Sam Harris's Blog, page 14

The Riddle of the Gun (Revisited)

In this episode of the Waking Up Podcast, Sam Harris discusses his views about guns and gun control in light of a recent mass shooting.

 

A liberal Muslim and a non-believer in search of common ground

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Never Stop Lying

If you have ten minutes to spare, I recommend watching the above video, because it encapsulates better than most how difficult it is to even discuss the threat of political Islam.

My opponent was Dean Obeidallah. As incredible as it may seem, the man has since claimed that he mopped the floor with me in this exchange. I would not have thought such a degree of self-deception possible, but then I recalled Obeidallah’s response to my and Bill Maher’s encounter with Ben Affleck last year…

@JennySmithh @BenAffleck @billmaher @SamHarrisOrg he crushed the bigotry of maher and Harris. Thankfully Affleck is a true liberal

— Dean Obeidallah (@Deanofcomedy) October 4, 2014

...and realized that Obeidallah knows his audience. As I’ve said before, the most depressing thing about the episode with Affleck was seeing how many Muslims thought he had “exposed” my and Maher’s bigotry—as though shouting “gross” and “racist” and similar epithets were an act of investigative journalism. Having witnessed this mindless display of tribalism, I have no doubt that most of Obeidallah’s fans will think he performed admirably in our debate and will imagine, once again, that my bigotry against the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims has been “exposed.”

It would be tempting to despair for humanity at this point, were it not for the fact that many more people who watched this video thought Obeidallah came off as a mendacious buffoon. Unfortunately, a number of those who have taken my side have also written off Obeidallah as a know-nothing comedian who is of no consequence in the larger public conversation about Islam. But this disparagement of him is unfair. He is a former attorney and prominent enough in the American Muslim community to have gotten a meeting with President Obama. Along with Reza Aslan, Obeidallah is now on the short list of media personalities who can play the consoling role of “moderate Muslim” on demand. He is also a very public supporter (and beneficiary) of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)—a group that has worked tirelessly to blur the line between legitimate political interests and theocratic bullying. Consequently, what Obeidallah says about his religion and its critics on national television (and on social media) actually matters.

For a former attorney, Obeidallah is quite sloppy. For instance, when Bill Maher claimed on his show that “like 90 percent” of Egyptian Muslims favor the death penalty for apostasy, Obeidallah branded him a bigot who couldn’t keep his facts straight. According to Obeidallah, only 64 percent of Egyptian Muslims favor death for apostates. While even he conceded that this number is depressing, many people came away feeling that Maher can’t be trusted. Did Obeidallah even bother to read the Pew poll that he claimed Maher had misrepresented? The real figure was 88 percent. Is 88 percent rather “like 90 percent”? I’ll let readers decide. (Judging from what I’ve seen online, I fear that most of Obeidallah’s fans would say no.)

Unfortunately, like Reza Aslan, Obeidallah seems almost compulsively dishonest. For instance, pay attention to the point in our exchange, beginning at 3:15, when I mention specific punishments under sharia—amputations for thieves and death for homosexuals. Obeidallah reflexively attempts to cloud the issue by denying that the Qur’an contains any mention of “throwing gays off of rooftops.” In response to this interruption, I can only insist that “it’s in the hadith, and you know it.” Is it possible that a Muslim who has been shilling for an organization like CAIR doesn’t actually understand the status of homosexuality under Islamic law? I don’t think so.

For readers who want a little more context, here is part of an email that Ali A. Rizvi sent me after this exchange:

Although the Quran doesn’t explicitly say it except in the case of the story of Lot, as you know there’s a hadith-based consensus pretty much across the board (Sunni and Shia) that homosexuality is punishable by death. On the method of killing, however — burning to death, stoning to death, dropping from a height, etc. — it depends on who you ask.

Throwing gays from a high place is something that the caliph Abu Bakr is said to have supported (cliff), as well as the caliphs Umar and Ali (minaret). Most often quoted is Abdullah Ibn Abbas, Muhammad’s cousin (their fathers were brothers), who is respected by both Sunnis and Shias, and is the source of many ahadith from Muhammad. He advocated throwing gays from a height and then stoning them. Some will say this is part of the ahadith, and others will say it’s his tafsir (exegesis of the Quran) and doesn’t qualify.

In a Shia hadith from Jafar As-Sadiq (the sixth imam and a descendant of Muhammad), the fourth caliph and first imam Ali says to a man who confesses to a homosexual act, “The Holy Prophet has prescribed three methods of dealing with the situation, you may choose any one of the three deaths — by having the arms and feet tied and thrown from the cliff, being beheaded, or being burnt alive.”

 

It is by no means an accident that members of the Islamic State are taking men suspected of being gay to rooftops and hurling them to their deaths. Nor is this specific punishment a grotesque innovation on the part of some sadist in their organization. This is a religious practice. Please watch my exchange with Obeidallah with the understanding that he knows this, and yet he feels that his moral energy is best spent charging me with bigotry for worrying about the way specific doctrines within the Islamic tradition are breeding intolerance and violence. One of my readers wrote after watching this exchange, “I find this behavior far more disconcerting than the rantings of jihadists.” I agree. To stifle conversation in this way is to merely wave away the concerns of all those living under Islamic theocracy (or its creeping threat), while very likely prolonging their misery.

After our encounter on CNN, where he did nothing but misrepresent the doctrine of Islam and call me a bigot for speaking honestly about it, Obeidallah produced this gem on Twitter:

@lalodagach @SamHarrisOrg It was so much fun watching Sam get mad -Reza told me it would be and he was right!

— Dean Obeidallah (@Deanofcomedy) September 27, 2015

Consider the total lack of moral and intellectual seriousness on display here, and then recall that this is someone who actually got a meeting with the president of the United States to discuss American-Islamic relations.

Since Aslan appears to have been working behind the scenes to ensure that a productive conversation would prove impossible, it seems only decent to remind the world of his own shamefully dishonest performance on that very show:

 

Here you see Aslan misrepresent almost every fact he deigns to touch—from the connection between religious doctrine and violence to the status of women in Muslim-majority countries (“In Indonesia, women are 100 percent equal to men”!) Well, yes, in that they have the same rate of circumcision. In particular, his claim that female genital mutilation is exclusively an “African problem,” with no connection to Islam, is false. It’s true that FGM predates Islam, and it’s true that certain Christians and animists in Africa also practice it. But no other group inflicts this needless barbarism on girls (which generally has nothing in common with the “circumcision” of boys) at the rate that Muslims do. And that’s not an accident, because all four schools of Sunni jurisprudence support it. Consequently, there’s no mystery about why hundreds of millions of Muslims believe the practice to be obligatory, or at least permissible. It is spelled out in the hadith with the same care that male circumcision is. What you see in this video is a “moderate” Muslim wildly distorting the facts and hectoring a journalist with charges of bigotry. The horror, of course, is that it works.

There appears to be no limit to how low the people who hurl these charges of bigotry will sink. For instance, months after Craig Stephen Hicks murdered three Muslim students in North Carolina, Obeidallah sent the following tweet:

@MaajidNawaz @RichardDawkins Yes but I have not demonized those groups. Many view Sam's words as radicalizing the NC shooter who killed 3

— Dean Obeidallah (@Deanofcomedy) September 15, 2015

“Many view…”? That’s rich. Obeidallah was one of the few people to make this ludicrous allegation when he wrote, without a shred of evidence, that my “hateful comments about Islam” may have inspired Craig Stephen Hicks to commit those murders.

Once again, I find myself caught between the Scylla of responding to defamatory lies (and boring many of you) and the Charybdis of letting them spread unchecked. I keep trying to find a middle path and to respond judiciously. As the recent Tim Hunt debacle reveals, even a genial Nobel laureate can have his reputation swiftly destroyed by the malicious use of social media. If you don’t think the effort against me is sustained and concerted, just look at the sorts of things that Glenn Greenwald, Aslan, and Obeidallah spread about me on Twitter. There is simply no question that my reputation would have suffered far more damage at their hands without all the support I’ve received from readers online.

Into this morass comes my book with Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue. When I said on CNN that I had no doubt there were many Muslims who would make fine presidents, Maajid was precisely the sort of person I was thinking of. (Unfortunately, as a British citizen, he’s not eligible.) The Muslim community needs far fewer smirking liars who claim to be “moderates” and many more courageous people like Maajid who are willing to oppose bigotry where it truly exists.

Note:

If I’m going to accuse my opponents of shameless misrepresentation, I should be swift in correcting mistakes of my own. Here are few things I now believe I got wrong in the above interview:

1. The interview took place before Ben Carson modulated/clarified his remarks on the prospect of electing a Muslim president. This was also before some of his crazier unscientific beliefs came to light. Consequently, I now think I acquiesced too readily to the charge of “bigotry” against him and was not critical enough of his betrayal of science.

2. Don Lemon made the point that 38 percent of Americans say they would not vote for a Muslim candidate for the presidency, and I said that the rate of rejection for an atheist candidate would be about 20 percent higher. It had been a long time since I looked at the polling on this question, and it turns out that I had a 2006 Newsweek poll in my head (which I’ve referenced at least once before). Recent Gallup polling shows that atheists have closed the gap and are now running just two percentage points behind Muslims in popularity. Nothing of substance turns on this error—and my larger point still holds—but a difference of 20 percent misrepresents (current) political reality.

3. I’d also like to point out (and celebrate) the high standard of honesty to which my readers hold me. Consider this thread on Twitter, where one supporter argues that I was slightly dishonest when Obeidallah raised the topic of “profiling.” As you’ll see from this partial exchange (there was more to it, but the thread appears to be broken), I stand by what I said. I certainly do not support what Obeidallah meant (and, more important, what he intended our audience to understand) by the phrase “racial profiling.” So, contrary to what some people thought, I wasn’t denying any of my published views. The best I could do in the heat of the moment was to say, “We can talk about profiling, but you haven’t summarized my views accurately.” However, I absolutely love that even in circumstances that were perfectly hostile to my explaining myself, when any effort to parse so loaded a term as “profiling” in the time allotted would have damned me before 99 percent of the audience—my supporters still expect me to be absolutely honest and forthcoming. That is a level of trust that I have worked hard to earn. Please know that I will work just as hard to keep it.

Rethinking ‘Hitler’s Pope’

Mark Riebling has been an architect of post-9/11 “intelligence-driven policing,” co-founding and serving as research director for the Center for Policing Terrorism. He received his degree in philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA. His latest book is Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler.

*  *  *

Harris: Previously, you’ve written about problems of intelligence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism. What inspired you to write about the papacy in the Second World War?

Riebling: Well, I was raised Catholic, and one of the things I learned before I left the faith was that nuns could nail me if I said something heterodox, because they had an awesome system of informants! So I didn’t find it implausible, or uninteresting, when I later heard from one retired spy that the Vatican ran the world’s oldest and perhaps best intelligence service. Or when another retired spy told me that the Church was so skilled in clandestine operations that the NSA couldn’t crack the pope’s codes. And I like the challenge of writing secret histories of powerful institutions—maybe because my academic training is in philosophy, and I’m interested in how our background theories come to bear when the data are severely limited but the stakes are high. I’d like to think I write about these things as exercises in mindfulness, not unlike what philosophers from Epictetus to Foucault have recommended—a self-check of my own intellectual hygiene. Less abstractly, I just thought that much of what had been written about the wartime Church was crap!

Harris: There’s a large literature implicating the Catholic Church generally, and Pope Pius XII specifically, in Nazi atrocities. You argue that this literature needs adjustment, because the wartime pope actually conspired, you say, to remove Hitler and the Nazis. On what evidence do you rest your case, and how did you uncover it?

Riebling: The evidence case came first from critics of the Nazi-era Church—Daniel Goldhagen, James Carroll, and even John Cornwell, the author of Hitler’s Pope. They all conceded that Pius XII hated Hitler and worked secretly to overthrow him. Yet they said this in their books in just a clause, a sentence, or a paragraph. To me, this episode merited more curiosity. If “Hitler’s pope” tried to kill Hitler, what’s the story, and what does it say about how the world’s leading moral institution met the worst moral crisis in history? The big break in answering these questions came when I obtained the verbatim transcripts of secret papal audiences—transcripts that exist only because Vatican Jesuits secretly bugged those meetings.

Harris: The pope made secret tapes, like Richard Nixon?

Riebling: Yes. The Vatican had an advanced audio-surveillance system—Pius had it hardwired by the inventor of the radio, Guglielmo Marconi. These surveillance transcripts falsify a premise shared by most critics of Pius. Critics paint him as a great centralizer, who imposed Rome’s will on reluctant bishops. The primary evidence shows the reverse: Pius was a decentralizer, who followed rather than led his flock. Critically, in two March 1939 transcripts, four German cardinals ask Pius to appease Hitler so that German Catholics won’t break away and form a state church, as happened in Tudor England. Pius heeds the German episcopate’s advice. Instead of protesting openly, he will resist Hitler behind the scenes. Judging that he couldn’t lead a Church of saints, Pius settled for a Church of spies.

Harris: How did the Vatican spy against Hitler?

Riebling: Well, the March 9th discussion becomes really granular in terms of papal spycraft. The Holy Father explains how to skim Catholic charitable contributions to fund a clandestine courier network. He directs his operatives to use a certain hostel near a Munich train station. A cardinal cites a New Testament passage to justify deceiving the SS. One of the operatives in this papal underground is a Jewish lesbian who has converted to Catholicism; she later dies in a concentration camp. Another Vatican agent is a Bavarian book publisher, who flies reports on Nazi atrocities over the Alps in a single-seat sports plane; he later goes to the gallows. Along the way, this clandestine network—the SS code-named it “the Black Chapel”—becomes pivotal in plots to overthrow the Nazis.

Harris: What was the pope’s role in those plots?

Riebling: Well, without giving too many spoilers, Pius XII participated in three plots to kill Hitler. In all three, Pius held midnight meetings in the papal apartments with British diplomats, trying to bring off a coup in Berlin. But the first plot fizzled when German generals lost their nerve. The second failed when a bomb on Hitler’s plane froze at high altitude. The third wounded Hitler with plastic explosives, but unraveled because the plotters failed to cut communications between top Nazis. In the second and third plots, German Jesuits, reporting to the pope’s advisors, acted as political organizers and couriers. But through it all, Pius XII was almost the lone constant among the plotters—as their secret foreign agent for nearly six years.

Harris: I’m getting the uncomfortable feeling that I’ve been too hard on the Vatican for its conduct during the war. But you argue that this doesn’t get it off the hook, morally speaking.

Riebling: I don’t think it absolves either the Church as an institution or Catholics as a group. Perhaps counterintuitively, I think the pope’s secret war against Hitler shows just how much the Church and Catholics have to atone for. Because there’s a profound question raised by the heroism of covert resistance, and it’s one you discuss in a note in The End of Faith. One can always make the argument that covert resistance in particularly dangerous situations is the best possible course. You mention those who secretly helped Jews, and you say that they probably did more good by living and helping others in secret than by openly protesting the Nazis and dying on principle. But that was their situation only because so few people were willing to offer open opposition in the first place. That’s exactly my view, and my book, although written as a spy story, can be seen as a sermon on that bitter, deeper truth.

That so few were willing to offer overt resistance is an indictment of European culture; and one of the shaping influences of this culture was a Christian anti-Judaism going all the way back to the first century. It’s too narrow to say this is just Catholic; it’s Christian, it’s partly in the Gospels’ saying that the Old Covenant was broken, and, if anything, it intensified under Luther. That the Holocaust was initiated by a mostly Protestant nation is sometimes forgotten; that the Catholic Church, by virtue of its stronger institutional identity, did much more than the Protestants did to resist Hitler was revealed to the White House in many secret reports to Roosevelt.

Harris: But Hitler and other leading members of the SS were at least nominal Catholics. Why didn’t Pius XII excommunicate them?

Riebling: He could have, and should have. But he didn’t, for reasons that you can understand only if you think like a pope who feels responsible for guiding a billion souls to eternal life. That’s a heavy burden, and if you take it on, you have to weigh every pronouncement according to whether it serves or thwarts that aim. The last time the pope excommunicated a secular bully—Napoleon—Europeans laughed it out of court, and Napoleon turned it into a badge of honor, rather like Donald Trump getting attacked by the media. Napoleon’s prestige rose, the papacy’s fell, and millions of Catholic souls were diverted into damnation, in the Vatican’s view, because they lost access to the sacraments. Likewise, when Pope Paul VI condemned birth control, and First World Catholics ignored it, the papacy again lost prestige, and Catholics fled the Church in droves—many millions were that much closer to Hell. I think Pius XII felt he was in an impossible situation where he had to save Catholic souls at the expense of Jewish—and even Catholic—lives. And the only way out of that no-win situation was to cut the Gordian knot by killing Hitler.

Harris: But shouldn’t Pius have spoken out against the Holocaust? What do you think would have happened if he had protested publicly?

Riebling: Well, of course—he should have cried it from the mountaintop. But Hitler’s would-be killers asked him not to, fearing it would cause a crackdown on resistance elements. In fact, the last day during the war on which Pius publicly said “Jew”—October 20, 1939—is also the first day we can document his complicity in plots against Hitler. And later, you find British and US diplomats begging Pius not to denounce the genocide of the Jews, fearing this would also expose Soviet atrocities against the Poles. But perhaps most important, it’s wrong to say that gentiles were waiting to jump forward to save the Jews, and only papal silence held them back. As Pius himself put it, most Germans “believed in” Hitler.

Harris: Is it fair, then, to say that your research is both a defense of the pope and an indictment of the Church?

Riebling: I wouldn’t contest that, but I might rephrase it. Wrapped in a reconsideration of this one particular pope, there’s a critique of Catholics more generally. At its core, this critique questions what the secular-liberal narrative often presumes. Many educated people say: Personal mysticism is cool, but organized religion is just terrible! It’s a very Rousseauean kind of thing. In a democracy, the authorized discourse states that the people are good: Authority structures are the problem, and the people are the solution. Congressmen are wicked; voters are good. Bishops are corrupt; the people are pure. There’s a clever phrase by Leo Strauss that applies to this whole ethos: He called it “liberal persecution of authoritarianism.” This rhetorical persecution may even be merited in most cases. But it misleads us when we look at Europeans’ response to Nazism. Personal mysticism was less effective against tyranny than organized religion was. The masses were not the solution to Hitler; they were the problem. By the end of this story, the pope comes out looking pretty good, and ordinary Catholics come out looking terrible.

Harris: What are the implications for the world today?

Riebling: I think there are two. First, conservative, even authoritarian, religious structures can prove extremely helpful against revolutionaries who want to impose a far more radical, utopian political religion. If Sunni Islam had a hierarchy, we would see many of its leaders resist ISIS more effectively. By comparison, you are seeing the Shia capable of counteraction, not just because they are anti-Sunni, but because they have a clerical hierarchy. The Sunni conservatives will at some point have to either fight the revolutionaries or obey them. It was similar in Cambodia under Pol Pot—finally the old-line communists in that part of the world couldn’t take it anymore. Likewise, who is now sending troops to prop up an authoritarian Assad to stop ISIS? The former KGB agent Vladimir Putin. Which should remind us that in the former Soviet Union, glasnost and perestroika did not come from “the Russian people.” They began within the most elite ranks of the Party—the KGB. I think the pope’s secret war against Hitler should be grouped with this family of phenomena—authoritarian resistance to totalitarianism.

The second implication relates to the importance of myth. I don’t mean to go all Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell here, but there’s a reason that the first books the Nazis banned were not nonfiction but novels. They wanted to destroy any possible counter-myths. The word “myth” comes from the Greek mythos, which just means “story.”  For 500 years we’ve seen, in the progress of science, the demythification of the world—or the disenchantment of the world, to use Max Weber’s phrase. The magic’s all gone, but the monsters remain. But myths, or stories, and structures built on them, can help fight those monsters. That’s a lesson I draw from the story of the Church and the Reich. SS documents record the Nazis’ frustration with their failure to replace Christian myths—a failure that ran deeper, for instance, than their inability to remake Ascension Day into the Feast of Thor’s Hammer. As one SS report noted, “In exactly those areas where political Catholicism holds sway, the peasants are so infected by the doctrines of Catholicism that they are deaf to any discussion of the racial problem.” So if you wanted to fight Nazism, there was something helpful in the Christian myth—as also in the communist myth. For half a century, the Marxist myth of the New Man was fairly successful in supplanting the old stories—but the magic’s gone out of that, too. So you have, unless you are mindful, a banalization of human experience. This banality is going to tempt some people to join ISIS for excitement, for re-enchantment, for remythification. If you join ISIS, you have a story! Your life is numinous—it’s as if you’re living in the Iliad instead of, say, just playing soccer in the dust in a Bauhaus housing project in Basra. Or you’re channeling the Teutonic Knights while you’re horsewhipping Jews in 1930s Nuremburg—I think the personal hunger is the same. As C.G. Jung said, you can chase out the devil, but he shows up somewhere else. Which is one reason why, when Jung was an agent for US intelligence in 1944, he urged propping up political Catholicism—in fact, through the Christian-socialist parties that came to dominate Cold War Europe, whose exiled leaders Pius sheltered in the Vatican. Jung was an atheist, but he preferred Christian socialism to the atheist communism he saw coming. He predicted that the freethinking atheist would fare better under the frowning brow of the Christian myth than under the trampling boot of the communist one.

Harris: That’s all extremely interesting. Do you have any final thoughts?

Riebling: There’s a related point here, on which I don’t think secular liberals today are as honest as George Orwell dared to be. On April 6, 1940—coincidentally, the same day the first papal plot against Hitler failed—Orwell published an essay containing an insight that could stand as an epitaph for the whole modern age. He recalled a cruel trick he once played on a wasp that was sucking jam on his plate. Orwell cut him in half. The wasp paid no mind, merely went on with his meal, while jam trickled out of his severed esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. “It is the same with modern man,” Orwell wrote. “The thing that has been cut away is his soul.” We’ve sawed off the moral branch on which we sat—divine sanction for absolute ethics—and then we’ve fallen into a cesspool, and we’re surprised. In that mode we say (when we’re not under the “Pope Francis effect”): The pope is not the moral father figure of mankind; he’s a medieval mummy, his magic doesn’t work, and we don’t want it to work—on abortion, on gay marriage, on other things. But during the Shoah, we say: Hey, mummy, get out there and work your magic! We don’t believe in it; but an awful lot of plain folk do.

That’s hypocritical and condescending. Especially because the record of secular liberals during the Nazi era was hardly admirable on the whole. Few parts of German society put up less resistance to Nazism than progressives in the universities, who liked Hitler’s ideas on national health care, and protecting the environment, and separating church and state, and even claimed to ground racism in “evolutionary science.” 

There’s a critical discourse on these failings of secular liberalism. But compared with the critical discourse on the pope and the Reich, you have to dig hard to find it. As someone who considers himself a secular liberal, and an atheist, I try to stay curious about whatever doesn’t fit my paradigm, and I think it’s good conceptual hygiene to revisit these failures—to learn from the mistakes of one’s own side and from the successes of conservative believers. You can’t worry so much about giving the other side “ammunition.” You have to be large enough, and empathic enough, and secure enough, to give credit. In the process—and I hope this happens with those who read my book—you might learn or unlearn something about the past that helps you live in the present more mindfully.

Riebling, an expert on secret intelligence, compellingly explores the papacy’s involvement in espionage during World War II…. This book has much to surprise, especially the many German officers, separately and together, involved in attempts on Hitler’s life…. Pius, vilified by critics who believed he ignored Germany’s atrocities, comes off as a politically savvy man who realized his interference would precipitate Hitler’s mortal overreaction against German Catholics. Not only a dramatic disclosure of the Vatican’s covert actions, but also an absorbing, polished story for all readers of World War II history.  —Kirkus

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The Multiverse & You (& You & You & You…)

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark about the foundations of science, our current understanding of the universe, and the risks of future breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.

Known as “Mad Max” for his unorthodox ideas and passion for adventure, Max Tegmark’s scientific interests range from precision cosmology to the ultimate nature of reality, all explored in his new popular book Our Mathematical Universe. Tegmark is a professor of physics who has published more than two hundred technical papers and been featured in dozens of science documentaries. His work with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year: 2003.” For more information about his work, please visit his MIT website and the Future of Life Institute.

 

What I Really Think About Profiling

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris responds to misrepresentations of his views (again).

Islam & the Future of Tolerance

This panel discussion was held at Harvard’s Kennedy Forum on September 14, 2015.

Sam Harris

Neuroscientist; Co-founder and Chief Executive, Project Reason; Author, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, among others

Maajid Nawaz

Author, Radical; Founding Chairman, Quilliam

Juliette Kayyem (moderator)

Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School; Former Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs, US Department of Homeland Security

We Need to Talk About Islam’s Jihadism Problem

By Maajid Nawaz and Sam Harris



It’s time to confront Islamism head on—without cries of Islamophobia. Holding Islam up to scrutiny, rationally and ethically, must not be confused with anti-Muslim bigotry.

Ours was an inauspicious first meeting. Nawaz a former Muslim extremist turned liberal reformer, had just participated in a public debate about the nature of Islam. Though he had spent five years in an Egyptian prison for attempting to restore a medieval “caliphate,” Nawaz argued in favor of the motion that night, affirming that Islam is, indeed, “a religion of peace.” Harris, a well-known atheist and strident critic of Islam, had been in the audience. At a dinner later that evening, Harris was asked to comment on the event. He addressed his remarks directly to Nawaz:

Harris: Maajid, it seems to me that you have a problem. You need to convince the world—especially the Muslim world—that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by extremists. But the problem is that Islam isn’t a religion of peace, and the so-called extremists are seeking to implement what is arguably the most honest reading of the faith’s actual doctrine. So the path of reform appears to be one of pretense: You seem obliged to pretend that the doctrine is something other than it is—for instance, you must pretend that jihad is just an inner spiritual struggle, whereas it’s primarily a doctrine of holy war. Here, in this room, can’t you just be honest with us? Is the path forward for Islam a matter of pretending certain things are true long enough and hard enough so as to make them true?

Nawaz: Are you calling me a liar?

Harris: What?

Nawaz: Are you calling me a liar?

Read the rest at The Daily Beast…

Clearing the Air with Dave Rubin

Sam Harris talks to Dave Rubin about free speech, religion, foreign policy, and other topics.

So who is Sam Harris, and what has he done to upset Ben Affleck?

By Andrew Masterson

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