A mixed crate of apples and oranges.
I am an admirer of Sam Harris, have been for some for some time now, for bringing a certain amount a clarity to the badly muddled discourse on Islam. However, in portions of this discussion, I thoroughly disagree with him, especially with the term of ”Islamism”. Instead, I would like to hear him grasping the significance of koranic abrogation.
Taking into factual context, the when, the where it (abrogation) occurred, and for what reason. It would bring him to the realization as to why the Islamic calendar begins with the hijra to Medina, and not before, during Mohamed’s time in Mecca when the more tolerant verses are attributed.
Abrogation is the single most problematic feature in the koran, for it alone delegates how the believer is to understand the entirety of the koran. It’s not up to the Muslim to pick and choose what Islam is, but Mohamed and Allah. If Muslims choose to ignore those texts, that’s something different altogether, and does not negate the later verses which many Muslims strictly adhere to.
NOTE: I seriously doubt those using the term ”Islamism” would use it if Islam only had a few thousand followers.
“When someone says, “Listen, I murdered my rich neighbor because I knew he kept a pile of money in a safe. I wanted that money, and I didn’t want to leave a witness,” nobody looks for an ulterior explanation for that behavior. But when someone says, “I think infidels and apostates deserve to burn in hell, and I know for a fact that I’ll go to paradise if I die while waging jihad against them,” many academics refuse to accept this rationale at face value and begin looking for the political or economic reasons that they imagine lie beneath it. So the game is rigged.”
The True Believers
Sam Harris and Graeme Wood discuss the Islamic State
Graeme Wood writes for The Atlantic, where he covers a wide range of subjects, including education, science, books, and politics, and he has reported frequently from the Middle East since the early 2000s. In the March issue of the magazine, he published a lengthy investigation of the ideology of the so-called Islamic State—which included the controversial claim that the Islamic State is, despite its deep unpopularity with most Muslims, Islamic.
Wood was kind enough to speak with me at great length on this topic.—SH
Harris: We’ll get into all of those things. And I’m really looking forward to this discussion. But I should clarify this notion that I’m an “enemy of Islam.” Granted, I’ve not always been as careful as I now am when speaking on this topic, so I’ve earned the label. One could certainly say that as a vocal atheist, I’m an enemy of all religion. So, in that sense, I’m an enemy of Islam too. But for the purposes of a conversation like this, I’m actually an enemy of “Islamism,” not Islam per se. Islamism, as you know, is the desire on the part of a minority of Muslims to impose their religion on the rest of society (and jihadis are the minority of Islamists who attempt to do so by force). Anyone who’s not an Islamist himself must be an enemy of that project, whether he thinks about these things or not.
The distinction between Islam and Islamism is important. I’ve just written a short book with the Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance (Harvard University Press, June 2015). When talking to Maajid, my primary goal wasn’t to win the fight against Islam in favor of unbelief. Rather, it was to honestly discuss the problem of Islamism and to find some way of addressing it. Of course, I had a few critical things to say about mainstream Islam too, but I’m under no illusions that our near-term objective is to persuade 1.6 billion Muslims to give up their religion and declare themselves atheists. However, as with many religions, the boundary between beliefs that appear benign and those that suddenly prove dangerous isn’t so easy to find. My main concern is always to look at the role that specific unfounded ideas are playing in the world, and to counter the ones that seem most harmful.
Let’s talk about the Islamic State. As you point out, many people allege that it isn’t Islamic. Happily, your article makes it clear how delusional that claim is. As you know, I didn’t need any convincing on this point. From the moment the Islamic State emerged, it felt almost as if I had invented it as some kind of thought experiment to prove that everything I wrote in The End of Faith was true. These people are a crystalline example of the problem I described in that book—as is the response of liberal apologists who have been saying that their behavior has nothing to do with Islam. Rather, we’re told that burning people alive in cages, crucifying children, and butchering journalists and aid workers is an ordinary human response to political and economic instability. Even representatives of our own State Department assert this. I can’t imagine how comically out of touch with reality we appear from the side of the jihadis.
More here. H/T: Dennis Mitzner
