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138 pages, Hardcover
First published October 6, 2015
[Harris] The tensions you've been describing are familiar to all religious moderates, but they seem especially onerous under Islam. The problem is that moderates of all faiths are committed to reinterpreting, or ignoring outright, the most dangerous and absurd parts of their scripture—and this commitment is precisely what makes them moderates. But it also requires some degree of intellectual dishonesty, because moderates can't acknowledge that their moderation comes from outside the faith. The doors leading out of the prison of scriptural literalism simply do not open from the inside. In the twenty-first century, the moderate's commitment to scientific rationality, human rights, gender equality, and every other modern value—values that, as you say, are potentially universal for human being—comes from the past thousand years of human progress, much of which was accomplished in spite of religion, not because of it. so when moderates claim to find their modern, ethical commitments within scripture, it looks like an exercise in self-deception. The truth is that most of our modern values are antithetical to the specific teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And where we do find these values expressed in our holy books, they are almost never best expressed there.Potential readers of this book need to be alerted to the fact that the Audible.com edition of this book has a one hour twenty-two minute (2hr 18min original book, 3hr 40min total length) audio epilog that is not included the print edition. I don't know if the Kindle version has it, or if there are any second edition versions that include it. This epilog contains reactions of both Harris and Nawaz to the questions and comments that were received from readers of the print edition.
Moderates seem unwilling to grapple with the fact that all scriptures contain an extraordinary amount of stupidity and barbarism that can always be rediscovered and made holy anew by fundamentalists—and there's no principle of moderation internal to the faith that prevents this. These fundamentalist readings are, almost by definition, more complete and consistent—and, therefore, more honest. The fundamentalist picks up the book and says, "Okay, I'm just going to read every word of this and do my best to understand what God wants from me. I'll leave my personal biases completely out of it." Conversely, every moderate seems to believe that his interpretation and selective reading of scripture is more accurate than God's literal words. Presumably, god could have written these books any way He wanted. And if He wanted them to be understood in the spirit of twenty-first-century secular rationality, He could have left out all those bits about stoning people to death for adultery or witchcraft. It really isn't hard to write a book that prohibits sexual slavery—you just put in a few lines like "Don't take sex slaves!" and "when you fight a war and take prisoners, as you inevitably will, don't rape any of the!" And yet God couldn't seem to manage it. This is why the approach of a group like the Islamic state holds a certain intellectual appeal (which, admittedly, sounds strange to say) because the most straightforward reading of scripture suggests that Allah advises jihadists to take sex slaves from among the conquered, decapitate their enemies, and so forth.
... ... ...
I want to be clear that when I used terms such as "pretense" and "intellectual dishonesty" when we first met, I wasn't casting judgment on you personally. Simply living with the moderate's dilemma may be the only way forward, because the alternative would be to radically edit these books. I'm not such an idealist as to imagine that will happen. We can't say, "Listen, you barbarians: These holy books of yours are filled with murderous nonsense. In the interests of getting you to behave like civilized human beings, we're going to redact them and give you back something that reads like Kahlil Gibran. There you go ... Don't you feel better now that you no longer hate homosexuals?" However, that's really what one should be able to do in any intellectual tradition in the twenty-first-century. Again, this problem confronts religious moderates everywhere, but it's an excruciating problem for Muslims. (p65-69)
Launching more drone strikes than Bush ever did and compiling a secret “kill list,” President Obama’s administration took the view that al-Qaeda was like an organized crime gang—disrupt the hierarchy, destroy the gang. Theirs was a concerted and dogmatic attempt at pretending that al-Qaeda was nothing but a fringe criminal group, and not a concrete realization of an ideological phenomenon with grassroots sympathy (119).This failure of the Obama administration to recognize Islamic terrorism for what it is—Islamic terrorism—brings about another discussion I found most interesting in the book: the failure of liberalism.
We must name the ideology behind the Islamic State so that we can refute it. It is crucial to name Islamism so that Muslims like me are confronted with a stark choice. Either we reclaim our religion and its narrative or allow thugs and demagogues to speak in its name and impose it on others. Merely calling it “extremism” is too relative and vague, and sidesteps the responsibility to counter its scriptural justification (121).Nawaz created a term to describe President Obama’s refusal to recognize the ideology behind the extremism: the Voldemort effect. President Obama recognizes that there is a danger that must be dealt with, but by refusing to name it he increases the public’s fear of it, much as characters in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels feared Voldemort so much (and increased their fear of him) by referring to him as “He Who Must Not Be Named.” It is notable to remember that the one person who called Voldemort by his name, Harry Potter, is the one who vanquished him. (Does this mean Trump is our Harry Potter? Maybe Trump’s signature hair style and orange skin has the same meaning as Harry’s lightning bolt? Dear god!) President Obama and soon-to-be President Trump (gulp) should take common sense measures such as naming the ideology of the terrorism and explaining it. If the greater public knows what we’re dealing with, perhaps fear and anti-Muslim hatred will decrease.