of Christians and Buddhists and Hindus and everyone else who's in thrall to some
01:06:36.560
otherworldly belief system. To the degree that they find life in this world captivating, beautiful,
01:06:43.600
worth maintaining, worth improving, they are captivated and they have, they have another
01:06:49.680
commitment. And when they read God saying something that seems inimical to maximizing human flourishing,
01:06:57.360
whether it's political or economic or intellectual or artistic or any other way, they decide to
01:07:03.840
disregard God's crazy edict there because it is incompatible with what they want out of life. And that's a
01:07:10.240
good thing. And most, even Muslims, for the most part, have been captured by that modern, secular,
01:07:19.040
humanist project. And that's the lever we have to keep pulling on some level.
01:07:23.520
Well, I mean, in a sense that I agree with you that Islam, well, maybe, so certainly Muslims are pragmatic,
01:07:32.080
because they have to be. But I think I would argue that Islam is also pragmatic and flexible, that it can
01:07:39.440
incorporate ideas from outside of scripture and then sort of retroactively Islamize them. And I know
01:07:49.600
that you argue, you know, if I recall in parts of the moral landscape, or maybe it was at the end of
01:07:58.000
faith, one of them that, that the, and some of the argument that you're making now that to the extent
01:08:05.920
that Muslims are pragmatic, it's because of things that are foreign to their faith. And it's because
01:08:12.400
of the sort of indelible pull of secularization that they cannot avoid because they live in the real
01:08:19.280
world. But I don't know why we have to see those things as outside of Islam or not falling within
01:08:26.720
the realm of religion. And that's, and that's why I think Islam has been quite flexible and resonant
01:08:36.080
to this very day, despite a lot of challenges to it, is that it is able to bring those other things
01:08:43.360
in. So someone can be fully modern, and fully Muslim and not have to choose where I think,
01:08:49.760
if you look at Christianity at a crucial moment in the 19th century in particular,
01:08:57.280
where people were essentially making a choice between being Christian and being modern, because
01:09:03.680
the church was so avowedly against popular modern concepts like universal suffrage or democracy or
01:09:12.400
socialism, where Islam has actually been quite nimble in this regard in being somewhat comfortable.
01:09:20.480
So that's why you have phrases that people use quite often, like Islamic democracy, Islamic socialism,
01:09:27.920
Islamic finance. And I think that's, that's key to understanding why Islam has been resistant
01:09:38.800
to this kind of more aggressive secularization that would privatize Islam, or to kind of put it in a
01:09:46.720
box. Muslims have realized, I think, by and large, that they don't have to put Islam in a box to live
01:09:55.520
Let's get to this, because this is drawing to the heart of your claim, which most people find provocative,
01:10:02.080
which differentiates what you're doing or saying from what I certainly hear Majid saying. And this is
01:10:08.880
that, for all practical purposes, Islamism is here to stay, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
01:10:16.880
I have a quote here from you, where you say, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing
01:10:20.160
for Islam to play an outsized role in public life. And you also say, quote, I see very little reason
01:10:27.520
to think that secularism is going to win out in a war of ideas. This is a kind of skepticism about
01:10:34.560
secularism. And that's coupled to something that you do seem to view as a kind of intrinsic good,
01:10:42.960
which is democracy, or the respect for democracy, or the outcome of a democratic process. So that as
01:10:50.000
long as the people tell you what they want, and their wants are made effective at the level of
01:10:55.760
government through the democratic process, it's not for us to say what they should want, or to
01:11:01.600
deny them what they want. And you seem to think that there's not really a deep argument for secularism,
01:11:09.600
but there is a deep argument for democracy. I want to talk about that a little bit, because I see that
01:11:15.680
the other way around. I don't see democracy to be an intrinsic good. If the people are imbeciles
01:11:21.040
or religious maniacs, well, then you could argue they're not ready for democracy.
01:11:26.080
Or democracy is suicidal. It could be suicidal. When I say that religion shouldn't play a
01:11:31.600
role in public policy or government, what I mean is that dogmatism shouldn't play a role, and
01:11:38.720
unreason shouldn't play a role, and the denial of science shouldn't play a role, and superstition
01:11:44.960
or a belief in magic shouldn't play a role. And the reason why secularism, let's just take a core
01:11:51.040
principle of secularism, which is at odds with much of what Muslims believe, and certainly much of what
01:11:58.480
Islamists believe, just a commitment to free speech and a commitment to freedom of thought, which is
01:12:04.400
really at the core. This is an intrinsic good for this reason. It is the only real error-correcting
01:12:13.360
mechanism we've got intellectually and ethically moving forward. The moment you say that unpopular
01:12:21.760
opinions, or new opinions, or startling opinions are not only unpopular, startling, new, and worthy
01:12:30.000
of criticism, perhaps, but illegal, we're going to punish you for having them, right? We will kill you
01:12:36.080
for your apostasy. We will kill you for the cartoon we didn't like, or the novel we didn't like, or the
01:12:42.480
play you shouldn't have staged. The moment you make that move, you put a brick wall at the horizon
01:12:48.400
of human conversation, and there's really no telling how bad that could be in The Limit. And the only
01:12:55.680
way we can move forward, morally and scientifically, and culturally, really, is to have conversation be
01:13:01.680
open. And that is fundamental in a way that democracy merely isn't.
01:13:06.480
Yeah, so let's see, a couple things there. So I guess one thing that's worth mentioning that,
01:13:13.920
so my own progressive views on certain issues, so I support gay marriage, I support decriminalization
01:13:20.720
of marijuana, things that are associated with classical liberalism, let's say, and the left as well in the
01:13:27.680
US. I guess I've sort of come to the conclusion that my arguments about those things would be
01:13:36.320
compelling to me and people like me. I'm under no illusion that they'll be compelling to a majority
01:13:44.160
of Egyptians or Pakistanis or whatever. So I actually am willing to acknowledge that my views are not going
01:13:51.840
to win out when it comes to Islam. And I have to be realistic about that. And so that's one thing I
01:14:01.120
Let me just get you to refine that or unpack that a little bit, because half the time I hear you say it's just that.
01:14:07.600
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