Making Sense - Sam Harris - #82 — The End of the World According to ISIS

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:08.820 This is Sam Harris.

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00:00:46.460 Today I am speaking with Graham Wood.

00:00:49.680 Graham is a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine.

00:00:53.620 He has written for The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

00:00:58.360 And many other publications.

00:01:00.800 He was the 2014-2015 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

00:01:08.800 And he teaches in the Political Science Department at Yale University.

00:01:13.060 And he's the author of the book, The Way of the Strangers, Encounters with the Islamic State.

00:01:18.500 And we get deep into his book, and into the worldview of ISIS.

00:01:24.440 We use ISIS and the Islamic State interchangeably.

00:01:28.280 And we talk about his experience reporting on ISIS, the myth of online recruitment, how to

00:01:35.320 challenge the theology of ISIS.

00:01:38.100 We talk about the quality of ISIS's propaganda.

00:01:40.700 And Graham reveals the identity of the most important American recruit to the Islamic State.

00:01:46.660 And we spent a long time talking about the surprising significance of Jesus and the Antichrist

00:01:52.760 under Islam.

00:01:54.360 So there's a lot here.

00:01:55.640 And Graham is an amazing authority on these topics.

00:02:00.100 And it was a great pleasure to finally get him on the podcast.

00:02:02.080 So, without further delay, I bring you Graham Wood.

00:02:14.140 I am here with Graham Wood.

00:02:16.180 Graham, thanks for coming on the podcast.

00:02:18.680 Good to be here.

00:02:19.740 You have written this wonderful book, The Way of the Strangers, which is all about the Islamic 0.99

00:02:25.200 State, its rise, and you get right up to the point where its fall seems plausible.

00:02:33.520 Things have moved on a little bit since you published the book.

00:02:36.160 But it's just a really entertaining and deep introduction to this phenomenon of just global

00:02:45.320 jihadism more generally than ISIS.

00:02:47.840 But you get into the details in a very accessible way.

00:02:51.780 The book is structured around some very engaging profiles of people and also fairly amusing

00:02:58.520 profiles of people who you have spent some time with.

00:03:01.380 So my first question for you is just, as a journalist, did you feel that you were taking

00:03:06.760 much personal risk reporting this book?

00:03:10.120 I always worried a little bit about what might happen, because especially meeting someone for

00:03:14.300 the first time, you never know what he or she is going to do or what friends that

00:03:19.160 person's going to bring along.

00:03:20.120 But ironically, reporting on the Islamic State has been one of the safer assignments I've 0.98

00:03:25.660 had.

00:03:26.460 Being in war zones where you don't know where the bullets are going to be coming from, you

00:03:31.200 don't know who you're talking to, is often a very dangerous thing.

00:03:36.600 But talking to ISIS supporters is often an experience of subjecting yourself to proselytization

00:03:43.920 that they are really eager to deliver.

00:03:46.760 So it would be weird for them to attack me if I came to them and said honestly and verifiably,

00:03:54.900 look, I want to know about ISIS.

00:03:56.840 They are on this planet to oblige.

00:04:00.220 And so they, in general, are pretty happy to talk.

00:04:03.800 That comes through in the reporting.

00:04:06.660 You have these really adorable encounters with people who just have endless disposable time

00:04:12.720 to indoctrinate you.

00:04:14.400 And then you describe their apparent loss of enthusiasm once it's clear that you are not

00:04:20.620 a good mark for this.

00:04:22.060 But they clearly want to get their message out.

00:04:24.280 And I guess we should say that you are reporting these stories not from ISIS-held territory.

00:04:32.880 Well, it can't be taken for granted that someone won't do something horrible to you in Australia

00:04:37.520 or in Egypt or in Turkey or in the United States, for that matter.

00:04:41.480 And most of the people I spoke to did say, I should go to Syria.

00:04:45.500 They said, you know, we understand you'd be afraid to go there, that you think you might

00:04:49.880 get enslaved or beheaded.

00:04:51.800 But if you went there with permission, unlike how James Foley went, you'd be okay.

00:04:57.600 So the most dangerous encounters that I had were probably in places that we don't otherwise

00:05:02.860 think of as terribly dangerous, like maybe Norway or Australia or the United States, where

00:05:08.460 you're going to a cafe in a part of town that you don't know.

00:05:11.880 And you never know if there's going to be a van that pulls up next to you and pulls you

00:05:15.880 away.

00:05:17.500 That was always a danger.

00:05:18.840 But in the end, I was mostly just in danger of being overfed by these people.

00:05:24.580 That's an interesting point, this idea that if you went to Syria or Iraq and spoke to ISIS

00:05:33.000 directly, you'd be safe if you did it through the appropriate channels.

00:05:37.340 I was amused and slightly alarmed to see that John Walker Lind from his prison cell was somebody

00:05:44.940 who was advocating that you do that.

00:05:47.380 He seems completely unrehabilitated, Lind.

00:05:51.300 To remind people, John Walker Lind was the, often referred to as the American Taliban.

00:05:55.840 He was this young man from Marin County, as everyone should know, a bastion of privilege,

00:06:01.840 who decided to go fight with the Taliban very early on, I mean, before September 11th.

00:06:07.180 And in the aftermath of September 11th, he was caught fighting for them, was quickly prosecuted

00:06:13.660 and has disappeared into the bowels of our prison system.

00:06:17.120 It sounds like he's still there, quite full of faith and happy to advise you to go talk

00:06:23.140 to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi if you can manage it.

00:06:27.680 Yeah, the way that I interacted with John Walker Lind was as follows.

00:06:32.120 He's been in prison since 2001.

00:06:35.240 I wrote to him and said, look, there seems to be this phenomenon called the Islamic State,

00:06:39.440 and a lot of people who in some ways are kind of like you have gone over there.

00:06:43.340 So given that you're still on American soil, and given that you're reading this letter

00:06:48.000 that I've sent you in prison, apparently you can be reached.

00:06:51.360 So do you have anything to tell me about what you think is motivating people and what the

00:06:56.260 Islamic State's all about? 0.96

00:06:57.200 And the letters that he wrote back were friendly, maybe a little bit officious, but were saying

00:07:05.700 in essence that the Islamic State would respect its covenants, he believed, if I went to them 0.92

00:07:11.380 and said, look, I'm a journalist.

00:07:13.060 I'm curious about what you're doing.

00:07:14.840 Can I go over there and have a kind of guided tour of the caliphate?

00:07:19.180 And yeah, I told him, that's not going to happen.

00:07:22.160 I'm not going to go over there and just take their word for it that they're not going to

00:07:27.380 behead me. 0.92

00:07:28.380 And he said, well, you know, it's really the only way to find out. 0.71

00:07:30.820 And trust me, they seem like men of their word.

00:07:34.000 So it appears that these 16-odd years that he's spent in prison has not disabused him

00:07:42.140 of the jihadism that he had pursued with the Taliban.

00:07:46.180 Instead, if anything, he's gone from being a Taliban supporter to perhaps an Islamic State

00:07:51.220 one.

00:07:52.380 Now, have there been journalists who have followed that path?

00:07:55.460 I know there's the one German journalist, I think, who crossed into ISIS territory and met

00:08:01.840 some people, although I can't remember if he did that with any permission.

00:08:06.000 Has this theory of Lin's been demonstrated?

00:08:10.840 Yes, and it's been so far verified in 100% of the cases, which is one case.

00:08:17.160 The guy is Jürgen Todenhofer, who's an elderly German magistrate, kind of an amiable weirdo,

00:08:24.900 very interesting political figure who's interviewed Bashar al-Assad and who wrote to a bunch of

00:08:31.120 German jihadis who were in ISIS territory and said, I'd love to go over there.

00:08:34.340 Can I come?

00:08:36.040 They brought him over, showed him the city of Mosul under ISIS control.

00:08:39.560 He took a bunch of, a lot of video.

00:08:42.640 And from the sounds of it, I spoke to him about this once.

00:08:46.540 Up until the very last moment that he crossed the Turkish border to safety, he wondered whether

00:08:51.640 they might kill him.

00:08:52.560 And even while he was over there, they said, look, we will respect the permission that we

00:08:57.720 gave you from the office of the caliph himself to come over here and keep you safe.

00:09:02.940 But we promise you, eventually we're coming to Germany and your name will be on our list.

00:09:08.740 Right.

00:09:09.540 That's always charming in a host. 1.00

00:09:11.160 I will keep you safe here, but I'm coming to kill you where you live. 0.98

00:09:14.520 Yeah, it's hospitality of a sort. 0.96

00:09:16.880 So just to rewind here, just to give people a little context, because I will have introduced

00:09:21.760 you in my intro to this episode, but you initially got into this research.

00:09:29.480 You wrote a cover article for The Atlantic magazine about ISIS a couple of years ago.

00:09:35.380 And that, at the time, I believe was the most read article in the history of the magazine.

00:09:40.520 It may still be, although I imagine you've had a little competition in the last couple of

00:09:44.980 years with the rise of Trump.

00:09:47.400 And now you have gone on to write this book.

00:09:50.880 You and I actually did, before I had a podcast, you and I did a long interview where I interviewed

00:09:55.740 you for my blog.

00:09:57.240 That covers territory that I don't think we'll really cover again in this conversation.

00:10:01.840 So people can go seek that out on my blog if they're interested.

00:10:06.600 Let's just start with the emergence of ISIS.

00:10:10.100 And then I think we're going to get into current events pretty quickly here.

00:10:14.120 But the birth of this group is fairly astonishing.

00:10:19.920 You report on how ISIS conquered Mosul with a force of something like 500 or 1,000 men and

00:10:26.200 put the entire Iraqi army to flight.

00:10:29.720 It was almost a proof of their divine aid in some way.

00:10:34.560 I mean, it was just like this miraculous display of cowardice on the part of an army that we had

00:10:39.280 trained.

00:10:40.080 How do you explain that first moment?

00:10:41.880 It wasn't actually that surprising to me.

00:10:45.020 I was in Mosul in early 2013, end of 2012.

00:10:50.960 I believe I was the last American reporter to be in Mosul.

00:10:54.380 And my experience of the city even then, and remember, this is like a year and a half before

00:10:59.180 ISIS took control of the city, was that everybody was afraid of what they were then calling al-Qaeda.

00:11:04.900 They were saying that shopkeepers would be extorted.

00:11:08.420 And if I, as an obvious foreigner, was spotted on the street, there's a really good chance I 0.99

00:11:13.620 would get kidnapped.

00:11:14.960 So even back then, there was the sense that there was no law except al-Qaeda's, except

00:11:20.040 ISIS's. 0.75

00:11:21.060 And there was definitely no respect for the Iraqi army.

00:11:24.020 So when ISIS came to town and actually took over the city with, you know, four or five

00:11:28.800 hundred guys, a bunch of pickups, machine guns, and so forth, it was like, yeah, this

00:11:34.280 was a city that was anarchic before, and they were almost just making it official.

00:11:40.000 But didn't thousands of troops just flee outright when these 500 men showed up?

00:11:46.580 Yeah.

00:11:46.720 And the troops who were there when I was there in 2013 was, they were garrisoned in just a

00:11:53.220 couple spots in the city.

00:11:54.580 They were considered tools of a Shia sectarian government.

00:11:59.220 Mosul's mostly a Sunni city.

00:12:01.520 And so it wasn't as if they were doing foot patrols, winning hearts and minds.

00:12:06.460 They were considered just those people in a barracks over there who we never see and we

00:12:11.640 would never trust with our safety.

00:12:13.360 So just imagine a bunch of Sunnis come to town. 1.00

00:12:16.260 They say, we represent your interests, you, the Sunnis of Mosul. 0.77

00:12:21.740 And those soldiers over there, we will let them run away, most of them, and we'll control

00:12:28.160 your city.

00:12:29.100 How would you like that?

00:12:30.060 And a lot of people in Mosul just said, well, that might be better than the status quo.

00:12:34.620 So I think that explains how they were able to take over so much so fast.

00:12:40.420 Now, how many people at this point have emigrated to join ISIS?

00:12:45.540 Is the figure still around 40,000?

00:12:48.740 Yeah, 40,000 is about right.

00:12:50.800 They, in the middle of last year, told people not to come anymore.

00:12:54.140 So you can expect that the numbers haven't risen too much.

00:12:57.460 And a lot of those 40,000 are already dead.

00:12:59.500 But yeah, from overseas, from countries that are not Iraq and Syria, usually the number

00:13:05.640 quoted is 40 to 45.

00:13:07.960 Now, one of the things you do in your book, which many people decline to do, is you get

00:13:15.100 into the heads of these guys in a way that allows you to see the world from their point

00:13:22.000 of view.

00:13:22.320 And when you do that, the behavior of these people becomes fairly logical.

00:13:29.900 The mysteries begin to evaporate once you begin to take people at their word, when they

00:13:35.260 tell you over and over again what they care about, what motivates them.

00:13:39.420 And it's amazing to me.

00:13:41.040 I mean, this is something that has now astonished me for going on 16 years, since September 11th.

00:13:47.860 People just find this virtually impossible to do.

00:13:52.340 Scholars of religion, or seeming scholars of religion, decline to do this.

00:13:57.140 Political scientists routinely prove themselves unable to do this.

00:14:01.320 And you have a quote here, I think it was fairly early in the book, that I loved, which is,

00:14:05.980 when someone says something too evil to believe, one response is not to doubt their sincerity,

00:14:11.020 but to expand one's capacity to imagine what otherwise decent people can desire.

00:14:15.780 That, I concluded, is the proper response to the Islamic State. 1.00

00:14:20.440 And your encounters with these people just become this exercise in accepting their account

00:14:27.100 of themselves.

00:14:28.480 You pressure test it in a variety of ways, because no account is free of internal contradictions.

00:14:35.060 But it's just, from my point of view, a very satisfying excavation of a worldview, which

00:14:44.400 you tackle, again, through many of these profiles you do with jihadists of various commitment.

00:14:52.260 You know, you gave a list of a few disciplines that have been neglectful in their duty to explain

00:14:57.580 some of these things, religious studies, political scientists, and so forth.

00:15:01.220 And in some ways, I've taken to heart messages that they've given about Muslims in other contexts

00:15:08.300 that they seem not to have applied themselves in this one, which is that we in the West,

00:15:13.040 non-Muslims, secular academics, we have taken it upon ourselves to speak on behalf of people

00:15:23.760 from far-off lands for brown people, for Muslims. 0.99

00:15:27.760 And so part of what I was doing was just heeding the call to instead listen to them, let them

00:15:34.040 speak for themselves.

00:15:35.300 It's not as if I, by examining their socioeconomic status or the political circumstances of where

00:15:43.300 they come from, can expect to just understand what they believe about the world.

00:15:48.740 I will be able to understand some things, but why not talk to them?

00:15:53.500 Why not let them speak for themselves?

00:15:55.160 And so what I ended up doing was, I think, an exercise that was as much anthropological

00:16:03.340 as journalistic.

00:16:04.540 It was trying to describe a culture, a mindset, a view of the world, and to describe it in a

00:16:12.640 way that the people who were speaking would recognize as accurate or at least interesting.

00:16:17.620 One thing that is, I think, surprising or will be surprising to many of our listeners is

00:16:23.100 that this myth of purely online recruitment is, in fact, a myth.

00:16:29.460 There's this picture that has emerged, which is that people get recruited entirely on the

00:16:36.260 basis of online contacts, and they have no affiliates in the real world that could explain

00:16:42.800 how their sympathy got bent toward jihadism.

00:16:46.420 I'm sure there must be some pure cases of that where it really is an internet phenomenon.

00:16:52.600 But for the most part, that is a myth.

00:16:55.540 Yeah, for the most part, that is nonsense.

00:16:58.060 The idea that people will just go on Twitter and be told ISIS is the way to go, read these

00:17:06.120 websites, read Dabik magazine, and get a ticket to Turkey and you're on your way.

00:17:11.840 That is not how it goes in, as far as I can tell, almost any cases of men.

00:17:18.920 I'll get to women in a second. 1.00

00:17:20.740 Usually for people who go over there, they know somebody who's already gone.

00:17:25.360 Obviously, there was a first mover, someone who went over and told his buddies, hey, it's

00:17:32.080 really nice over here.

00:17:33.200 There's a house that I got as soon as I arrived, and that kind of thing.

00:17:38.600 But in general, there's someone who you've met outside the mosque or in a cafe or on a

00:17:44.260 sports team, and that person has done something important in showing you that a human being

00:17:51.400 can go over there.

00:17:52.100 It's not gods who have gone over, but people like you and me.

00:17:56.480 And that changes everything, and everything flows from that.

00:17:59.840 Now, in the case of women, a little bit different. 0.99

00:18:03.580 You could look at the women who were recruited to al-Qaeda, and first of all, there aren't

00:18:07.960 very many of them.

00:18:09.140 Al-Qaeda was like a military organization.

00:18:11.880 It was very male, and it mostly thought of women as encumbrances because they wouldn't

00:18:20.140 be fighting.

00:18:21.320 Whereas with ISIS, they're trying to create a society, and so they need men, they need 0.99

00:18:24.900 women, they need children. 1.00

00:18:26.280 And so they've had to reach out in different ways.

00:18:29.860 And for that, online recruitment has been really, really valuable.

00:18:34.920 They've been able to talk to people who otherwise would be in very conservative milieus where

00:18:40.620 it's not like they could go talk to some stranger, leave the house whenever they wanted.

00:18:46.000 And so online, you can find people who are purely online recruited and who eventually made

00:18:50.980 it to Syria if they're women. 1.00

00:18:52.520 So focusing on the men for a second, the impulse for a woman to join the Islamic State, I must 1.00

00:18:59.820 say, remains a bit inscrutable to me.

00:19:03.480 But for the men, it really doesn't.

00:19:06.120 And at one point, you talk about what jihadists in general do, and ISIS has taken this to the

00:19:12.680 point of perfection, is that they, and this is a quote from you, they weaponize a fanatical

00:19:17.560 sense of shame by declaring that jihad is the only absolution.

00:19:22.360 Talk about this notion of shame for a moment, because it probably doesn't have a reference

00:19:28.840 point in the ears of many of our listeners.

00:19:31.260 When I was being recruited to an ISIS-like organization, this was before the time of ISIS, I was in Cairo

00:19:37.680 speaking with a guy I could only describe as a master recruiter.

00:19:42.360 And one of the first things that he would try to emphasize to me was that I had done horrible

00:19:47.020 things in my past.

00:19:48.720 He would ask me, wouldn't ask me to confess details of, say, my sexual history or whether

00:19:53.680 I'd use drugs or alcohol or my failings, but he would point out, God has requested that

00:19:59.200 you not do these things, and there will be punishment for you in the hereafter for the

00:20:04.360 things that you've done.

00:20:05.600 So he was really trying to emphasize this sense of deep, deep sin, which I think is familiar

00:20:13.100 to almost anyone who has gone over to ISIS.

00:20:15.640 ISIS says exactly the same thing, that God is watching you, he is nearer to you than your

00:20:20.560 own jugular vein, is one of the most famous lines from the scriptures that ISIS likes to

00:20:28.360 invoke.

00:20:29.940 And so when they say to someone, especially someone who has an especially sinful past as

00:20:34.980 a rent boy or drug addict or what have you, then part of their appeal is that they can absolve

00:20:42.300 you from the sins of your past.

00:20:45.180 You know, if you die in battle, you don't have to pay the bill when it comes to Judgment

00:20:49.380 Day because you're a martyr and you get fast-tracked straight to Paradise, whereas people who die

00:20:55.280 comfortably in their beds, they do have to go through an absolution process, a purification,

00:21:01.260 a kind of burning limbo before they enter the gates of Paradise.

00:21:07.460 Yeah, don't their ribs get crushed together and cracked at the moment of the Day of Judgment?

00:21:12.800 The recruiters love to talk about the lurid punishments.

00:21:17.440 And yeah, there's something called the punishment of the graves.

00:21:20.060 This is not just, by the way, an ISIS thing.

00:21:21.900 This is part of a fairly orthodox reading of the idea of the hereafter in Islam, that when you die,

00:21:28.980 like, you get trash compacted within your grave and you scream as your ribs crack and eventually 0.56

00:21:35.620 touch each other. 0.66

00:21:36.580 And the only ones who can hear this screaming are animals and genies.

00:21:42.480 So there's all sorts of bad things that happen to you after you die, unless you are one of

00:21:47.820 two categories, a martyr, someone who dies in the course of jihad or in a few other categories

00:21:54.020 of death, and a prophet, which none of us are.

00:21:58.300 So if you have a sense that you've got a steep, steep bill to pay in the hereafter before you

00:22:05.780 go through the pearly gates, then you have all the more incentive to die faster and more

00:22:12.120 gloriously to avoid paying that bill.

00:22:14.400 It's a dine and dash theory of the hereafter.

00:22:16.740 I feel like I'm paying that bill on the jujitsu mats.

00:22:19.240 No one hears my screams, not even the genies, when I get crushed.

00:22:22.660 But you can always tap out.

00:22:24.080 You can't tap out when the creator of the universe is doing it to you.

00:22:27.200 One hears.

00:22:28.480 No, not when he's got you in a rear naked choke. 0.86

00:22:31.560 You can't do anything about that.

00:22:33.020 This is something you keep confronting throughout the book.

00:22:36.200 You continually bump into the problem of arguing against the Islamic State's theology.

00:22:43.060 And unfortunately, it's a non-trivial problem.

00:22:46.780 It's a problem that, as I said, many scholars and many mainstream Muslims shirk.

00:22:53.320 I guess the pun on the Arabic term for polytheism should be intended there.

00:22:58.940 So many so-called moderate Muslims and their apologists just lie about the doctrines from

00:23:05.680 which the Islamic State is drawing its inspiration.

00:23:08.320 At one point, you quote the head of CARE, the Council of American-Islamic Relations, claiming

00:23:13.680 that there are no end-time prophecies in Islam.

00:23:18.100 I hear people like Reza Aslan say that the Koran abolishes slavery, right? 0.88

00:23:22.800 There's no support for slavery in Islam.

00:23:25.800 Countless people have said that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam.

00:23:30.040 President Obama quite famously said this over and over again.

00:23:33.040 And one reason why I think Hillary Clinton lost is that she seemed inclined to follow

00:23:37.460 that quite delusional line.

00:23:40.240 And rather than talk about the actual link between specific doctrines with respect to

00:23:46.140 martyrdom and jihad and apostasy and blasphemy and all the rest and this death cult behavior, 0.70

00:23:53.640 people reflexively talk about U.S. foreign policy and the Ba'ath Party and bad people who

00:24:00.580 would do bad things anyway, right?

00:24:02.220 This is just religions being used as a pretext. 0.96

00:24:04.980 They claim that ISIS has no theological justification for its actions.

00:24:10.160 At one point, you quote somebody, I think it was a Guardian writer, who even argued that

00:24:13.580 ISIS drew its actual inspiration from the French Revolution and from the scientific enlightenment.

00:24:20.320 You have people like Tariq Ramadan saying that ISIS is not a religious phenomenon.

00:24:24.580 It's purely political.

00:24:25.600 I mean, there's just this tsunami of obscurantism that rises up every time a person attempts

00:24:34.060 to talk about the theological roots of this phenomenon.

00:24:38.080 So how have you encountered that obscurantism?

00:24:42.220 And were you taken in by that initially and then gradually deprogrammed through your encounter

00:24:48.540 with sincere believers?

00:24:49.620 What was that like for you in terms of disabusing yourself of that myth?

00:24:55.600 I had the fortune or maybe misfortune of encountering ISIS-like beliefs or jihadist beliefs abnormally

00:25:03.940 early in my life.

00:25:05.280 I was about, let's see, 20, I was 22 years old when I first met someone who was a follower

00:25:11.100 of bin Laden.

00:25:12.400 I was at a conference in Peshawar, Pakistan.

00:25:15.760 I was just a backpacker passing through, but there was a conference going on, so I was curious

00:25:19.380 what was there.

00:25:19.900 And it was basically a bunch of jihadists who were getting together, and they were in fact

00:25:24.720 addressed remotely by bin Laden himself.

00:25:28.240 So I got to talk to people.

00:25:29.820 And from that early stage, I already had a sense that there was more to jihadism than just political

00:25:38.860 grievance or any of the other things that you listed.

00:25:41.940 And there was certainly, among the people who were part of that group, an absolute devotion

00:25:48.020 to Islamic scriptures and to interpretations of those scriptures that have been around for

00:25:52.920 a long time and are not made up out of thin air in the 20th century or 21st century.

00:25:58.080 So that came first for me.

00:26:00.860 And some of the apologetic efforts hit my ears well after, and well after I knew what the responses

00:26:09.220 were from the jihadist side, for me it was so, the response was so ubiquitous.

00:26:18.780 Every side was saying, especially in this country, that ISIS was not a religious phenomenon,

00:26:25.460 that ISIS was best understood in ways that had little to do with the history of Islam,

00:26:31.660 except for some extreme Islamophobes, of course.

00:26:34.620 So that sentiment was so constant that, for me, what was much more interesting was to

00:26:41.260 find the Muslims who were actually opposed to ISIS and who, unlike the ones who would 1.00

00:26:48.160 say, hey, slavery's been abolished in Islam permanently and forever, or that ISIS has no 0.73

00:26:57.580 knowledge of its scriptures, was to find the ones who didn't have that level of ignorance

00:27:03.440 or willingness to lie about the history of the religion.

00:27:07.360 And there turned out to be a lot of them who had arguments against ISIS that came from an 0.80

00:27:12.400 Islamic perspective, sometimes a very conservative, possibly even jihadist Islamic perspective, and

00:27:19.300 to ask them where they got those ideas as well.

00:27:21.860 Much has been made of the fact that some recruits to the Islamic State were found to buy books

00:27:28.820 like, with titles like Islam for Dummies, as though this proves that religion played no

00:27:35.360 real role in their behavior, because they obviously didn't understand their religion all that well,

00:27:40.260 or that in some ways their claims of a religious motive must be insincere if they're buying books

00:27:46.180 like that.

00:27:46.640 And again, this is precisely the sort of point that I've heard someone like Reza Aslan make

00:27:51.360 on television, right?

00:27:53.100 I noticed you dispatched that idea at some point in the book.

00:27:57.540 Dispatch it here, because that has always struck me as a fairly crazy and, in many cases, insincere

00:28:04.000 point.

00:28:05.280 Yeah, there were a couple guys from Birmingham, England, who were trying to get to ISIS territory

00:28:10.160 and had in their Amazon.co.uk shopping carts the Koran for Dummies and Islam for Dummies.

00:28:18.160 And ever since then, you hear this invoked as evidence that these people know nothing about

00:28:25.220 Islam, have no interest in Islam, and it's obviously just not so. 1.00

00:28:30.880 Well, the idea that, first of all, that someone who is reading books about Islam has no interest

00:28:39.060 in Islam is self-evidently a non-sequitur.

00:28:44.240 But beyond that, you have to understand that the amount of time that someone has spent as

00:28:50.660 a devoted jihadist or pious Muslim is not correlated with the intensity of their feeling

00:28:58.240 of devotion or piety.

00:29:01.740 I think a lot of people think that how do you judge whether someone is a believing Muslim?

00:29:06.840 Well, you look at time in grade.

00:29:09.240 How long has this person been identifying as a Muslim?

00:29:12.560 And the answer for many ISIS supporters, it's true, it's rather short.

00:29:16.440 But how intensely do they believe this?

00:29:18.800 Quite a lot.

00:29:19.400 And so you find people like Mehdi Hassan, now of Al Jazeera, who will at any chance invoke

00:29:27.800 this example.

00:29:29.340 We should say now of The Intercept, right?

00:29:31.700 Isn't he writing for The Intercept?

00:29:33.360 Yeah, I think he's Al Jazeera and The Intercept now.

00:29:36.240 And any time you talk about this, you're likely to hear someone, not always Mehdi, say, look, 0.99

00:29:42.920 this is an example of how foolish these people are. 0.99

00:29:46.640 And I'm not saying they're not foolish. 0.99

00:29:48.500 I would just point out that educating yourself, reading books about Islam, is the sign of someone 0.97

00:29:54.700 who actually cares a lot about this stuff.

00:29:56.600 Now, the other point that people will make about someone who's reading the Quran for dummies is that this person is not a learned Muslim.

00:30:06.400 He's not a sheikh or an al-Azhar trained theologian.

00:30:10.600 And I would not deny that.

00:30:13.000 What I think people miss from this, though, in their zeal for denigrating the followers of ISIS, is that in any human population, you would find some people who are novitiates and some people who are a small fraction of people who are learned scholars of the faith.

00:30:34.000 You know, you could go, as Rukmini Kalamaki once said to me, if you went to a small town in Italy and you approached people coming out of mass on a Sunday and you asked them about obscure doctrines within Catholicism or canon law, the average person would have no idea what you were talking about.

00:30:50.640 Would you then conclude that that person is not Catholic or has no interest in Catholicism?

00:30:56.560 No. The person just came out of mass and probably identifies very closely with Catholicism, just happens not to be someone who is tremendously learned.

00:31:06.660 And that's the case, of course, with the majority of Islamic State recruits as well.

00:31:12.080 Yeah, yeah, it's a very important point, this time and grade illusion that I think you've aptly named, because the point gets made another way quite frequently, too, which people will say that the person has no background in a madrasa, for instance, right?

00:31:29.080 This is someone who had a fairly secular background and then all of a sudden has changed his worldview as though no sudden change could be sufficient to count as a real religious conviction.

00:31:43.360 But, of course, people have awakenings to one or another religion all the time.

00:31:48.540 And when you trace people's connection to the rest of the community, what you find rather often is not necessarily jihadism, but you find a religious context which is fairly conservative by any comparison even with Christian fundamentalism in the West.

00:32:09.380 And as you find throughout the religious landscape, you find that religious ideas are systematically protected from criticism.

00:32:20.760 So the belief in paradise is endemic to planet Earth in one or another form, and it's certainly incredibly well-subscribed throughout the Muslim world among Muslims who have varying degrees of commitment and knowledge about the faith.

00:32:39.380 And so people who can seem quite secular still live, in many cases, their entire lives in a context where I believe in paradise and the legitimacy of martyrdom and the divine origin of the Quran and all the building blocks of this worldview are in place, whether they've taken a real interest in it or not up until that point.

00:33:03.280 I can give you an example of how some of these ideas go from being dormant to being active.

00:33:09.380 A lot has been said about the apocalyptic side of ISIS.

00:33:13.660 ISIS officially believes that the end of the world is coming, and it's coming at ISIS's instigation at their hand, and it's not going to be pretty, and it's going to cause the Antichrist to come back, and great battles and so forth.

00:33:27.720 These are not things that are generally spoken of in mosques.

00:33:32.320 If you go to your local mosque, you're very unlikely to find an imam screaming about the end of the world, just like if you go to your local church.

00:33:41.280 This is probably not going to be the favorite topic of a sermon at any megachurch, although there will be a kind of understanding that these ideas are out there.

00:33:51.860 And in the case of Muslims, as one scholar told me, this is the kind of thing that is told to Muslim kids when they go to bed at night.

00:34:02.080 It's stories to make them be good kids, to obey their mom and dad, to think about good and evil and try to develop a moral sense.

00:34:16.300 They're not stories that are necessarily going to be weaponized into ISIS.

00:34:21.580 They're just part of the folklore of a culture.

00:34:26.000 Now, ISIS, it finds people who have been told these stories, and these are largely benign stories, I think, and then it comes to them and says,

00:34:35.560 all right, all those stories you've heard that were not emphasized by your religious authorities, they're real.

00:34:42.220 They're happening right now.

00:34:43.320 And since people have been hearing them over and over again, it's a fairly simple action to wake them up to the idea that these great battles are happening right now,

00:34:54.060 and you better get there soon, otherwise you'll be thought of in the hereafter as someone who ran away.

00:35:00.000 Yeah, well, I want to talk about the end times prophecies in some detail, because they really are the goofiest stories ever told,

00:35:06.720 and the fact that anyone believes them literally is fairly astonishing.

00:35:10.680 But before we get there, so you said that in the course of reporting this book,

00:35:16.740 you encountered people who were not mere obscurantists with respect to ISIS, but still disagreed with them.

00:35:23.960 So you found scholars who, rather than play hide-the-ball with the articles of faith,

00:35:30.460 they dealt with the theology of ISIS in a more honest way. 0.71

00:35:34.540 I mean, they would acknowledge, for instance, that the prophet had sex slaves, right?

00:35:39.660 Rather than condemn slavery, or even sexual slavery, the prophet practiced it, right? 1.00

00:35:45.860 This is unambiguous in his biography, and it's not an accident, therefore, that ISIS thinks they can do this,

00:35:53.140 and therefore the challenge is for honest critics of this sort of faith to find a theological basis from which to criticize it.

00:36:01.860 How did those efforts appear to you?

00:36:04.400 Did you find people who were offering a counterpoint to the theology of ISIS that you felt could sway potential jihadists?

00:36:17.460 There are a few different categories, especially from believing Muslims, of believing Muslims who were opposed to ISIS.

00:36:24.860 There would be some whose main effort was to make Muslims look good.

00:36:31.120 I would put, as an example, CARE would probably be one organization that was involved in that,

00:36:37.260 and trying to say, look, we are not ISIS.

00:36:39.620 And it's true, they are not ISIS.

00:36:40.880 They're not supportive of ISIS.

00:36:42.840 They are also, though, very willing to say things that are false about Islam,

00:36:49.040 and about the history of the beliefs that Muslims have had over the years.

00:36:54.980 Another category is of people who would, they would not lie about Islam, but they would lie about ISIS. 0.94

00:37:01.460 They would claim that ISIS is not, doesn't believe what it believes, doesn't say what it says.

00:37:07.340 That's maybe a slightly easier to deal with category.

00:37:12.120 And then you'd find others whose knowledge of their own tradition is extensive enough

00:37:20.340 that they couldn't possibly simply deny the reality of slavery in Islam, 0.91

00:37:26.800 or amputation of hands of thieves, or beheading sorcerers and apostates. 0.64

00:37:33.100 And that last category was what I found to be the, it was, first of all, a diverse category. 0.98

00:37:38.180 There were many different Muslim scholars, Muslims within it.

00:37:42.120 But it was also the most interesting, because, as you say, they were not playing hide the ball.

00:37:46.700 They were instead engaging in a very complicated and sincerely felt battle within the faith.

00:37:55.840 And, you know, they would, to take the issue of slavery specifically,

00:38:00.700 one of those earlier categories might have, they might have said slavery has been abolished in Islam.

00:38:05.680 That is true if you think Islam is the governments of Muslim-majority countries. 0.98

00:38:12.320 They have pretty much all abolished slavery.

00:38:14.940 It is not true of the tradition of Islam, which has, for most of its existence,

00:38:20.440 recognized the legitimacy of slavery and codified the institution.

00:38:25.440 So you'd find one of the most distinguished living Muslim jurists, Taki Yusmani, a Pakistani,

00:38:33.360 who said of this argument that slavery has been simply abolished by the consensus of all Muslims, 0.95

00:38:38.980 to be, he said, so ridiculous it would make a grieving mother laugh. 0.66

00:38:44.580 That's the person I wanted to talk to, was someone who was aware of the place in the tradition, 0.81

00:38:50.880 and yet was able to give me an explanation of why ISIS's version of this was not okay.

00:38:57.820 Before we go further in that direction, I just want to comment on this impulse that so many Muslims 0.58

00:39:04.520 and their apologists feel to, above all, make sure that Islam doesn't look bad

00:39:10.920 or that Muslims don't look bad in the aftermath of a terrorist attack 1.00

00:39:15.360 of the sort we've recently experienced. 0.96

00:39:17.820 This is so wrong-headed.

00:39:20.080 I mean, few things make the community of Muslims look worse

00:39:25.280 than their reliably lying about the faith. 0.84

00:39:29.480 They're lying about the existence of dangerous doctrines

00:39:34.520 which are so easy to find, right?

00:39:36.820 And so whatever the motive for these lies, it can't help but appear sinister.

00:39:41.860 And this ritual is now so widely repeated that it's just, it's become a caricature of itself.

00:39:50.680 You know, in the aftermath of an event like Manchester or London, which just happened,

00:39:54.960 you have Muslims jumping on the airwaves, either representatives of care 1.00

00:39:59.380 or people who claim to be secular.

00:40:02.940 And in fact, in many cases, certainly are secular.

00:40:06.240 You've got people like the comic Dean Obadala, you know, who's got a post on CNN

00:40:10.800 and they jump on television and they essentially say, what do you want from us?

00:40:14.940 We condemn terrorism.

00:40:16.540 Look, I condemn terrorism.

00:40:17.960 I'm condemning terrorism.

00:40:19.200 I don't support ISIS.

00:40:20.640 Why is the burden on Muslims to condemn terrorism every time something like this happens?

00:40:25.880 This is, I've hit this before, but I just, I view this as like a public service announcement.

00:40:30.500 The issue is not that Muslims don't condemn terrorism. 0.99

00:40:34.920 Condemning terrorism is a trivially easy thing to do.

00:40:38.920 And I, and I, it goes without saying that most Muslims don't support the activities of

00:40:45.880 a man who shows up at an Ariana Grande concert and massacres children, right? 0.59

00:40:51.300 That need not be said, but what is altogether lacking is an honest acknowledgement that this

00:40:59.000 violence is arising out of sincere belief in the truth of specific religious doctrines.

00:41:05.920 And that, that is the problem.

00:41:07.880 Muslims don't have to condemn terrorism. 0.89

00:41:10.540 They have to condemn the doctrines of martyrdom and jihad, which is a much heavier lift, right? 0.99

00:41:17.560 Theologically and, and socially, and they, they need to condemn all of the triumphal bullshit 0.98

00:41:24.180 about Islam eventually conquering the world. 0.99

00:41:27.700 That is ISIS's message.

00:41:29.860 And that's what has to be confronted head on by honest, secular, liberal, or otherwise conservative,

00:41:37.720 and nonetheless tolerant Muslims.

00:41:40.320 And that is something, I mean, I feel like I can count on one hand, maybe two hands at most,

00:41:46.520 the people who honestly do that reliably.

00:41:50.040 And it's someone like Majid Nawaz who gets on CNN and just, you can actually track through his statements

00:41:56.540 and remain sane at the end.

00:41:59.020 So anyways, this is my hobby horse, but it just, you know, every time there's a new terrorist

00:42:04.440 event and we see the same shills for delusion jump on television, it really is just crazy

00:42:12.000 making.

00:42:12.720 I'm largely in agreement with what you just said.

00:42:15.200 I will say, I do get the question all the time.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - June 15, 2017

#82 — The End of the World According to ISIS

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