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by
Sam Harris
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December 14 - December 31, 2020
“Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drove you.
Fight against them until idolatry is no more and God’s religion reigns supreme. But if they desist, fight none except the evildoers”(2:190–93). “Fighting is obligatory for you, much as you dislike it. But you may hate a thing although it is good for you, and love a thing although it is bad for you. God knows, but you know not” (2:216).
“The only true faith in God’s sight is Islam…. He that denies God’s revelations should know that swift is God’s reckoning” (3:19). “Let the believers not make friends with infidels in preference to the faithful—he that does this has nothing to hope for from God—except in self-defense” (3:28).
“If you have suffered a defeat, so did the enemy. We alternate these vicissitudes among mankind so that God may know the true believers and choose martyrs from among you
If you should die or be slain in the cause of God, God’s forgiveness and His mercy would surely be better than all the riches they amass” (3:156). “Never think that those who were slain in the cause of God are dead. They are alive, and well provided for by their Lord; pleased with His gifts
“Those that suffered persecution for My sake and fought and were slain: I shall forgive them their sins and admit them to gardens watered by running streams, as a reward from God;
We suddenly smote them and they were plunged into utter despair. Thus were the evil-doers annihilated. Praise be to God, Lord of the Universe!” (6:43–45). “[T]hose that deny Our revelations shall be punished for their misdeeds” (6:49). “Such are those that are damned by their own sins. They shall drink scalding water and be sternly punished for their unbelief” (6:70).
On almost every page, the Koran instructs observant Muslims to despise nonbelievers. On almost every page, it prepares the ground for religious conflict. Anyone who can read passages like those quoted above and still not see a link between Muslim faith and Muslim violence should probably consult a neurologist.
Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death. Sayyid Qutb, one of the most influential thinkers in the Islamic world, and the father of modern Islamism among the Sunni, wrote, “The Koran points to another contemptible characteristic of the Jews: their craven desire to live, no matter at what price and regardless of quality, honor, and dignity.”
suicide bombings have been rationalized by much of the Muslim world (where they are called “sacred explosions”). Indeed, such rationalization is remarkably easy, given the tenets of Islam. In light of what devout Muslims believe—about jihad, about martyrdom, about paradise, and about infidels—suicide bombing hardly appears to be an aberration of their faith.
The bottom line for the aspiring martyr seems to be this: as long as you are killing infidels or apostates “in defense of Islam,” Allah doesn’t care whether you kill yourself in the process or not.
Over 38,000 people recently participated in a global survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
We now live in a world in which Muslims have been scientifically polled (with margins of error ranging from 2 to 4 percent) as to whether they support (“often,” “sometimes,” “rarely,” or “never”) the deliberate murder and maiming of noncombatant men, women, and children in defense of Islam. Here are some of the results of the Pew study
If you do not find these numbers sufficiently disturbing, consider that places like Saudia Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories were not included in the survey.
A young man, born into relative privilege, packs his clothing with explosives and ball bearings and unmakes himself along with a score of children in a discotheque, and his mother is promptly congratulated by hundreds of her neighbors.
What will the Palestinians think about such behavior once peace has been established? If they are still devout Muslims here is what they must think: “Our boys are in paradise, and they have prepared the way for us to follow. Hell has been prepared for the infidels.”
We must not overlook the fact that a significant percentage of the world’s Muslims believe that the men who brought down the World Trade Center are now seated at the right hand of God, amid “rivers of purest water, and rivers of milk forever fresh; rivers of wine delectable to those that drink it, and rivers of clearest honey” (47:15).
The irony here is almost a miracle in its own right: the most sexually repressive people found in the world today—people who are stirred to a killing rage by reruns of Baywatch—are lured to martyrdom by a conception of paradise that resembles nothing so much as an al fresco bordello.
For devout Muslims, religious identity seems to trump all others.
Saddam may have tortured and killed more Muslims than any person in living memory, but the Americans are the “enemies of God.”
A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic
What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry?
I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world’s population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher’s stone, and unicorns.
We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry.
One need only read the Koran to know, with something approaching mathematical certainty, that all truly devout Muslims will be “convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power,” just as Huntington alleges.
Western leaders who insist that our conflict is not with Islam are mistaken; but, as I argue throughout this book, we have a problem with Christianity and Judaism as well. It is time we recognized that all reasonable men and women have a common enemy.
Given the constraints of Muslim orthodoxy, given the penalties within Islam for a radical (and reasonable) adaptation to modernity, I think it is clear that Islam must find some way to revise itself, peacefully or otherwise. What this will mean is not at all obvious.
Can anyone point to a greater offender of Muslim dignity than Islamic law itself?
simply recall what Afghanistan was like under the Taliban. Who are those improbable creatures scurrying about in shrouds and being regularly beaten for showing an exposed ankle? Those were the dignified (and illiterate) women of the House of Islam.
At this point in their history, give most Muslims the freedom to vote, and they will freely vote to tear out their political freedoms by the root.
There is no doubt that our collusion with Muslim tyrants—in Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Iran, Egypt, and elsewhere—has been despicable. We have done nothing to discourage the mistreatment and outright slaughter of tens of thousands of Muslims by their own regimes—regimes that, in many cases, we helped bring to power.
But our culpability on this front must be bracketed by the understanding that were democracy to suddenly come to these countries, it would be little more than a gangplank to theocracy. There does not seem to be anything within the principles of Islam by which to resist the slide into sharia (Islamic law), while there is everything to encourage it.
but we cannot merely force Muslim dictators from power and open the polls. It would be like opening the polls to the Christians of the fourteenth century.
Even more troubling, Spain translates as many books into Spanish each year as the entire Arab world has translated into Arabic since the ninth century.
Muslim terrorists have not tended to come from the ranks of the uneducated poor; many have been middle class, educated, and without any obvious dysfunction in their personal lives.
Hezbollah militants who die in violent operations are actually less likely to come from poor homes than their nonmilitant contemporaries and more likely to have a secondary school education.27 The leaders of Hamas are all college graduates, and some have master’s degrees.
I suspect that Muslim prosperity might even make matters worse, because the only thing that seems likely to persuade most Muslims that their worldview is problematic is the demonstrable failure of their societies.
As we see in the person of Osama bin Laden, a murderous religious fervor is compatible with wealth and education.
As long as it is acceptable for a person to believe that he knows how God wants everyone on earth to live, we will continue to murder one another on account of our myths.
The French Socialists in the 1930s seem to have had a peculiar genius for this style of self-deception, for despite the billowing clouds of unreason wafting over from the East, they could not bring themselves to believe that the Nazis posed a problem worth taking seriously. In the face of the German menace, they simply blamed their own government and defense industry for warmongering.
many Western liberals now blame their own governments for the excesses of Muslim terrorists.
much of the world now blames Israel for the suicidal derangement of the Palestinians.
The truth is, as Dershowitz points out, that “no other nation in history faced with comparable challenges has ever adhered to a higher standard of human rights, been more sensitive to the safety of innocent civilians, tried harder to operate under the rule of law, or been willing to take more risks for peace.”
Ask yourself, what are the chances that the Palestinians would show the same restraint in killing Jews if the Jews were a powerless minority living under their occupation and disposed to acts of suicidal terrorism?
War and conversation are our options, and nothing guarantees that we will always have a choice between them.
What have we needed for these terrorists to prosper? We have needed immense failures of political courage and imagination within the Muslim world. We have needed an almost willful lack of curiosity about those failures by people in other parts of the world—the
Given what Islamists believe, it is perfectly rational for them to strangle modernity wherever they can lay hold of it. It is rational, even, for Muslim women to encourage the suicides of their children, as long as they are fighting for the cause of God. Devout Muslims simply know that they are going to a better place.
Someone, after all, must believe in God, for talk of God to be politically efficacious.
Nothing explains the actions of Muslim extremists, and the widespread tolerance of their behavior in the Muslim world, better than the tenets of Islam.
