Original Guest Post

by Jai Singh

There is currently increasing journalistic scrutiny of the atheist British scientist Richard Dawkins and his ally Sam Harris’ statements about Islam and Muslims. In December 2012, the Guardian published an excellent article highlighting the acclaimed physicist Professor Peter Higgs’ accurate observations about Dawkins’ pattern of behaviour when it comes to religion in general; Professor Higgs (of “Higgs Boson particle” fame) has forcefully criticised Dawkins. More recently, superb articles by Nathan Lean in Salon (focusing on Dawkins), Murtaza Hussain for Al Jazeera (focusing on Dawkins, Harris etc) and Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian (mentions Dawkins but focuses predominantly on Harris; also see here) have received considerable publicity. Readers are strongly advised to familiarise themselves with the information in all of these articles.

Before I address the issue of Richard Dawkins, it is worthwhile highlighting some key information about his ally Sam Harris. As mentioned in Glenn Greenwald’s extensively-researched Guardian article, Harris is on record as a) claiming that fascists are “the people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe”, and b) stating “We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim”. Furthermore, bear in mind the following paragraph from a previous Guardian article about Harris: “…..But it tips over into something much more sinister in Harris’ latest book. He suggests that Islamic states may be politically unreformable because so many Muslims are “utterly deranged by their religious faith”. In another passage Harris goes even further, and reaches a disturbing conclusion that “some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them”.”

Richard Dawkins’ “atheist anti-religion” agenda has noticeably become increasingly focused on Islam & Muslims; his online statements (recently including his Twitter account ) have now become so extreme that a great deal of them are essentially indistinguishable from the bigoted, ignorant nonsense pushed by the English Defence League leadership and the main US-based anti-Muslim propagandists such as Robert Spencer etc.

In fact, as Nathan Lean’s Salon article mentioned, the following very revealing information recently surfaced: It turns out that Dawkins has publicly admitted that he hasn’t even read the Quran even though (in his own words) he “often says Islam is the greatest force for evil today”. Mainstream Islamic theology (including the associated impact on Muslim history) is not based solely on the Quran, of course, but Dawkins’ admission is indicative of a number of major problems on his part. So much for the credibility of Richard Dawkins’ “scientific method” in this particular subject. It goes without saying that this also raised questions about exactly which dubious second-hand sources Dawkins has been getting his information on Islam and Muslims from, if he hasn’t even taken the normal professional academic steps of reading the primary sacred text of the religion he has also described as “an unmitigated evil”. Not to mention the question of Dawkins’ real motivations for his current fixation with Islam and Muslims.

Well, it appears that some answers are available. It certainly explains a great deal about Richard Dawkins’ behaviour. In the main part of this article beneath the “Summary” section below, I have listed 54 anti-Islam/anti-Muslim statements posted by Richard Dawkins on the discussion forum of one of his own websites. (The list of quotes also includes embedded URL links directly to the original statements on Dawkins’ website).

Summary of Richard Dawkins’ actions

1. There is a direct connection to Robert Spencer’s inner circle. As confirmed by the URL link supplied by Richard Dawkins in quote #11, Dawkins has definitely been using that cabal’s anti-Muslim propaganda as a source of “information” for his own statements; Dawkins specifically links to the “Islam-Watch” website, which is a viciously anti-Muslim site in the same vein as JihadWatch and Gates of Vienna (both of which were the most heavily cited sources in the terrorist Anders Breivik’s manifesto). More pertinently, as confirmed by this affiliated webpage, the core founders & members of that website include the currently-unidentified individual who uses the online alias “Ali Sina”. This is the same fake “atheist Iranian ex-Muslim” who is a senior board member of “SIOA”/“SION”, an extremely anti-Muslim organisation whose leadership is formally allied with racist white supremacists & European neo-Nazis and has even organised joint public demonstrations with them. “Ali Sina” himself was also cited by Breivik in his manifesto.

Note that the SIOA/SION leadership inner circle includes: a) AFDI and JihadWatch’s Robert Spencer, an ordained Catholic deacon who has been proven to have repeatedly made false statements about Islam & Muslims and has publicly admitted that his actions are heavily motivated by his (unilateral) agenda for the dominance of the Catholic Church; b) AFDI and Atlas Shrugs’ Pamela Geller, who is now on record as advocating what is effectively a “Final Solution” targeting British Muslims, including mass-murder; c) the English Defence League leadership; and d) David Yerushalmi, the head of an organisation whose mission statement explicitly declares that its members are “dedicated to the rejection of democracy” in the United States. Furthermore, Yerushalmi believes that American women shouldn’t even have the right to vote.

Extensive details on “Ali Sina” are available here. Quite a few of the quotes in that article are horrifying. Bear in mind that this is the person whose website Richard Dawkins has publicly cited and promoted. “Ali Sina” is on record as making statements such as the following:

“Muhammad was not a prophet of God. He was an instrument of Satan to divide mankind so we destroy each other. It is a demonic plot to end humanity.”

“I don’t see Muslims as innocent people. They are all guilty as sin. It is not necessary to be part of al Qaida to be guilty. If you are a Muslim you agree with Muhammad and that is enough evidence against you.”

“Muslims, under the influence of Islam lose their humanity. They become beasts. Once a person’s mind is overtaken by Islam, every trace of humanity disappears from him. Islam reduces good humans into beasts.”

[Addressing all Muslims] “We will do everything to save you, to make you see your folly, and to make you understand that you are victims of a gigantic lie, so you leave this lie, stop hating mankind and plotting for its destruction and it [sic] domination. But if all efforts fail and you become a threat to our lives and the lives of our children, we must amputate you. This will happen, not because I say so, but I say so because this is human response. We humans are dictated by our survival instinct. If you threaten me and my survival depends on killing you, I must kill you.”

“Muslims are part of humanity, but they are the diseased limb of mankind. We must strive to rescue them. We must do everything possible to restore their health. That is the mission of FFI [“Faith Freedom International”, “Ali Sina’s” primary website]. However, if a limb becomes gangrenous; if it is infected by necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating disease), that limb must be amputated.”

[Addressing all Muslims] “But you are diseased. You are infected by a deadly cult that threatens our lives. Your humanity is destroyed. Like a limb infected by flesh eating disease, you are now a threat to the rest of mankind…..Islam is disease. What does moderate Muslim mean anyway? Does it mean you are moderately diseased?”

“But there was another element in shaping his [Muhammad’s] character: The influence of Rabbis. Islam and Judaism have a lot in common. They have basically the same eschatology and very similar teachings…..These are all secondary influences of Judaism on Islam. The main common feature between these two faiths is their intolerance. This intolerance in Judaic texts gave the narcissist Muhammad the power to do as he pleased…..How could he get away with that? Why would people believed [sic] in his unproven and often irrational claims? The answer to this question is in Judaism. The Rabbis in Arabia had laid the psychological foundations for Islam among the tolerant pagans…..The reasons Arabs fell into his [Muhammad’s] trap was because of the groundwork laid by the Rabbis in Arabia.”

“Muhammad copied his religion from what he learned from the Jews. The similarity between Islamic thinking and Judaic thinking is not a coincidence.”

“By seeing these self-proclaimed moderate Muslims, I can understand the anger that Jesus felt against those hypocrites whom he called addressed, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”

“In Christianity, it wasn’t the religion that needed to be reformed but the church. What Jesus preached was good.”

“The image portrays the words of Jesus, “the truth will set you free.” That is my motto…..After listening to this rabbi, I somehow felt sympathy for Jesus. I can now see what kind of people he had to deal with.”

2. After Nathan Lean and Glenn Greenwald published the aforementioned Salon and Guardian articles, both “Ali Sina” and Robert Spencer rapidly wrote lengthy articles on their respective websites defending Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. It would therefore be constructive for Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris to publicly clarify if they welcome or reject “Ali Sina” & Robert Spencer’s support. It would also be constructive for Dawkins and Harris to publicly clarify the nature and extent of their involvement with “Ali Sina” & Robert Spencer.

3. Richard Dawkins’ anti-Islam/anti-Muslim narrative (including the stereotyped caricature and his own convoluted strawman arguments) is essentially identical to the hatred-inciting, theologically-, historically- & factually-distorted/falsified propaganda promoted by Far-Right groups such as the English Defence League and especially the owners of JihadWatch and Gates of Vienna. This is clearly not just a coincidence, considering Dawkins’ online sources of [mis]information.

4. Richard Dawkins is now on record as making a series of extremely derogatory statements in which he bizarrely refers to Islam (a religious belief system) as though it were a conscious, sentient entity (see #5, #32, #36, #49). The nature of those statements suggests that Dawkins is actually referring to Muslims. (Also see #7).

5. Richard Dawkins is now on record as repeatedly defending Sam Harris, including Harris’ claims about Muslims and Islam (see #42, #43).

6. Richard Dawkins is now on record as enthusiastically praising the Dutch Far-Right politician Geert Wilders (see #50).

7. Richard Dawkins is now on record as publicly claiming that “communities” has become code for “Muslims” (see #18) and that “multiculturalism” in Europe is code for “Islam” (see #19).

8. Richard Dawkins is now on record as repeatedly praising & defending Ayaan Hirsi Ali (see #20, #26, #50). Hirsi Ali has been proven to have fabricated aspects of her background/experiences (as confirmed by the BBC). Hirsi Ali is also on record as revealing the full scale of her horrific beliefs, including the fact that she sympathises with Anders Breivik and blames so-called “advocates of silence” for Breivik’s mass-murdering terrorist attack.

9. Richard Dawkins is now on record as repeatedly promoting the Far-Right conspiracy theory that British police avoid prosecuting Muslims due to fears of being labelled “racist” or “Islamophobic” (see #1, #24, #28, #45). Robert Spencer & Pamela Geller’s closest European allies, the English Defence League leadership, are amongst the most vocal advocates of this ridiculous conspiracy theory.

10. Richard Dawkins is now on record as explicitly describing himself as “a cultural Christian” (see #54).

11. Richard Dawkins is now on record as proposing what is basically an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” strategy, specifically in terms of Christians vs. Muslims (see here and here. Also see #16). This raises questions about exactly how much support Dawkins has secretly been giving to certain extremist anti-Muslim individuals/groups, or at least how much he is personally aware that these groups are explicitly recycling Dawkins’ own rhetoric when demonising Islam & Muslims.

12. Richard Dawkins is now on record as exhibiting very disturbing attitudes towards the British Muslim Member of Parliament Baroness Sayeeda Warsi and the British Muslim Independent journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, including repeatedly making highly offensive claims that they are “tokens” with zero qualifications for their respective jobs and are in positions of seniority/influence solely because they are “female, Muslim and brown/non-white” (See #25, #29, #30, #31, #35, #53). Dawkins clearly shares the EDL leadership’s noticeable hostility towards Baroness Warsi in particular; furthermore, note Dawkins’ sneering “open letter” to Baroness Warsi (see #29), and also note the fact that the EDL leadership recently published a similar “open letter” to Baroness Warsi on their main website, written by an unidentified anonymous author.

13. Richard Dawkins has published a lengthy diatribe by Robert Spencer/Pamela Geller/EDL ally/SIOE co-founder Stephen Gash.

14. Richard Dawkins has enthusiastically republished a large number of viciously anti-Muslim comments originally posted on the discussion thread of a Telegraph article written by Baroness Warsi. Dawkins claimed that the only reason he was reproducing these comments on his own website was “because the Telegraph is apparently censoring them”.

15. Despite the claims of Richard Dawkins’ defenders that he is an “equal opportunity offender” in terms of his criticisms of various organised religions, the aforementioned 54 quotes speak for themselves and Dawkins’ real pattern of behaviour is self-evident. Amongst other things, it raises the question of whether Dawkins was already perfectly aware that the anti-Islam/anti-Muslim propaganda he is basing his statements on originates in members of Robert Spencer’s extremist inner circle and their respective hate websites (which would have very nasty implications about Dawkins himself), or whether Dawkins has been astonishingly incompetent about researching his sources of “information”.

16. Further information on Richard Dawkins’ other activities targeting Islam & Muslims is available here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Examples of statements by Richard Dawkins:
#1: [Quoting: “No I don’t think it was racist to feel that way. If you saw a European mistreating his wife in public wouldn’t you feel the same? “] “Of course. In that case I might have called a policeman. If you see a Muslim beating his wife, there would be little point in calling a policeman because so many of the British police are terrified of being accused of racism or ‘Islamophobia’.”

#2: “Religion poisons everything. But Islam has its own unmatched level of toxicity.”

#3: “Religion poisons everything, but Islam is in a toxic league of its own.”

#4: “…..But let’s keep things in proportion. Christianity may be pretty bad, but isn’t Islam in a league of its own when it comes to sheer vicious nastiness?”

#5: [Quoting: “He blamed ‘radical stupid people who don't know what Islam is,’”] “They are certainly stupid, but they know exactly what Islam is. Islam is the religion that wins arguments by killing its opponents and crying ‘Islamophobia’ at anyone who objects.”

#6: “This horrible film deserves to go viral. What a pathetic religion: how ignominious to need such aggressively crazed defenders.”

#7: “Muslims seem to suffer from an active HUNGER to be offended. If there’s nothing obvious to be offended by, or ‘hurt’ by, they’ll go out looking for something. Are there any other similar examples we could think of, I wonder, not necessarily among religious groups?”

#8: “Paula’s letter in today’s Independent (see above) will doubtless provoke lots of fatuous bleats of “Oh but Islam is a peaceful religion.””

#9: [Quoting: “But it has nothing to do with islam.”] “Oh no? Then why do the perpetrators, and the mullahs and imams and ayatollahs and ‘scholars’, continually SAY it has everything to do with Islam? You may not think it has anything to do with Islam, but I prefer to listen to what the people responsible actually say. I would also love it if decent, ‘moderate’ Muslims would stand up and condemn the barbarisms that are carried out, or threatened, in their name.”

#10: “What is there left to say about Sharia Law? Who will defend it? Who can find something, anything, good to say about Islam?”

#11: [Quoting: “needed to respect other religions”] “That word ‘other’ worries me and so does ‘respect’. ‘Other’ than what? What is the default religion which makes the word ‘other’ appropriate? What is this ‘other’ religion, which is being invoked in this high-handed, peremptory way. It isn’t hard to guess the answer. Islam. Yet again, Islam, the religion of peace, the religion that imposes the death penalty for apostasy, the religion whose legal arm treats women officially as second class citizens, the religion that sentences women to multiple lashes for the crime of being raped, the religion whose ‘scholars’ have been known to encourage women to suckle male colleagues so that they can be deemed ‘family’ and hence allowed to work in the same room; the religion that the rest of us are called upon to ‘respect’ for fear of being thought racist or ‘Islamophobic’. Respect? RESPECT?”

#12: “All three of the Abrahamic religions are deeply evil if they take their teachings seriously. Islam is the only one that does.”

#13: “Yes, Christians are much much better. Their sacred texts may be just as bad, but they don’t act on them.”

#14: “Quite the contrary. I think the problem [with Islam] is with the MAJORITY of Muslims, who either condone violence or fail to speak out against it. I am now praising the MINORITY who have finally decided to stand up for peace and nonviolence.”

#15: [Quoting: “Actually I think linking to every video this bigot releases does look like an endorsement, even if it's unintentional. Why not link to some news items by some other right wing bigots the BNP or the EDL, they're always banging on about Islam so it should qualify.”] “I support Pat [Condell]’s stance on Islam. It is NOT based on racism like that of the BNP, and he is properly scathing about so-called ‘Islamophobia’.”

#16: “After the last census, Christianity in Britain benefited, in terms of political influence, from the approximately 70% who ticked the Christian box, whether or not they were really believers. With the menacing rise of Islam, some might even be tempted to tick the Christian box, for fear of doing anything to boost the influence of the religion of “peace””.

#17: [Quoting: “What sort of justice is this? My daughter has been beaten to death in the name of justice,” Mosammet's father, Dorbesh Khan, 60, told the BBC.] “What sort of justice? Islamic justice of course.”

#18: “Just as ‘communities’ has become code for ‘Muslims’, ‘multiculturalism’ is code for a systematic policy of sucking up to their often loathsome ‘community leaders’: imams, mullahs, ‘clerics’, and the ill-named ‘scholars’.”

#19: “Forgive me for not welcoming this judgment with unalloyed joy. If I thought the motive was secularist I would indeed welcome it. But are we sure it is not pandering to ‘multiculturalism’, which in Europe is code for Islam? And if you think Catholicism is evil . . .”

#20: “I don’t think this is a matter for levity. Think of it as a foretaste of more serious things to come. They’ve already hounded Ayaan Hirsi Ali out of Holland and their confidence is growing with their population numbers, encouraged by the craven accommodationist mentality of nice, decent Europeans. This particular move to outlaw dogs will fail, but Muslim numbers will continue to grow unless we can somehow break the memetic link between generations: break the assumption that children automatically adopt the religion of their parents.”

#21: “I said that Islam is evil. I did NOT say Muslims are evil. Indeed, most of the victims of Islam are Muslims. Especially female ones.”

#22: “Whenever I read an article like this, I end up shaking my head in bafflement. Why would anyone want to CONVERT to Islam? I can see why, having been born into it, you might be reluctant to leave, perhaps when you reflect on the penalty for doing to. But for a woman (especially a woman) voluntarily to JOIN such a revolting and misogynistic institution when she doesn’t have to always suggests to me massive stupidity. And then I remember our own very intelligent Layla Nasreddin / Lisa Bauer and retreat again to sheer, head-shaking bafflement.”

#23: “Apologists for Islam would carry more conviction if so-called ‘community’ leaders would ever go to the police and report the culprits. That would solve, at a stroke, the problem that has been exercising posters here. ‘Community’ leaders are best placed to know what is going on on their ‘communities’. Why don’t they report the perpetrators to the police and have them jailed?”

#24: “Presumably we shall hear all the usual accommodationist bleats about “Nothing to do with Islam”, and “It’s cultural, not religious” and “Islam doesn’t approve the practice”. Whether or not Islam approves the practice depends – as with the death penalty for apostasy – on which ‘scholar’ you talk to. Islamic ‘scholar’? What a joke. What a sick, oxymoronic joke. Islamic ‘scholar’!
It is of course true that not all Muslims mutilate their daughters, or approve it. But I conjecture that it is true that virtually all, if not literally all, the 24,000 girls referred to come from Muslim families. And all, or virtually all those who wield the razor blade (or the broken glass or whatever it is) are devout Muslims. And above all, the reason the police turn a blind eye to this disgusting practice is that they THINK it is sanctioned by Islam, or they think it is no business of anybody outside the ‘community’, and they are TERRIFIED of being called ‘Islamophobic’ or racist.”

#25: “Apologies if this has already been said here, but “Baroness” Warsi has no sensible qualifications for high office whatever. She has never won an election and never distinguished herself in any of the ways that normally lead to a peerage. All she has achieved in life is to FAIL to be elected a Member of Parliament, twice (on one occasion ignominiously bucking the swing towards her party). She was, nevertheless, elevated to the peerage and rather promptly put in the Cabinet and the Privy Council. The only reasonable explanation for her rapid elevation is tokenism. She is female, Muslim, and non-white – a bundle of three tokens in one, and therefore a precious rarity in her party. You might have suspected her lack of proper qualifications from the fatuous things she says, of which her speech in Rome is a prime example.”

#26: [Quoting: “Muslim extremists have called for Aan to be beheaded but fellow atheists have rallied round, and urged him to stand by his convictions despite the pressure.”] “For one sadly short moment I thought the ‘but’ was going to be followed by ‘moderate Muslims have rallied round . . .’ Once again, where are the decent, moderate Muslims? Why do they not stand up in outrage against their co-religionists? Maybe Ayaan Hirsi Ali is right and “moderate Muslim” is something close to an oxymoron. How can they not see that, if you need to kill to protect your faith, that is a powerful indication that you have lost the argument? It is impossible to exaggerate how deeply I despise them.”

#27: “There are moves afoot to introduce sharia law into Britain, Canada and various other countries. I hope it is not too “islamophobic” of me to hope that the “interpretation” of sharia favoured by our local Muslim “scholars” will be different from the “interpretation” favoured by Iranian “scholars”. Oh but of course: “That’s not my kind of Islam.””

#28: [Quoting: “Richard, I really dislike disagreeing with you. However, female genital mutilation is not really based on Islam. My wife is from Indonesia and I have asked around and none of them know of anyone who does that in their country. From all that I have read and seen, it seems like it predates islam and is mostly found in Africa and to a lesser extent the Middle East.”] “Even if you are right (and I am not necessarily conceding the point) that FGM itself is not based on Islam, I strongly suspect that the British police turning a blind eye to it is very strongly based on islamophobophobia – the abject terror of being thought islamophobic.”

#29: “Dear Lady Warsi
Is it true that the Islamic penalty for apostasy is death? Please answer the question, yes or no. I have asked many leading Muslims, often in public, and have yet to receive a straight answer. The best answer I heard was from “Sir” Iqbal Sacranie, who said “Oh well, it is seldom enforced.”
Will you please stand up in the House of Lords and publicly denounce the very idea that, however seldom enforced, a religion has the right to kill those who leave it? And will you stand up and agree that, since a phobia is an irrational fear, “Islamophobic” is not an appropriate description of anybody who objects to it. And will you stand up and issue a public apology, on behalf of your gentle, peaceful religion, to Salman Rushdie? And to Theo van Gogh? And to all the women and girls who have been genitally mutilated? And to . . . I’m sure you know the list better than I do.
Richard Dawkins”

#30: [Quoting: “Blimey Richard! This really has got up your nose, hasn't it? Your comments are usually a great deal more measured. It's not exactly uncommon for a Minister to “rise without trace”. I think we can all agree that our political system is “sub-optimal” to put it politely. Tokensim is one possibility (though if the Tories were really just after the muslim vote its interesting that they opted for a female muslim token).”] “I didn’t mean to suggest that the Tories were after the Muslim vote. I think they know that is a lost cause. I suspect that they were trying to live down their reputation as the nasty party, the party of racists, the party of sexists, the Church of England at prayer. More particularly, the ceaseless propaganda campaign against “Islamophobia” corrupts them just as it corrupts so many others. I suspect that the Tory leadership saw an opportunity to kill two, or possibly three, birds with one stone, by elevating this woman to the House of Lords and putting her in the Cabinet.
I repeat, her [Baroness Sayeeda Warsi’s] qualifications for such a meteoric rise, as the youngest member of the House of Lords, are tantamount to zero. As far as I can see, her only distinction is to have stood for election to the House of Commons and lost. That’s it.
Apart, of course, from being female, Muslim, and brown. Like I said, killing three birds with one stone.”

#31: “Baroness Warsi has never been elected to Parliament. What are her qualifications to be in the Cabinet? Does anyone seriously think she would be in the Cabinet, or in the House of Lords, if she was not a Muslim woman? Is her elevation to high office (a meteoric rise, for she is the youngest member of the House of Lords) any more than a deplorable example of tokenism?”

#32: “I too heard Paul Foot speak at the Oxford Union, and he was a mesmerising orator, even as an undergraduate. Once again, Christopher Hitchens nails it. It is the nauseating presumption of Islam that marks it out for special contempt. I remain baffled at the number of otherwise decent people who can be seduced by such an unappealing religion. I suppose it must be childhood indoctrination, but it is still hard to credit. If you imagine setting up an experiment to see how far you could go with childhood indoctrination – a challenge to see just how nasty a belief system you could instil into a human mind if you catch it early enough – it is hard to imagine succeeding with a belief system half as nasty as Islam. And yet succeed they do.”

#33: “Orthodox political opinion would have it that the great majority of Muslims are good people, and there is just a small minority of extremists who give the religion a bad name. Poll evidence has long made me sceptical. Now – it is perhaps a minor point, but could it be telling? – Salman Taseer is murdered by one of his own bodyguard. If ‘moderate’ Muslims are the great majority that we are asked to credit, wouldn’t you think it should have been easy enough to find enough ‘moderate’ Muslims, in the entire state of Pakistan, to form the bodyguard of a prominent politician? Are ‘moderate’ Muslims so thin on the ground?”

#34: “It is almost a cliché that people of student age often experiment with a variety of belief systems, which they subsequently, and usually quite rapidly, give up. These young people have voluntarily adopted a belief system which has the unique distinction of prescribing execution as the official penalty for leaving it. I have enormous sympathy for those people unfortunate enough to be born into Islam. It is hard to muster much sympathy for those idiotic enough to convert to it.”

#35: [Quoting: “Why do any media outlets keep repeatedly inviting her [Yasmin Alibhai-Brown] (excluding more capable, intelligent, qualified guests) as if she is some kind of authority or expert on anything at all?”] “Do you really need to ask that question? Media people are petrified of being thought racist, Islamophobic or sexist. The temptation to kill three birds with one stone must be irresistible.”

#36: [Quoting: “I'm surprised nobody has acknowledged the elephant in the room -- namely, multicultural appeasement of Islam. The fact that (a) the paper was accepted, and (b) it took only five days to get accepted, suggests that there's something funny going on here. Could it be that the referee of the paper was a subscriber to the popular opinion in Britain that anything associated with Muslims short of murder in broad daylight is somehow praiseworthy and something to be encouraged?”] “Yes, I’m sorry to say that is all too plausible. Perhaps the Editor decided it would be “Islamophobic” to reject it.”

#37: [Quoting: “I seem to remember a very bright young muslim lad”] You mean a bright young child of muslim parents.

#38: “Oh, small as it is, this is the most heartening news I have heard for a long time. What can we do to help these excellent young Pakistanis, without endangering them? If, by any chance, any of them reads this web site, please get in touch to let us know how we might help. If anybody here has friends in Pakistan, or elsewhere afflicted by the ‘religion of peace’ (it isn’t even funny any more, is it?), or facebook friends, please encourage them to join and support these brave young people.”

#39: [Quoting: “The obvious question is: who cares, are we saying when it was a catholic school it was ok and a Muslim school is worse.”] “Yes. It is worse. MUCH worse”

#40: [Quoting: “I was even accused of having converted and married into another religion. But I wasn't worried as I'm a true Muslim," says the feisty young woman.”] If only she were a bit more feisty she would cease to be a Muslim altogether – except that would make her an apostate, for which the Religion of Peace demands stoning. Indeed, you’ll probably find she’d be sentenced to 99 lashes just for the crime of being feisty.”

#41: [Quoting: “Disgusting and hideous as this practice is, I think the article makes it quite clear that it's not limited to any one religion or community. It's common to Christians, Muslims, Hindus, yezidis and many others.”] I just did a rough count (I may have missed one or two) of the named victims Robert Fisk mentioned. As follows:
Muslim 52
Hindu 3
Sikh 1
Christian 0
But of course, Islam is the religion of peace. To suggest otherwise would be racist Islamophobia.”

#42:
“Whatever else you may say about Sam Harris’s article quoted above, and whether or not he is right about the NY mosque, the following two paragraphs, about Islam more generally, seem to me well worth repeating.
Richard”
[Quotes Sam Harris] “The first thing that all honest students of Islam must admit is that it is not absolutely clear where members of al Qaeda, the Taliban, al-Shabab, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hamas, and other Muslim terrorist groups have misconstrued their religious obligations. If they are “extremists” who have deformed an ancient faith into a death cult, they haven’t deformed it by much. When one reads the Koran and the hadith, and consults the opinions of Muslim jurists over the centuries, one discovers that killing apostates, treating women like livestock, and waging jihad—not merely as an inner, spiritual struggle but as holy war against infidels—are practices that are central to the faith. Granted, one path out of this madness might be for mainstream Muslims to simply pretend that this isn’t so—and by this pretense persuade the next generation that the “true” Islam is peaceful, tolerant of difference, egalitarian, and fully compatible with a global civil society. But the holy books remain forever to be consulted, and no one will dare to edit them. Consequently, the most barbarous and divisive passages in these texts will remain forever open to being given their most plausible interpretations.
Thus, when Allah commands his followers to slay infidels wherever they find them, until Islam reigns supreme (2:191-193; 4:76; 8:39; 9:123; 47:4; 66:9)—only to emphasize that such violent conquest is obligatory, as unpleasant as that might seem (2:216), and that death in jihad is actually the best thing that can happen to a person, given the rewards that martyrs receive in Paradise (3:140-171; 4:74; 47:5-6)—He means just that. And, being the creator of the universe, his words were meant to guide Muslims for all time. Yes, it is true that the Old Testament contains even greater barbarism—but there are obvious historical and theological reasons why it inspires far less Jewish and Christian violence today. Anyone who elides these distinctions, or who acknowledges the problem of jihad and Muslim terrorism only to swiftly mention the Crusades, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, the Tamil Tigers, and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, is simply not thinking honestly about the problem of Islam.”

#43: [Quoting: “I am newish here (and not planning to stay). Could someone please just set my mind at rest by confirming whether or not this poster is the real Prof. Dawkins. I really, really hope not. I used to have respect for him and I supposed that, being a busy man, he would never have time to come here, and therefore could not be held responsible for all the bigotry, against believers in general, and Muslims in particular, which gets aired here in the guise of Reason. If this really is him, then I guess he can't disassociate himself from it and from the charge of providing a platform for bigots and haters. If it's really you, Prof. Dawkins, you should be ashamed of yourself.” Quoting his own comment: “Whatever else you may say about Sam Harris's article quoted above, and whether or not he is right about the NY mosque, the following two paragraphs, about Islam more generally, seem to me well worth repeating. Richard”] “You mean the Koran and the Hadith don’t say what Sam claims they say? I’m delighted to hear that, but can you substantiate it? I do hope you can, then we can all sleep easier. If, on the other hand, Sam is summarising Islamic scriptures accurately, why should I be ashamed of myself for simply quoting Sam’s accurate summary?”

#44: “Some critics have suggested that Paula should fairly have quoted, in equal measure, from Islamic scriptures. Since she was responding to a specific question set by the Washington Post about ‘religious and moral considerations’, it was appropriate for her to concentrate on the religions that dominate the readership of the Washington Post, namely Christianity and Judaism. However, it would be an interesting exercise for one of our Koranically-informed readers to undertake a matching article drawing on the scriptures of the ‘Religion of Peace’. Which of the ‘great’ monotheistic faiths will win First Prize for bloodthirsty nastiness and ethnic cleansing zeal?”

#45: “I have it on the authority of a London schools inspector that the reason the police do not prosecute is that they are afraid of being accused of racism or “Islamophobia.” In the words of the police officer quoted in this article, they “don’t want to alienate communities.” You might as well refrain from prosecuting child rapists because you don’t want to alienate the pedophile community. If arresting these vicious hags really were “islamophobic” (or course it isn’t), I’d be proud to be called islamophobic.”

#46: “Most Muslims don’t do honour killings, but the vast majority of honour killings are done by Muslims, loyally practising their faith and following what their religion has taught them is the right and proper thing to do.”

#47: [Quoting: “Given what the Palestinians have been through in the last 40 years, expecting polite grace & dignity at all times might be a little optimistic.”] “And you think these people were Palestinians? Or were they just Muslims?”

#48: “Islam is surely the greatest man-made evil in the world today, and I think I’d feel a tiny bit more secure against the menacing threat of Islam and Islamic faith schools, under the Tories than under Labour”.

#49: [Quoting Steve Zara: “Now, it seems like the Cartoons were designed to be quite offensive. That was the artistic intention. Putting aside any judgement on that, wouldn't it have been more interesting if the cartoons had been designed to be hardly offensive at all, in the style of the UK atheist bus campaign. It would have make those claiming insult and offence look very silly indeed.”] “..…The Westergaard cartoon implies nothing more offensive than that Islam is a violent religion, a fact that was amply demonstrated by the response to it. Part of the problem, as many here have pointed out, is that Islam expects special treatment: expects to be allowed to take disproportionate offence, far beyond that assumed by anybody else on Earth.”

#50: “I have just watched Fitna. I don’t know whether it is the original version, but it is the one linked by Jerry Coyne. Maybe Geert Wilders has done or said other things that justify epithets such as ‘disgusting’, or ‘racist’. But as far as this film is concerned, I can see nothing in it to substantiate such extreme vilification. There is much that is disgusting in the film, but it is all contained in the quotations, which I presume to be accurate, from the Koran and from various Muslim preachers and orators, and the clips of atrocities such as beheadings and public executions. At least as far as Fitna is concerned, to call Wilders ‘disgusting’ is surely no more sensible than shooting the messenger. If it is complained that these disgusting Koranic verses, or these disgusting Muslim speeches, or the more than disgusting Muslim executions, are ‘taken out of context’, I should like to be told what the proper context would look like, and how it could possibly make any difference.

To repeat, Wilders may have said and done other things of which I am unaware, which deserve condemnation, but I can see nothing reprehensible in his making of Fitna, and certainly nothing for which he should go on trial. Like the film of Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, the style of Fitna is restrained, the music, by Tchaikowski and Grieg, is excellently chosen and contributes to the restrained atmosphere of the film. The horrendous execution scenes are faded out before the coup-de-grace; all the stridency, and almost the only expressions of opinion, come from Muslims, not from Wilders.

Why is this man on trial, unless it is, yet again, pandering to the ludicrous convention that religious opinion must not be ‘offended’? Geert Wilders, if it should turn out that you are a racist or a gratuitous stirrer and provocateur I withdraw my respect, but on the strength of Fitna alone I salute you as a man of courage, who has the balls to stand up to a monstrous enemy.”

#51: [Sarcasm] “How dare you interfere with their culture? Obviously these people should be allowed to follow their own customs, without interference from Islamophobic imperialists. In any case, I expect only SOME women will be stoned for the crime of being raped. And even they will almost certainly deserve it, as they surely wouldn’t have been raped if they hadn’t shown an inch of bare wrist or ankle, or if they hadn’t left the house unaccompanied by a male relative.”

#52: “I am not in favour of banning the burqa, because I am not in favour banning any style of clothing. But I think Pat is right to compare the burqa with a Ku Klux Klan hood or a swastika armband (which shouldn’t be banned either). I think he is right to speak of Islamic fascism, I think he is right to condemn the use of the word ‘Islamophobia’….I think Islam is probably the greatest of all man-made evils in the world today. It takes courage to speak out against it. Pat has that courage. He will be making enough enemies among the Islamofascists. I prefer not to encourage them by attacking him from the other side. “

#53: “For a while now I have carried on a sporadic, and more-or-less friendly, correspondence with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. I continually try to provoke her with the horrors of Islam, in order to persuade her to leave it. She roundly condemns the bad bits of Islam, but I wonder where there are any good bits for her to retreat to. I am becoming increasingly curious. Are there ANY good things about Islam at all?”

#54: “I find it hard not to resent the implication of Comment 36645 by oao. I obviously refer to Christianity, by default, more than to Judaism (or Islam) because I am a cultural Christian, writing in a cultural Christian country (Britain) with an eye to a larger audience in another (more than merely cultural) Christian country (USA).”

Atheist Islamophobia… Again

Post by Kate Blanchard (Religion Dispatches)

Sparked by a Richard Dawkins tweet, in which he drew a parallel between Islamists and (yawn) Nazis, Nathan Lean recently suggested on Salon.com that the most famous representatives of the new atheism “flirt with” Islamophobia [echoing Chris Stedman’s prescient warning to fellow atheists on RD this past August]. As the article explains, Dawkins, Hitchens, and their ilk have had a gleeful decade of “intellectual triumphalism” directed against the religion that they see as particularly adept at producing “suicide bombers and terrorists,” which “are not aberrations. They are the norm.” Such Islamophobic ideas are not unique to the new atheists, of course, but after reading Lean’s analysis, one is inclined to nominate “flirting” (the term chosen by Salon editorial for the headline) for Understatement of the Year.

An article by Frans De Waal that seeks to understand why “Militant Atheism Has Become a Religion” seems relevant here. As an Emory psychology professor who conducts research on primate behavior, and an atheist himself, his criticism is directed neither at atheists nor Muslims. Instead he writes, “I consider dogmatism a far greater threat than religion per se.” Dogmatists “are poor listeners” who “pound their drums so hard that they can’t hear one another.”

He surmises that their primary motivation is not to discover the truth but rather to show off, “the way male birds gather… to display splendid plumage for visiting females.” De Waal accuses the new atheists of going after Islam simply because it is “low-hanging fruit” in Western contexts: “Throw in a few pictures of burqas, mention infibulation, and who will argue with your revulsion of religion?” Audience after audience applauds these tired tactics as if they were original, but they are highly unscientific and do little to further understanding.

It’s not difficult to see how the character of one’s atheism may closely reflect the character of one’s religiosity. Those who leave behind lives that were deeply shaped by religious conviction, ritual, and community will likely feel they need, at least for some time, a period of “recovery from religion” in order to figure out their new identities. Depending on their families, careers, or other relationships, the break-up may be quite painful, emotionally and even materially. Religion that is hateful and judgmental is thus likely to breed atheists who respond measure for measure. Dogmatic atheism, in other words, is one obvious consequence of dogmatic religion.

The rise of the “nones” therefore raises interesting questions about the future of dogmatism. If no one is “indoctrinating” children or “forcing” religion down anyone’s throat any more, what will people rebel against or leave behind? What force will we blame when people behave badly? If, as De Waal’s article suggests, dogmatism is a natural tendency among some members of our species, then it is not going away. It will just find some other outlet. Where will it bubble up when traditional religions cease to provide the heat?

by Garibaldi

We have long detailed that Islamophobic pop-Atheist gurus Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens were, in varying degrees, apologists for imperialism, colonialism and torture (after experiencing water boarding himself Hitchens spoke out against the practice).

In the past week both Nathan Lean in Salon.com and Murtaza Hussain in AlJazeera English have written scathing critiques of the New Atheist movement leaders. These critiques are not the first of their kind, many have written very well about the views and beliefs of the likes of Harris and Dawkins, including Chris Hedges, PZ Myers, RJ Eskow, Theodore Sayeed, Jeff Sparrow, Scott Atran and a host of others.

It appears both Lean and Hussain’s articles afflicted Harris particularly badly, but apparently when Glenn Greenwald retweeted Hussain’s article it drew a special ire from Harris that he could not ignore; he subsequently shot off an angry email to Glenn Greenwald (read their exchange here).

In today’s Guardian, Glenn Greenwald has written a devastating article exposing Sam Harris’ long and detailed track record of hostile anti-Muslim animus.

by Glenn Greenwald (Guardian)

An excellent article by Nathan Lean of Aslan Media, taking on the absurdities of the New Atheists.

Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheists flirt with Islamophobia

BY NATHAN LEAN

A Twitter rant by Richard Dawkins re-exposes a disturbing Islamophobic streak among the New Atheists

Richard Dawkins, the preppy septuagenarian and professional atheist whose work in the field of evolutionary biology informs his godless worldview, has always been a prickly fellow. The British scientist and former Oxford University professor has expended considerable ink and precious breath rationalizing away the possibility of cosmic forces and explaining in scientific terms why those who believe in a divine creator are, well, stupid.

It appears, however, that some of those believers are stupider than others. At least according to a recent series of tweets by Dawkins, who served up a hostile helping of snark this week aimed at followers of the Muslim faith. It’s a group that has come to occupy a special place in his line of fire — and in the minds of a growing club of no-God naysayers who have fast rebranded atheism into a popular, cerebral and more bellicose version of its former self.

The New Atheists, they are called, offer a departure from the theologically based arguments of the past, which claimed that science wasn’t all that important in disproving the existence of God. Instead, Dawkins and other public intellectuals like Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens suffocate their opponents with scientific hypotheses, statistics and data about the physical universe — their weapons of choice in a battle to settle the scores in a debate that has raged since the days of Aristotle. They’re atheists with attitudes, as polemical as they are passionate, brash as they are brainy, and while they view anyone who does not share their unholier-than-thou worldview with skepticism and scorn, their cogitations on the creation of the universe have piqued the interest of even many believers. With that popularity, they’ve built lucrative empires. Dawkins and Harris are regulars in major publications like the New York Times and the Economist, and their books — “The Selfish Gene” and “The God Delusion” by Dawkins and “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Harris — top bestseller lists and rake in eye-popping royalties.

It seems to me that this tempest in a teapot began with a misunderstanding, Lawrence Krauss was under the impression that attendees of the debate were being forced to sit in segregated seating when clearly the troubles began when a few atheist men demanded to sit in-between Muslim women who had voluntarily chose to sit apart from men.

I’m not sure if Krauss is a fan of violin music but would he likewise make a big stink out of Orthodox Jews who were allowed their own space for segregated seating between men and women at a recent concert by Itzhak Perlman at the Barclays Center?

This whole episode had the trappings of atheists making a big ado about nothing.

Dawkins defends Enlightenment values

Last Saturday the Islamic Education and Research Academy organised a debate at University College London between iERA’s Hamza Tzortzis and atheist scientist Lawrence Krauss on the topic “Islam or atheism. Which makes more sense?”

Krauss was unhappy about the organisation of the event, claiming that the audience was separated on the basis of gender, and hetweeted the following comment, which was widely publicised: “Almost walked out of debate as it ended up segregated + saw 3 kids being ejected for sitting in wrong place. I packed up and they caved in.”

Krauss’s complaint was seized on by fellow atheist Richard Dawkins, who informed his Twitter followers: “At UC London debate between a Muslim and Lawrence Krauss, males & females had to sit separately. Krauss threatened to leave.” He addedsarcastically: “I don’t think Muslims should segregate sexes at University College London events. Oh NO, how very ISLAMOPHOBIC of me. How RACIST of me.”

Well, in addition to a couple of other tweets that suggested perhaps just a hint of hostility towards Islam and its adherents (“Who the hell do these Muslims think they are?”, Dawkins demanded,followed by “How has UCL come to this: cowardly capitulation to Muslims? Tried to segregate sexes in debate between @LKrauss1 and some Muslim or other”) what is Islamophobic – and, yes, not a little racist – about Dawkins’ response is that he should publish damaging accusations against a Muslim organisation without bothering to establish the facts of the case.

He wasn’t the only one. On Monday UCL issued a statementdeclaring that, although they were “still investigating what actually happened at the meeting”, they nevertheless accepted the charge that “despite our clear instructions, attempts were made to enforce segregation at the meeting”, and on that basis they announced that iERA was banned from holding any further meetings at UCL.

For their part, iERA responded with a press release expressing their “surprise with the decision by University College London to not allow us to hold any further events on UCL premises” and stating that they would be meeting with UCL to clarify the situation.

Interviewed by the Huffington Post, Zayd Tutton of iERA gave their version of what happened at the meeting: “There were three sections as agreed with UCL prior to the debate. This was agreed clearly with UCL representatives. Muslim women choosing to adhere to orthodox Islamic principles in sitting in their own area had their own section. As for those who wanted to sit together, male or female, they had their own section where they freely mixed and sat together from the beginning.”

Tutton added the “3 kids”, in defence of whom Krauss had threatened to withdraw from the debate, were in fact two men who forcibly tried to sit in the female section. He said: “When arguing it was about sitting in any area in the auditorium, they were offered an entirely free aisle in the aforementioned Muslim female section, but insisted that they wanted to sit in between the Muslim females, with a view to offending their religious beliefs.”

This account is confirmed by a Muslim woman who attended the debate. She has written:

“As a woman, I should have the choice who I choose to mix with. The organisers were accommodating to all – for those who wanted to sit separately, and for those who wanted to sit together. During the event, 2 men demanded to sit in the women’s section in between the women, after much discussion, the organisers cleared space for them to sit – (there were so many rows), while still trying to respect the position of the women who had requested to be seated separately. A man in particular demanded to sit in between the women in order to ‘challenge their beliefs’. How is this being tolerant? The men were intimidating and the organisers spoke in length to the individuals before asking them to leave as they showed complete disrespect.”

In further tweets Krauss reported that he had held a subsequent meeting with iERA, as a result of which he appears to have accepted their assurance that they had no intention of forcing men and women to sit separately at the debate. But that still wasn’t good enough for Krauss. “I was told there would be no gender segregation,” he complained, “whereas their intent was voluntary gender segregation.” In other words, what he is objecting to now is not that gender separation was imposed on those attending the debate; rather, his argument is that Muslim women who wanted to sit in their own section apart from male members of the audience should have been prevented from doing so.

Atheists like Krauss and Dawkins like to portray themselves as promoters of Enlightenment values and women’s rights. But when it comes to Islam, they ignore empirical evidence and abandon rational thought in favour of blind adherence to dogmatic anti-Muslim prejudice. As for supporting feminist principles, this evidently doesn’t extend to respecting the right of Muslim women to follow their faith – or indeed to defending them against harassment by fellow male atheists.

by Garibaldi

A little over a week ago I had the privilege to converse with writer and intellectual Haroon Moghul, who is currently in between writing several books (I won’t give away any spoilers) and completing his PhD dissertation!

Moghul is a unique voice who early on challenged Islamophobia while also providing nuanced insight and perspective relating to Islamic issues and Muslim identity, for which he earned his rightful place in the ranks of the anti-Loons.

A brief bio:

Haroon Moghul is a Fellow at New America Foundation and a Ph.D. candidate in Columbia University’s Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies. His research focus is colonial India, and specifically Muhammad Iqbal’s project of reconstructing religious thought in Islam.

Haroon is the Fellow in Muslim Politics and Societies at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School and is on the Board of the Multicultural Audience Development Initiative at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He holds an M.A. in Middle East and South Asian Studies from Columbia University.

Haroon is an Associate Editor and columnist at Religion Dispatches; his writing has also been featured on al-Jazeera, Foreign Policy, and The Huffington Post. In his novel, “The Order of Light” (Penguin 2006), young Muslims light themselves on fire to protest the authoritarian reality of the Middle East, an eerie forecasting of recent events.

As you can expect, Moghul’s background, fields of study and writings sparked our curiosity. You will find that the deep introspection which he provides to intrinsic questions about the relationship between “the West and the East” will be of immense benefit and critical importance.

We touched upon Moghul’s: loss and return to faith in God, the place of doubt in Islam, literature, what exactly is a “Muslim reformer,” the phenomenon of “ex-Muslims and ex-terrorists” in relation to Islamophobia, Jesus and carpet bombing, a possible shisha pow-wow with Kamal Saleem, the Arab uprisings, Saudi Arabia and why he may never be able to do Hajj (pilgrimage), and the famous early 20th century Indian Muslim poet Muhammad Iqbal.

Fair warning: The interview is long but very, very much worth the read.

Interview with Haroon Moghul:

Garibaldi of Loonwatch: I was intrigued by your bio, where we read that you left Islam and became an Atheist. In my conversation with Reza Aslan he described his conversion to Evangelicalism as “emotional” and his conversion to Islam as being “rational.” At one point you became an atheist…

Haroon Moghul: Yeah, there was a period in my life where I didn’t believe in God.

LW: An AltMuslimah book review discussed a book that you were featured in titled “All-American: 45 American Men on Being Muslim.” The book review described you as,

“displaying a raw honesty about the difficulties of Islam’s central command, to believe in God – how a totalitarian commitment to the ‘endless tasks assigned by Islam’ left you “crumpled in otherworldly exhaustion,’ before you found yourself able to accept Islam as a long term journey marked by balance.”

I’m hoping you can say a little more about this journey for those who don’t have access to the book. Why did you become an atheist and what does it mean to be “crumpled in otherworldly exhaustion”?

HM: The way I was taught Islam was as a checklist religion. There were things that you had to do on a daily basis, on an annual basis, on a life-time basis and the way in which those things were presented to me, the way in which I understood them, was like marking items off a list. Pray five times a day, fast during Ramadan, go to Mecca for Hajj and the result was looking at life as some type of calculation: “I do so many things in this column, I don’t do so many things in that column” and the effect of it for me was exhausting.

Intellectually it was very unsatisfying, emotionally it was deadening and spiritually it felt profoundly meaningless.  It seemed like going through the numbers for the sake of going through the numbers and when you added up the numbers after you died that’s where you ended up. And because I was someone who found it very hard to fulfill even the most basic of those commandments, it seemed I was Sisyphus constantly trying to push a rock up a hill; eventually the rock would roll down on me and crush me and I would have to try to do it all over again.

So I would have these bursts of Islam, when every few months I would feel so spiritually moved that I would connect to the religion and jump into it and go all in and then drop out, and I would come out the other side feeling incredibly worn down. The more often that happened over the years the more I felt that this was an impossible task. You keep trying and if you never make it then what’s the point?

When I finally came around, it was to this idea that Islam is a journey, and I still believe that, it’s an attempt to get closer to God and many times we make huge mistakes and we end up farther away than where we started and the point simply is that you are trying to get there (closer to God).

This point was illuminated to me by a friend who pointed out that the whole idea of Islam is turning back to God and having that relationship with God. It’s this constant idea of turning back. You wouldn’t have to turn back if you didn’t screw up and the fact is that as human beings we screw up and I screw up more than most. It’s that returning and the fact that you can and should return that is Islam in its essence. It’s not a checklist, it’s about building a relationship.

LW: That sounds at least partially like a very wrenching experience, filled with existential pain, and your return to Islam was in juxtaposition to Reza’s who when we interviewed him told us that he felt an excitement about Islam, and also that he had what he described as a “rational experience.” In your return there is more emphasis on the spiritual, not saying that his wasn’t but you’re describing something that is touched a little more with the luminosity of spirituality.

HM: I grew up in a really religious household, a really religiously conservative house, in a very orthodox Sunni community you could say and intellectually that always made sense to me. I understood and believed and reproduced the arguments for Sunni orthodoxy, though they never moved me spiritually or emotionally, and so there was this massive disconnect.

When I was 21, I went to Egypt to study Arabic, retracing the footsteps of people in my community and in my family who’d made their journey to Egypt to study Arabic and Islam.  But I went there and I realized that the last thing I wanted to do was be in the mosque.  But there was something about Islam in Egypt that compelled and impacted me very differently from the way in which people had practiced Islam around me and that set in motion this profound and painful process where I realized that I wasn’t who I thought I was.

I remember reading people like Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel Prize winning author, and I was astonished at how he was able to bring Islam and belief in God very casually and very non-intrusively into his ideas and that’s always something that appealed to and intrigued me.

I’m going to be a dork here and reference Lord of the Rings but on reading Tolkien what is fascinating is that this deeply religious Catholic never mentions his Catholicism in his many books, but you can’t make sense of them unless you understand that he is a Christian. I think it’s that kind of religiosity that becomes almost implicit, that was compelling and beautiful to me and that’s something I found attractive in Egypt when I found it. That’s one of the reasons why I enjoy traveling so much because we find ways of living religion that are more moving and compelling.

Ultimately for me there was an emotional component and it comes down to the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, because I realized after a little while that if I was an atheist, then the Prophet Muhammad was deluded or deceptive or something – but he wasn’t who he said he was and that to me was something I couldn’t accept and so I had this really weird, I don’t know what you want to call it, “atheism coupled with a belief in the Prophet Muhammad.”

I had to somehow make sense of that and so it was more of an emotional identification with the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, that brought me back around to the idea of God.

LW: That’s very interesting. So you were at some stage a “believing Atheist?”

HM: Yeah in a way. I think sometimes we really badly want things to fit into a box but it makes perhaps more sense for these things to be processes that we go through and there are, and you mentioned rationality, there are all these things that make us who we are.

My belief in God and the Prophet Muhammad isn’t solely rational, there is a rational component there but a lot of it has to do with history, family, identity, emotion, spirituality, beauty and literature and all these things that combine together to make something compelling to us, something that becomes who we are or we become what that is.

I found the check-list version of Islam deeply alienating and profoundly unfulfilling and the challenge has been to have the confidence to say this doesn’t work for me, I need to find something that works for me and makes sense to me but it has to be reasonable enough, I won’t use the word rational because that could be alienating to people, but it has to be reasonable enough that I can share it with someone else, so that it can make sense to someone else. It doesn’t necessarily have to move them but it has to be something that makes sense to them because otherwise a faith that is so purely individualistic becomes meaningless. We are social creatures and if we can’t share our emotions and feelings and preferences then those things are going to disappear.  If you force a human being to choose between individuality and social identity, individuality will always fade.

Now I’m going in a different direction but that was something that I needed to come to terms with: “How does Islam make sense to me but also provide something compelling enough to share with others and get from others?”  We always require that kind of reflection and support and back and forth engagement that allows us to keep going when we stumble or when we feel weak or when we feel lost in some sort of way.

LW: Something in what you went through has a philosophical component in the sense that it relates to the place of doubt in Islam. Before I get to that let me ask you if you would describe yourself as a Muslim reformer?

HM: That’s an incredibly loaded question.

[laughter]

HM: That’s the kind of question I always get. There’s always that one person in the audience who has only read certain far-right websites on Islam and they will ask questions like, “Are you a Muslim secularist?” And you’re kind of like what the heck does that mean?

I’d say I am someone who wants us to be engaged with the foundations of Islam in an intelligent, creative and compassionate way, and I do think that is fundamentally what Islam wants us to do.  If the Quran and the Prophet are for every people in every time then those things have to be engaged with based on where and who we are and if we’re just inheriting something then we aren’t engaging Islam and I think that is fundamentally an un-Islamic concept.

The idea of reform is not alien to Islam. I think that an Islam that is not open to letting in fresh air is not really Islam. It pretends to be Islam, it masquerades as Islam, it takes the name of Islam and even acts in the name of Islam but it isn’t Islam.

LW: What I was going to ask you relating to this is that your story provides space for a perhaps contentious or even misunderstood subject regarding the place of doubt in Islam. Some Muslim intellectuals such as Tariq Ramadan in his book “Islam, the West and the Challenges of Modernity” discuss doubt in terms of cultural divergence.

Ramadan essentially says that the experience of faith in Islam is not of a similar nature as the so-called “Western” concept that “doubt is the trial of fire necessary to any real faith.” Ramadan says,

“We can find many Muslims who acknowledge not practicing their religion as they should, but very few are those who assert not believing at all. God’s existence is almost never doubted; this seems to be a natural daily given fact of men and women…it is a question of cultural divergences; over here meaning was given to doubt; over there meaning is in the reminder.”

I found this very intriguing as a concept in that Ramadan is not saying this as an absolute, but rather is speaking in generalities, that what is “audible” in one cultural context is not in another. You have “Western Muslims” who are growing up in a context in which doubt is a major component of religious life and experience of faith, and it might touch on some of the subjects we were talking about in the sense that it can “let in fresh air” maybe, do you see it that way?

HM: For me I think that the intellectual exploration of Islam is profoundly meaningful and valuable but it is not something that the majority of people will ever really engage in or want to engage in or need to engage in and this is something that took me some time to come to terms with.

In part it comes from my study of philosophy. I was a philosophy major for my undergrad; I used to read a lot of philosophy and I continue to read a lot of philosophy for my doctorate and philosophy is great, don’t get me wrong, but what you realize at a certain point is that you have these incredibly intelligent men and women, mostly men in the Western tradition, and often times they disagree with each other completely so there’s no real clarity of view that emerges from merely studying philosophy.

That kind of engagement with philosophy and thought is important but for Muslims in the West, and especially in the United States, our religious life will be a collective community life or it will be nothing at all.

For many people the intellectual exploration of Islam is irrelevant or impossible: They simply do not have access to the sources, they don’t have the time or the energy, and they don’t have the desire. They are going to get Islam from an experience that is part of family, community and culture, that’s where the future of Islam lies, in those things, not in textual analysis, and family, community, and culture have to create space for doubt, for wrestling with religious ideas, and dealing with the kind of questions that are going to come up.

And I think one of the most interesting things that we have to be prepared for is that religion has always been reflected by where you are and one of the most amazing things about the United States is its ability to assimilate people into pre-existing norms and ideas.

So religion in America succeeds basically if it becomes Protestant, right, so you have JFK’s famous speech where he basically says, “As President, I am not going to listen to the Pope.” What he is saying is that my Catholicism is no different than your Protestant faith. You can trust Catholics because we are just like Protestants and basically every religious community in the USA goes through that and we are not going to be any different.

We’d be delusional if we imagined that somehow American Islam is going to be different and so what we have to be prepared for as a community is that the kinds of doubts we’re going to have about Islam amongst individuals are going to be by-and-large the same doubts that Jews and Christians and Mormons and Hindus in the USA will have.

Basically that means Islam in America will be very Protestant, it will be about interior faith, it will be about states of the heart as opposed to actions you do externally and there is room for doubt in that sense, of course there is, that is just human reality – but it’s also the fact that when you live in a society where beliefs are questioned and interrogated and doubted and even dismissed you’re going to see more of that amongst Muslims because essentially we take on where we are.

Umar Farooq Abdullah has this saying, that “Islam is like a river and it takes on the color of whatever it passes through,” so we’re going to take on whatever we pass or are passing through and we can’t be separated from that context.  So the kind of doubts we are going to see amongst Muslims are the same kind of doubts we see among other groups in the US.

I can give a real quick example of this; a guy came up to me after a lecture I gave and said that he really doesn’t see the purpose of religion and all the criticisms he gave of Islam clearly emerged from the kind of common Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins-type criticisms of religion, which have nothing to do with Islam. It was clear that he didn’t really understand Islam, he was simply applying to Islam the kind of critiques of religion he had heard elsewhere: “If Islam is about making people better why was the Prophet so rich and wealthy?” – well he wasn’t rich and wealthy and he was like “oh, I didn’t know that.”  What I’m saying is that the doubts themselves are not just spontaneously emerging, they are also doubts that mimic from the doubts we hear around us.

I don’t know if I answered your question?

LW: No, I think you did!

HM: I think you hit on something really interesting and someone said this to me recently, this is really profound: “In Islam we attempt to realize spiritual states through physical action so even if prayer doesn’t seem to do anything for you, you just keep praying.” So it’s like you’re going to the gym for a few months. It might really suck and really hurt and you might be miserable but eventually you find that it brings you something positive and good and you find you can’t live without it and eventually you become fundamentally changed because of it.

I think religion is very similar in that way. At an Islamic Relief fundraiser I was at, someone said, “give a little money everyday against your self and your lower inclinations and it eventually becomes a habit and eventually becomes something you like to do and eventually becomes something you can’t do without.” Islam does accept doubt, and I think it’s not perhaps framed in a way we are used to framing doubt – but why would we have a spiritual tradition that tells you to do it even if you don’t feel like doing it?

That’s doubt, saying “I don’t want to do this but I’m going to do it and eventually it will do something for me,” and that’s maybe where the check-list version of religion was communicated to me in a really bad way or a really judgmental way as opposed to as a journey, in which you are trying make yourself into a better person, and these are the tools that you use, but the tools are not the point, they are simply to get you from point A to point B. Sometimes you get stuck on point A but you’re still trying and I think that’s where doubt is in Islam and the space for doubt.

LW: Our readers are going to have a lot to unpack here. This is a topic that certainly will be the subject of only increasing conversation as time goes by and this is a good place, since we are talking about the boundaries of “ex-Muslims” and “Muslim reformers,” a good place to segway to a topic we cover often, “Islamophobia” and “anti-Muslim bigotry.” Two terms that even now are being contested as either contradictory or in need of being challenged or wiped out of the English language.

We recently had an exchange on our site, or between site commenters in which ex-Muslims from the CEMB, which is led by Iranian expat and Worker’s Communist Party of Iran member Maryam Namazie who has been accused of links to questionable individuals and organizations and has written things like,

“‘My Hijab, My Right’ is like saying ‘My FGM (Female Genital Mutilation), My Right’!!! The veil is an instrument to control a woman’s sexuality, like FGM…. Today, more than ever before, the veil is political Islam’s symbol…. The veil is not just another piece of clothing – just as FGM is not just another custom. I suppose if it were to be compared with anyone’s clothing it would be comparable to the Star of David pinned on Jews by the Nazis to segregate, control, repress and to commit genocide.”

The exchange took place on an article by former Muslim As’ad Abukhalil (i.e. Angry Arab)…

HM: Yeah, sure.

LW: Titled “On Ex-Muslims” that critiqued the Economist article regarding Atheism and Islam… 

HM: Yes, I saw it; it was a really good critique.

LW: What are your thoughts on the article and maybe such organizations? You don’t hear about Councils of Ex-Christians, Ex-Jews or Ex-Buddhists. I understand that there is this need for a space where you can share your experiences and thoughts with like-minded individuals but it seems rather conspicuous when your members are aligning with far-right organizations and causes or championing individuals who support apartheid, occupation, illegal settlements, aggressive illegal wars, torture, the stripping away of civil liberties and so forth? 

HM: I think there are a couple of things that come to mind about this.  There’s a book by Owen Chadwick on secularization in Europe (The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century) in which he notes that many people in Europe assimilated to the secular ideal not out of any genuine intellectual exploration or conviction but because it seemed to be the more intelligent thing to do.

Many times I think the choices we make in life are the choices that are available to us, and in this way life seems to resemble high school: If you listen to this kind of music, you have to dress this way and hang out with these kind of people. There’s no logical reason why those three things have to go together but life makes it very hard for us to exist in between spaces.

Institutions, discourses, conversations, community centers, social life, even who we can talk to and who we can’t talk to – all those things tend to align with certain positions. I think a very good example of this in an extreme sense is the modern Republican Party. There’s no logical connection between Ayn Rand and Evangelical Christianity, in fact the two are diametrically opposed in many ways but the way in which modern America structures these choices, those two things converge.

That’s what has happened to a lot of Muslims who have come to the United States and come to the West, they’ve inherited a religious tradition that is at times misogynistic and patriarchal, that’s not particularly free thinking or creative or relevant, and so they find space wherever they can and that’s the second point.

I really don’t like what a lot of these so-called ex-Muslims purport to represent or the causes they affiliate themselves with – for instance, they say religion is violent but then they ally themselves with warmongers. This is fundamentally what Christopher Hitchens did, he said all religion is bad but he allied with one type of religion in a war against another type of religion.

He was not a particularly nuanced or thoughtful person on this, but the fact is that for many who grow up in Muslim communities, where there is no room for them, especially for women, it’s not surprising that they would affiliate with right-wing organizations.  Fundamentally what do they feel?: They feel they don’t have a voice. They feel no one is listening to them. Religion’s shoved down their throat along with culture, social expectations, and they feel like prisoners in their communities and families.

So they want out but they also want a voice; every human being wants to feel like they are being heard and sometimes the only time they can be heard is with these right-wing organizations, which sometimes don’t have the best intentions in using them or giving them a platform, but somebody is giving them a platform, somebody cares to listen to them, and I think that speaks to what Muslim communities are failing to do.

A final point is that the process of becoming Western for these immigrant origin Muslim communities (and I think it is a different reality for African American or Eastern European Muslim communities) is going to be, for lack of a better term, a little “Darwinian” and a lot of attempts at institution building are going to fail. They are going to blow up in peoples faces, they are going to prove to be massive sink holes where money and time is wasted, and only some of them will work and some of them will succeed and unfortunately that means a lot of people will be casualties of this incredibly painful, as you described it, attempt at understanding what it means to be a Muslim in the West and as a Westerner.

What we really need to do is to show that rationality, intelligence and creativity are not opposed to religion but are realized by religion. If Islam is really a universal religion then Islam must speak to and be seen to speak to universal problems and give people the confidence to be universal and here is a brief example of this: Many Muslims in Western Europe who are of immigrant origin or immigrants come from a much more lower socio-economic profile and so their horizons are much more limited.

My parents were both doctors who came to the United States, and I am saying this because I recognize how much who I am is based on achievements that I had no part in.  One thing my father always told me, and I think a lot of immigrant Muslims in America can feel this, is that “there is no reason you can’t go to Harvard and Yale,” and of course the problematic assumption here is that you have to go to Harvard or Yale, but underlying that was this incredible form of empowerment such that even though you are a brown man with a funny name, you are as smart if not smarter than everybody around you and you can go to the top institutions not only in the country but on the planet and you can compete with anyone and you are a Muslim.

Islam has to be seen to enable people to move forward and if Islam is seen as limiting or limited, it’s not surprising that people who feel frustrated, oppressed and suffocated, and who are oppressed and suffocated, are going to seek refuge wherever they can find it. Ultimately what people want is a community where they feel heard.

Someone just told me that little kids need 3 statements of validation for every statement of criticism and adults need 10 statements of validation for every statement of criticism. Meaning that as we grow older we grow more insecure and then the question rebounds to us: Are we making people feel like human beings and getting something positive and nurturing, and letting them express themselves, or all these just exercises in rhetoric?

LW: There’s some ominous things in there about things blowing up…

[laughter]

HM: Maybe a bad choice of words… horrible

LW: Count on the Islamphobes to take that and spin it some way.

[laughter]

LW: What organizations do you see in a Western context really trailblazing and balancing between complications of identity and articulating a relevancy for Muslims in the West? In engaging with the broader society that are not failing and that are not creating “casualties” in the way that you described?

HM: At the risk of sounding self-serving I think the Islamic Center at New York University has done an amazing job, that was something that I was involved with a long time ago (1998-2002), but it’s really under Imam Khalid Latif that it’s become a unique and profound organization.

Another example is Usama Canon’s Ta’leef Collective. I’ve never been there nor had the chance to meet him unfortunately, but everyone I know or talked to who’s interacted with him and his community has been deeply and profoundly moved from what they’ve experienced there and I’m just relaying what I’ve heard, which is all good.

Another development that is going to have a really profound impact on American Muslim communities is Muslim chaplaincy. There are chaplains at major universities across the northeast and at the University of Toronto and University Michigan. I’m not so sure how spread out they are on the West Coast, I’m not really familiar with the West Coast. Abdullah Antepli at Duke University, for example, or Omer Bajwa at Yale University—these are people who have done immense good and will do even more good and I think there are a couple of reasons for that.

One is simply that they have institutional resources that cannot compare to what Muslim communities can produce. Duke University will always exceed the potential of a local mosque or community center. Also these chaplains are working in very pluralistic and diverse contexts, with young people who are the future of America. So they have their finger on the pulse of the country, they understand what is happening, and granted colleges and universities are exclusive institutions, but still they have more exposure to diversity than most Muslim community centers would simply for the fact that these chaplains have to deal with every single person who comes through those doors.

I think those are examples of institutions that are really leading the way forward.  With respect to communities that maybe are not, there are a lot of suburban mosques I’ve been to that are really beautiful, nice to look at, with pretty domes and mihrabs, but you go in and look around and there’s no one under the age of 35. It makes me wonder: What’s the point of raising millions of dollars for buildings that will be used for about two hours a week? It is environmentally wasteful, it is strategically pointless and institutionally self-defeating because you are constantly raising funding for something that is basically never used.

ADAMS Center in northern Virginia is interesting: They made a small prayer space but they have a large basketball court and the basketball court doubles as their Friday prayer space. That’s smart. At NYU’s Islamic Center there was the choice of fundraising for a standalone Muslim community center or as part of a multi-faith space and they chose the latter, which is smart financially, and smart because it makes Muslims work with other types of peoples and it also exposes other types of Americans to Muslims on a daily basis. Their Friday prayer space is shared with Jewish groups who use it later in the day for Shabbat services and that is so much more intelligent. We don’t need to be building buildings for the sake of building buildings – we need to be building people.

 LW: Very helpful insight. One last thing in returning to the discussion on “ex-Muslims/ex-terrorists.” It seems to have a political element to it that is disconcerting and also fits a sort of strange phenomenon of defining your identity in negative terms, by what you are not, or what you were formerly. 

Hamid Dabashi has written that some ex-Muslims are afflicted by a type of “self-hatred,” and I know you’ve also used this term in regards to individuals who are self-described “Muslim reformers” such as Asra Nomani who has said things like,

“Indeed, just as we need to track the Colombian community for drug trafficking and the Ku Klux Klan for white extremists, I believe we should monitor the Muslim community because we sure don’t police ourselves enough.”

And going back to Hamid Dabashi he writes about “White masks” being put over “Brown skins,” and he relates it to an internalization of racism describing it as “Islamophobic racism” a concept I know you have take exception to in some of your lectures?

HM: The Urdu and Persian word for spoon is “chamcha”; it’s also used in South Asia to describe a tool, as in ‘such and such person is a tool’ and the origins for that term go to colonialism. South Asians didn’t traditionally use knives, forks, and spoons, but the South Asians who eagerly flocked to the British began to embrace that identity, its culture, habits, and manners to the extent of using forks, knives and spoons, and as a result someone who uses a spoon is a tool, meaning a tool of foreign power, meaning someone who hates himself and his culture and there’s been a lot of this in Muslim history.

Ataturk is a profound example. He believed that the way forward to modernity was to make the weekend Saturday and Sunday, but that doesn’t make any sense because the weekends in the West follow the days of religious observance –if you’re following the spirit of the law you would go with Friday. Ataturk in that sense was a closed-minded literalist, he would be a radical Salafi if he were religious, but instead he’s a radical secularist, though the effect is the same. There’s a lot of this self-hatred and cultural embarrassment and a serious inability to think critically.

When I was studying in Pakistan, I met folks who argued that Pakistan was “backward” because they use the Arabic alphabet, but when I pointed to countries like Taiwan and South Korea, they would say well that’s different, they’re already modern. You’re kind of like, “Well what does that mean? Right?” [laughter] and there’s a lot of this simplistic thinking and perhaps some of it is self-hatred and some of it is materialistically motivated.

If you say certain things about Islam you can make a lot of money. You can have a career for yourself. You don’t have to be particularly bright or particularly sophisticated, you just have to tell people what they want to hear and they’ll pay a lot of money for it. Speaker’s fees for people who will represent Islam in a certain way are really high and of course it’s attractive to people. If someone dangles thousands of dollars in front of you, and you grew up in a community where no one’s paying attention to you and you have been mistreated, it’s easy to redirect that and a lot of times people take positions that aren’t really thoughtful– they come out of emotions or financial calculations.

Take the former: I’ve met a lot of people who, because of the September 11^th terrorist attacks and the religious extremism behind them, no longer believe in religion. But if you ask them, “what about atheist violence in the Soviet Union?” they have no answer. They never really thought about that. Dabashi is right that there is self-hatred at work; there is a desire to become powerful and important based on the standards and values of peoples outside and other than us, that we think are worth emulating, whose approval we need because of our insecurities and frailties, but I also think there are materialistic motivations at work.

Finally, this pays off handsomely with little effort.  Some folks are just not thinking critically.  They take their own experiences and assume those to be universal, either because they’re not smart enough to, or because they see the advantage it brings them. That’s like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s career has been founded on: “What happened to me is all of Islam.”

LW: What are your thoughts on the recent change of the AP stylebook in which the words “homophobia,” “Islamophobia” and “ethnic cleansing” were nixed? It was a strange move for some and it left many scratching their heads. These are words that have global traction in global culture and really unretractable momentum, some reactions seem to be going along with the changes, what are your thoughts?

HSM: Yes, it’s a strange decision to me. I do have some qualms with the use of the word “Islamophobia” – it isolates us, strategically speaking, from other communities suffering discrimination, like LGBT communities. There’s a lot of anti-Semitism in the U.S. and in the West generally, perhaps not as visible or public, but it’s still there, and there’s obviously anti-Latino sentiment. It’s important to look at racism and bigotry writ large rather than isolate ourselves, but from an academic point of view and an analytic point of view it is important to note that Islamophobia is often something unique.

One could make the argument that the concept of Europe as it exists today emerged over the last several hundred years in opposition not only to Islam but to the physical presence of European Muslims. Eastern European Muslims, Spanish and Portuguese Muslims, Italian Muslims, etc., were excluded from Europe conceptually, and eliminated physically, and that’s too often how Europe defined itself; as the non-Muslim, non-Brown, and those things became the ultimate other.  There’s a reason why when the Spanish get to the Philippines and find Muslims there, they call them Moors.

So while I don’t think this decision will eliminate the term “Islamophobia” from use, it is something I wonder about because there is a value to the term in its specificity. “Homophobia” gives us more precision than simply referencing bigotry or discrimination and points to a reality that exists and that people face on a daily basis. We need more precision in language, not less.

LW: I really enjoyed your wonderfully titled article “Jesus Carpet Bomb My Heart: A Muslim in Detroit.” Part of what you relay is a potentially frightening experience but at the same time not frightening at all. I know it was written in the vein of a type of satire but it is talking to a larger phenomenon of zealots who want yours and Muslims’ souls in general and are kind of feeding off of a miscomprehension and misunderstanding of the place of Muslims in the West.

HM: It was a lot of fun for me to write. The idea was a rather simple one: Rather than complaining about Islamophobia, why not go to it? This is a challenge for American Muslims; it’s very easy to engage people on the progressive left, it’s easy to talk to people who are looking for reasons to agree with you, but it’s a lot harder to go to people who don’t know anything about you or whose only exposure to Islam is a Kamal Saleem, a supposed former Muslim who really misrepresents Islam.

What I tried really hard to do in that piece was to write sympathetically. I do blame certain individuals behind that event for misrepresenting Islam – they should know better.  But for the people who go, their lives and experiences are not very different from American Muslims’ and that’s something people of conscience should take time to really understand.

At the same time I was looking at the fate of political Christianity in the West, which is very different than the fate of political Islam. I think it’s a very interesting inversion. Political Christianity triumphed in the US but culturally has been roundly defeated and is now dying out politically because it has no cultural roots, it has no sustenance and I think the converse is true in the Muslim world.

In the Muslim world, the revival of Islam has been profoundly successful, if you had gone to Istanbul in the 1990’s and if you go to Istanbul today, it’s obvious, but the attempt to politicize that revival is not doing so well and I think that is a good thing because the politicization of religion is profoundly dangerous.  But at the same time, just because political Christianity is dying in America doesn’t mean it’s roots are drying up.  Why was this Christianity so angry and so scared, for example?

What’s underlying what’s happened to much of Christianity in America is this sense of fear and that’s a fear that should be understood and respected and not dismissed out of hand, because we all experience fear in relative terms. If you were a person who makes $50K a year and that drops to $30K a year, yes you can say there are people who live on $2 dollars a day and that’s objectively true, but subjectively that’s never how you experience the world.

If your income is stagnating and you see people of different beliefs, all around you and apparently more successful than you, that’s a deeply unsettling place to be in and again it’s easy to say, “just suck it up and deal with it and the world is changing,” if you’re in a privileged place.  There is a kind of smug attitude among some who have access to great things.

Look at me.  I’m at Columbia University, I work in Washington, D.C., I have never in my life had to worry about money, thank God. I’m a person who’s profoundly blessed, and so it’s not very easy for me to put myself in someone else’s shoes, but that’s fundamentally the situation that many Americans and especially many outside of coastal areas have been going through for many years.

Why are they afraid of Islam?  What else are they afraid of?  Why not go to their events and find out?  Religion is something that gives people meaning and purpose and it’s how they define themselves in the world and that definition is something that needs to be attended to.  Who are the kind of people who go to places like this, what does this phenomenon really mean, why are they so concerned about Islam, and is their understanding of Islam something that can be engaged with?

Unfortunately my numerous tweets to Kamal Saleem have gone unanswered, but perhaps this interview will prompt him to sit down for coffee with me some day. Maybe we can do shisha since we do share that.

LW: That would be great…

HM: It would be interesting…

LW: If it does happen make sure to ask about his Grand Wazir of Islam forefather.

[laughter]

LW: You have talked about whether the USA and Muslims can be friends. In this time where you have drone strikes, wars, a perceived indifference and mocking of sacred symbols and the opinion of the USA is probably at the lowest it’s ever been, (who thought it could get any lower than when it was under Bush). Now Obama has been able over the past four years to squander whatever goodwill he may have garnered and elicited in the first few months and so my question is can the US and Muslims be “friends,” what would it take for the Muslim majority nations and the USA to come to some sort of a point of friendship or at least beyond this point of hostility that currently exists, mainly do to our actions in that part of the world?

HM: Some of the biggest problems facing the Muslim-majority world are related to policy decisions we, as a country, made, but that said some of the problems birthed from those decisions will continue on no matter that we recognize that now. I analogize it to abusive relationship; take a guy who beats his wife. Now it’s very possible that that abuse is related to the abuse that he may have suffered as a child at the hands of his own father, but just because we understand where that hate and violence comes from does not then mean that that person will stop being abusive.

So the Taliban emerge out of a number of decisions made by a number of countries, including ours, but just because we understand where they come from does not mean they are simply going to go away or become very nice people.  The reason I say that is because the US’s importance to and for the Muslim-majority world is in decline.  Phenomena that we set in motion, or that we affected, will not cease or continue even if we withdraw.

The US still can and should offer guidance and leadership but we must recognize that we are relatively in decline. The perfect example of that is Egypt right now. Of course the US and the IMF have some leverage over what happens in Egypt, but whether to side with Morsi or the anti-Morsi factions – it is a mess now and neither side has much to do with the US in, say, the way the Mubarak dictatorship did, and so we have less leverage.  But, our relative decline offers an opening for a new kind of relationship and there’s a lot of work that would need to be done to secure this, but fundamentally it begins with moving beyond a security framework.

We look at too much of the rest of the world, and especially the Muslim world, as threats, and much less as complex societies presenting opportunities. The ‘good Muslim, bad Muslim’ framework argued by Mahmood Mamdani is still very much in effect. We don’t give the Muslim world much value beyond its relative threat level, but the fact of the matter is that economic growth is shifting to other parts of the world and if the US wants to stay competitive, it needs to build meaningful and productive economic relationships with other parts of the world, including the Muslim world.  If we are not going to do that, and instead we’re simply alienating those countries and populations, then believe me – other countries will gladly step into the fray. The Chinese will, the Brazilians will, the Turks are obviously exploiting that, the Russians are trying to exploit it, India will try to jump in – there are other powers that will try to do that and in the long term that will be to our detriment.

With respect to Obama’s policies in the Middle East; while he’s preserved our leadership from a military end, in many other ways he’s been ineffective. I don’t know what the administration is thinking.  The framework through which we’ve dealt with the Arab Spring has been a patchwork, and generally behind the curve.  There’s some debt relief here and there, a billion dollars here and there, rather than daring to frame our relationship as one of building together.

Arab countries need help in different areas and we can offer that help, but I think the problem ultimately comes back to what we have become, and that is a debtor nation. A country that is in debt to others and does not build for itself cannot build productive relationships with the rest of the world. We can’t help meet the Arab and Muslim world’s needs when we can’t meet our own, but other countries can.

If you look at the Afghanistan war, what did we build over a decade? And compare that for example to what the Chinese have built, and I mean literally built, across the third world, in places like Africa and Pakistan – and so to return to your question, America can find positive relations with the Muslim world, but it’s going to take a lot of work, it’s going to take a lot of effort, but ultimately it’s to our benefit and helps us Americans politically, economically, and strategically.

LW: I wanted to ask you about what’s been dubbed the Arab Spring or the Arab uprisings, you wrote an article that provided a generally hopeful view of the ascent of Islamists titled, “The Shari’ah Spring: Media Gets It Backwards.”

“If we read the Arab Spring as a zero-sum game between Islamists and secularists, we’re going to miss what’s happening; if we imagine Arab democracy will look like secular Western democracy, we will likely be disappointed. And if we assume reference to Islam and democracy reveals only hypocrisy, insincerity, or ideological confusion, we’re likely to be surprised.”

Two years onward, how do you appraise where we are right now?

HM: It’s very early in the game, in places like Syria they haven’t even gotten rid of their dictator yet, let alone knowing what’s going to happen afterwards, while in places like Bahrain the revolution was suffocated and stifled and barely registers on the news.  In Libya and Egypt, the political transitions are in their incipient stages, while Tunisia seems to be farther ahead – but these are long-term struggles.

I think Turkey is an example of a country that has emerged pretty successfully from dictatorship but again this is a long-term process measuring in the decades. I don’t think these are the kinds of transitions that are going to have positive turnarounds in a year or two or three.

What I meant to say about Islamism and secularism is that the problem has never been ideological; it’s not about secular liberal politics or religious conservative politics so much as it’s about power, about how it’s balanced and basically whether or not its checked. The problem has always been monopolization of power in most of these countries.  In places like Egypt, Turkey and Syria, you’ve had excessively strong states with no room for pluralism and diversity and no room for meaningful checks and balances.  In countries like Pakistan, you have the opposite problem, you don’t have a sufficiently strong state.

When it comes to Islam and secularism, this is a fascinating problem. If we look at the American constitution, it was fundamentally not a democratic constitution, because it was written by a bunch of propertied white men and ratified by propertied white men. What the people of the Arab world are trying to do is write constitutions in countries with great diversity. So the thought experiment that I always present to people is: Let’s imagine that during the Constitutional Convention it’s not just White men with property but women and African Americans and Native Americans, basically every single human being who lived in the United States after the Treaty of Paris, the thirteen colonies as well as the land up to the Mississippi. All those people get together and tried to decide on a Constitution. Do we even think the US would be a country as we understand it today?  What would they have made of the Bill of Rights?

Perhaps a more illustrative example for the future of many Muslim countries is Canada, where you have two subgroups, Anglophone Canadian identity and the Quebecois, and they’ve attempted to come to some sort of terms of co-existence and that’s a messy, sloppy process at times but you’re working with what you have and this is a problem that secular liberals and Islamists in too much of the Arab and Muslim world don’t seem to or want to understand.  Nobody gets what they want entirely.

What do you do in a country where 30-50%, or much more, believes that religion should have a role in politics?  It’s easy to say that’s a non-Democratic opinion, that’s an unsecular opinion, that’s a bad opinion, but it’s still an opinion that a lot of your fellow citizens have, and you must deal with that. That really to me is the challenge of the Arab Spring.

Maybe America and the West are not helpful examples here, whereas more helpful examples are found in countries like Brazil and India, which have managed to build democracies in incredibly diverse populations with different religions and different attitudes to religiosity.

India for example, to be excessively simplistic, tries to keep religions equally close to the state as opposed to equally distant. So the joke in India is that every other day is a holiday because someone somewhere is celebrating.  But the point being that that’s the way they’ve dealt with religiosity.  This is the challenge in the Arab Spring, that in the years and decades to come you’re going to have very different ways of seeing the world and very different ways of identifying with it, and how do you create room at the table?

Do Iraqi Kurds and Arabs see themselves as part of the same country? And if they don’t, that has nothing to do with Islam or with Middle Eastern culture as “uniquely backward.” This is the same kind of stuff that happened in Europe. In Europe, the last 200 years have frequently been a history of ethnic cleansing, from the elimination of Jewish populations in Eastern Europe to eliminating Muslim populations in Eastern Europe.

It’s a really ugly process. And looking at Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, I’d rather you have that constitutional battle and even a bad constitution than what you had in Algeria in 1991. So again I am not saying that this is an ideal or good circumstance or that it’s going to be a pretty process to watch but this is how politics plays out. Democracy is messy, democracy is actually even often very violent because once you say “we the people are sovereign,” you have to start wondering who exactly those people are and this is the same challenge I predict we’ll see in Syria.

Will the Syrian opposition and the Alawites, Kurds, Sunnis and Christians see themselves as part of the same country or not, and if they don’t how do they come to terms with that? I think this is an unfortunate reality in the Muslim world, but historically speaking over the past 1400 years the Muslim world has been far more hospitable to diversity and pluralism than the West has been – that’s why you have more Muslims in Spain and France than Protestants.

What is Turkey?  Turkey is a fundamentally European state that was erected on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire and that meant ethnic cleansing, and so Turkey’s problem with the Kurds isn’t a uniquely Muslim problem, it isn’t part of some backward Muslim mentality, it’s just importing European nationalism into a context of diversity and the violent consequences that follow shows you the incompatibility.

Hopefully in places like Iraq and Syria, North Africa and other parts of the Muslim world, they can find a way to come to terms with diversity and honestly if we are looking at the big picture I’d rather have sloppy constitutional processes than civil war.

LW: That’s a profound point especially when you consider that in Europe you had all these religious wars, some have made the point that that was the reason or perhaps part of the reason why secularism rose in Europe. Do you think in places like Iraq that have seen high levels of Sunni vs. Shia violence that there will come a time when they will also say “we are tired of all this bloodshed”?

HM: You are totally right; there was this exhaustion with religion in Europe but secularism rose in Europe because of this fundamental fact –Europe conquered the planet. European states were more powerful than non-modern states, they could mobilize people to degrees that traditional empires could not.

The Ottomans could not compete with the mobilizing power of Russia. States that can mobilize people have to have strong national identities that can convince people to work together to degrees the Ottomans couldn’t.  The Ottomans left people alone and that’s why there was so much diversity in the Ottoman empire, but leaving people alone doesn’t allow you to build the kinds of institutions that the US or Canada has.

In order to get to the point of having these institutions the people have to buy into the project which is like you have people saying to have this kind of ethnic cleansing and the cycle of violence.  And states that are powerful, wedded to religion, become dangerous.  Secularism is the answer.

In a place like Iraq religion can die but it doesn’t die in the sense of disappearing, it just turns into something else. An analogy for Iraq in a hundred years is the Netherlands and Belgium. The Netherlands and Belgium were one country; they split in two because the North was Protestant and the South was Catholic, and it had nothing to do with language.

Now that those religious identities are no longer strong, now that Catholicism is no longer sufficient to keep Dutch- and French-speaking Belgians together, they don’t really see each other as the same people anymore. Before it was Catholic/Protestant and that split the Low Countries in half and now it is French speaking vs. Dutch speaking and basically Belgium isn’t functioning right now because the two don’t see each other as part of the same state.

It’s possible that the Sunni vs. Shia dynamic goes from being a religious identity to a political identity and it transmutes itself into being this idea of “this is who we are as a national people” and that is very possible.

If you look at Turkey, the Kurds revolted against Ataturk – because they saw their common Sunni identity was no longer the basis for identification, it was now about national identity, and the Kurds were like “screw you, we don’t want to be part of a Turkish national project, we’re not Turks, we don’t need to be,” and that’s my five minute version of history (laughs).

But if the only thing religion has to offer is blowing up the mosque, who the hell wants to be part of that? I’m actually astonished that people are still religious in much of the Muslim world. If you’re in Pakistan, and granted it’s a minority of people but look at what they do, the constant targeting of Shia Muslims, eventually people are going to be like “you know, if this is religion, this is a nightmare,” and at some level that’s inevitable if that’s all that happens in the name of religion.

The people who represent a different form of religion, a positive form of religion, if they get killed off or get cowed into being silent, then people eventually just reject religion, that’s a pretty natural and understandable process in some sense.

LW: In the Arab uprisings you have Islamists who have come to power or who are reaping the rewards of change and who are essentially agreeing with the neo-liberal economic order and I know you have written elsewhere in regards to the problem of economic stagnation that,

“what difference does it make what government you have? Left or right, the market seems always to win.”

It seems like the next battle will be with multi-national corporations and institutions and we will continue to see discontent and protests until we have a real reckoning with world bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank?

HM: Yeah, this is a challenge; this is something we see in Turkey for example. AKP has done some very good things in Turkey but if you study say Istanbul closely, some of their decisions have been extremely problematic: putting up skyscrapers, ruining the skyline, proposing bridges and infrastructure projects that prioritize development over the environment, there are real problems there and this is the danger when we identify a particular worldview with religion and a particular worldview with un-religion, it eliminates space to be creative.

This is not a problem with Islamism but an intellectual problem. Folks who have criticisms of the way in which economic growth is pursued and its human, environmental and social consequences have been marginalized. The Left has been marginalized, it doesn’t seem to be able to come up with deeply compelling critiques, people are angry and upset, the Arab Spring is without a doubt related to climate change and global economic crises and the inability of these old states to really meet the very real needs of their people. The question is: Can Muslims think really creatively or are they just recycling hashed out answers? Is Mohamed Morsi’s goal to stay in power or is it to help Egypt? And that’s an open question. Will the IMF loans really help Egypt? What’s his creative view for what happens next?

I think one of the reasons for Turkey’s success is demographics. All these conservative and religious Anatolian Turks were kept out of the halls of power and basically it’s like you open the door to the majority and when you do that your economic growth skyrockets, but I don’t think there has been much creative thinking amongst Muslim thinkers and that ultimately is a flaw of education.  But I am hopeful because as you get more democratic societies – even in Turkey – you will have more robust and meaningful educational institutions and you will churn out creative people who are trying to come to terms with the problems they are facing.

The problem is dictatorship, so when you open up political and educational space, you find space for answers that make sense to people and until that happens, it’s a fool’s errand, unfortunately.

Ironically, someone recently asked me about the Islamic left, and I replied that one of the most left-wing Islamist politicians ever was Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Look at Khomeini’s economic project and his rhetoric; he was basically a radical left thinker and a theocratic thinker but this nationalization of state industries, subsidization of Iranian needs, pushing for universal literacy, birth control and contraception…

All these things to the extent that today the government in Iran covers sex-change operations as part of its national health insurance plan. That’s a very different way of thinking about Islamism.

LW: Something you never really hear about.

HM: No, it’s not something you hear about. Iran is the only country in the world with a legal market for organs. Iranians came up with the idea that since people are already selling their organs on the black market, let’s legalize and regulate it. It’s a very weird version of the legalizing drugs argument but the point being that they’re not simplistic left vs. right as we sometimes assume about the American context. In most countries of the world what is right-wing is far more left-wing than people in the US would recognize.

LW: One last question in regards to Saudi Arabia and its role during the uprisings, as part of the counter-revolution. Many have commented on the site, Muslims and others that their role has been very negative, what are your thoughts?

HM: I think this is you attempting to make sure I never go on Hajj.

[laughter]

HM: Obviously in many ways, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s (KSA) role has been profoundly negative. Much of Saudi Islam speaks for itself unfortunately. It would be better if people didn’t listen to what it was saying. The KSA has used its oil wealth to subsidize a version of Islam that is at best useless and at worst deeply damaging.

I believe the KSA has, with the GCC, attempted to ally itself with Turkey against a Shia bloc and so there is obviously power politics at work in terms of their attitude to the Arab spring. I do think that the KSA will remain a deeply conservative society in many ways, that’s not something that’s going to change, but the reality of it is more probably profitably looked at if we look outside the framework of the KSA.

Just two quick examples: The first is the rise of the middle class in Turkey, which creates a type of Islam that has more resources than most Islamic discourses have had in the Muslim world, because here is a country with actual disposable wealth to a degree that most Muslim countries have not had in recent memory, and this is a conservative, pious middle class that uses its wealth as it sees fit. That is a profound challenge to Saudi Islam because it has an actual demographic base that Saudi Islam does not.

If you travel the Muslim world, many of the projects linked to the Gulen Movement, there is much that could be said about that separately but the point is that these folks are actively pursuing their vision of Islam in the world, they are acting on it, they are doing things, and the projects that they are proposing have far more utility than Saudi projects that tend to be “let’s build a fancy masjid somewhere,” whereas the Gulen movement is building schools, cultural institutions –  this is something that is going to have a profound payoff in the near future and this is something that other Muslim groups are looking at.

The second thing is that as you have the rise of this Muslim middle class they’re going to start placing demands on their governments vis-a-vis the KSA, because everyone wants to go on hajj. And you can see this in the KSA, and it breaks my heart to say it, but when you see a lot of South Asians in Mecca, say for ‘umrah, and they get treated like crap, it’s horrible, and they are forced to take it because they have no protections.  But if you watch how Turkish pilgrims are treated and how they assert themselves, it’s completely different because they come in a different position.

Their government has more authority vis-à-vis the KSA but they are also people who have built themselves up and so they have more confidence in themselves. Saudis can’t treat them in a certain way and as that process accelerates, God willing that happens in places like Egypt, Syria and Libya, too, and the Saudis are going to be forced to accommodate the rest of the Muslim world. You can’t have this conception of the “custodians of the holy mosques” in a democratic age.

The democratization of the Muslim world is going to change Mecca and Medina, it won’t be an easy process but it will happen.

LW: That is a penetrating insight, that will be helpful for many of our readers, do you have a final note that you would like to share as we wrap up?

HM: I would end with this. I studied Muhammad Iqbal, and Iqbal goes to Europe in 1905 and almost becomes an atheist because of what he sees there; he goes through this massive spiritual crisis and he says that it’s only poets like Ghalib and Bedil who rescue him from this atheism and denial of Islam.  Just imagine that moment and what it must have been like for him. He’s a brown man from a British colony in the heart of the world’s most powerful empire, there was at the time maybe 300 million Indians and 70-80 million Muslims, but probably no more than a few dozen Indian Muslims had Western education.

So he’s in London and he’s profoundly alone, intellectually he’s deeply alone, and this is 1905.  A hundred years later, there are so many Muslims who have access to that kind of education, while a hundred years ago if you were brown or black you were assumed to be genetically and racially inferior, that was what you were struggling against. Now people look at places like East Asia and wonder if East Asians are not genetically superior to the West, with the Chinese miracle, the South Korean miracle, the Japanese miracle.

Look at countries like Brazil, which is an engine of economic growth – at the same time, people would have thought that someone who wore a scarf or had a beard was culturally inferior. This is what Ataturk was basically teaching. Turkey could not advance if it literally did not reproduce the West in itself.  The way to save yourself from the West is to become like the West in an uncritical and a profoundly self-hating sense.

It’s only been a hundred years since then and the shift has been tremendous.  The reason I am saying that is not so people can become disheartened, because there is a lot to see in the world that is deeply disheartening and can give Muslims reasons to be paralyzed or cynical or apathetic, but if you look at the past 100 years and how things have changed, here and abroad, it’s deeply inspiring.

If we have a big picture perspective, we will be in a much better place than if we focus on conflicts that, while real, do not capture who we are and do not say who we are doomed to be.  We can be more than this, more than what we are now, and we will be more than this.  Today is just a process of getting out of a very bad place that our community and institutions got themselves into.

LW: I think this is a perfect place to end. A hopeful note about the future. Thank you for talking with us!

HM: It’s my pleasure. I’m a big fan of the website and the excellent work you do!

Democratic state Rep. Tom Riner sponsors law that the Kentucky state Supreme Court has refused to review.

More evidence of creeping Christian Law? I’m sure Robert Spencer and company will be all over covering this encroachment on the separation of religion and state.

What if they were Muslim?

A Year in Jail for Not Believing in God? How Kentucky Is Persecuting Atheists

AlterNet / By Laura Gottesdiener

In Kentucky, a homeland security law requires the state’s citizens to acknowledge the security provided by the Almighty God–or risk 12 months in prison.

November 21, 2012  |   In Kentucky, a homeland security law requires the state’s citizens to acknowledge the security provided by the Almighty God–or risk 12 months in prison.

The law and its sponsor, state representative Tom Riner, have been the subject of controversy since the law first surfaced in 2006, yet the Kentucky state Supreme Court has refused to review its constitutionality, despite clearly violating the First Amendment’s separation of church and state.

“This is one of the most egregiously and breathtakingly unconstitutional actions by a state legislature that I’ve ever seen,” said Edwin Kagin, the legal director of American Atheists’, a national organization focused defending the civil rights of atheists. American Atheists’ launched a lawsuit against the law in 2008, which won at the Circuit Court level, but was then overturned by the state Court of Appeals.

The law states, “The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God as set forth in the public speeches and proclamations of American Presidents, including Abraham Lincoln’s historic March 30, 1863, presidential proclamation urging Americans to pray and fast during one of the most dangerous hours in American history, and the text of President John F. Kennedy’s November 22, 1963, national security speech which concluded: “For as was written long ago: ‘Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’”

The law requires that plaques celebrating the power of the Almighty God be installed outside the state Homeland Security building–and carries a criminal penalty of up to 12 months in jail if one fails to comply. The plaque’s inscription begins with the assertion, “The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.”

Tom Riner, a Baptist minister and the long-time Democratic state representative, sponsored the law.

“The church-state divide is not a line I see,” Riner told The New York Times shortly after the law was first challenged in court. “What I do see is an attempt to separate America from its history of perceiving itself as a nation under God.”

A practicing Baptist minister, Riner is solely devoted to his faith–even when that directly conflicts with his job as state representative. He has often been at the center of unconstitutional and expensive controversies throughout his 26 years in office. In the last ten years, for example, the state has spent more than $160,000 in string of losing court cases against the American Civil Liberties Union over the state’s decision to display the Ten Commandments in public buildings, legislation that Riner sponsored.

Although the Kentucky courts have yet to strike down the law, some judges have been explicit about its unconstitutionality.

“Kentucky’s law is a legislative finding, avowed as factual, that the Commonwealth is not safe absent reliance on Almighty God. Further, (the law) places a duty upon the executive director to publicize the assertion while stressing to the public that dependence upon Almighty God is vital, or necessary, in assuring the safety of the commonwealth,” wrote Judge Ann O’Malley Shake in Court of Appeals’ dissenting opinion.

This rational was in the minority, however, as the Court of Appeals reversed the lower courts’ decision that the law was unconstitutional.

Last week, American Atheists submitted a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court to review the law.

Riner, meanwhile, continues to abuse the state representative’s office, turning it into a pulpit for his God-fearing message.

“The safety and security of the state cannot be achieved apart from recognizing our dependence upon God,” Riner recently told Fox News.

“We believe dependence on God is essential. … What the founding fathers stated and what every president has stated, is their reliance and recognition of Almighty God, that’s what we’re doing,” he said.

 

Prof. As’ad Abukhalil takes on the latest reliance by The Economist on “lazy cliches” regarding Islam and Muslims in relation to apostasy and Atheism.

Abukhalil takes issue with its essentialization based on anecdotal stories, inaccurate relaying of the facts as well as relying on the testimony of Islamophobic bigots such as Ibn Warraq who have a clear agenda.

On Ex-Muslims

by As’ad Abukhalil (Al-Akhbar English)

There are so many obsessively redundant stories about Muslims and Islam. They are too familiar: stories about the veil, Jihad, the status of women, minorities and apostasy. Western reporters love to search and find a Muslim in the West who tells a story of persecution by Muslims. These stories are sexiest when the person elaborates on his new freedoms in the West and how he/she was not able to breathe until their arrival in the West. They tell about their past suffocation and how they could only read and enjoy “Lolita” in Western countries.

But the stories of apostasy still resonate. Westerners don’t know that apostasy laws were common at the time when they were promulgated in Sharia. The Economist is sometimes reasonable, but other times indistinguishable in its resort to lazy clichés about Muslims. The new issue of the Economist has a long article about “Atheists and Islam.” In the article, all the familiar clichés are squeezed in to draw a most dramatic picture that is worthy of movies about medieval Europe. It operates under the classical premise: that one story about one Muslim suffices to tell the story about all Muslims. And in singling out a story or two about Muslims in the West, the writers don’t know that they often fall victim to deception.

In the last few decades, Western governments developed asylum laws which permit a person to obtain legal status if she/he can establish real concern for safety in his/her homeland. I have served as a consultant to many lawyers and law firms in the West and saw the most bizarre stories by people who are desperate to stay legally in the US. Some people talk about how their tribes (even when “the tribe” does not even apply in Damascus or Beirut) will kill them, because they once told a cousin that they are secular. Another claims that his tribe – again – kills its members if they exhibit effeminate tendencies. And many have stumbled on the legal premise of fear of apostasy. They tell a judge (with no background or knowledge of the Middle East) that governments there typically behead apostates.

The Economist’s article belongs to this genre. It talks about how only in Turkey and Lebanon atheists can live safely, but only quietly. Where do they get this information from? This doesn’t seem to be from someone who know people in the region. I, for one, became an atheist in my teens. My friends and comrades in Lebanon (Lebanese and Palestinians) were also vocal atheists, and none of us faced persecution or even harassment for our views. There is no evidence for any such persecution. Many of my “Facebook friends” are young Arabs who identify their religion as “atheists.” And no one is persecuting them. The Saudi government is a rare exception in this case. But Saudi Arabia is often the exception, although it gets good press here in the US. TheEconomist says that eight states in the region have apostasy punishment on the books, but does not say that no one can find one case of implementation of the law in this case, even if you go back decades in time. There is a clear concoction of a dramatic alarmist sensationalism that does not conform to the facts.

The Economist in fact admits that “such punishments are rarely meted out” but does not admit that they are NEVER meted out. The Economistin this article befitting Fox News or the National Inquirer, even talks about “vigilantes inflicting beatings or beheadings,” but gives no examples or specifics. And the article assumes that the rise of the Islamists is adding to the dangers ostensibly faced by atheists, but fail to notice that atheists and secularists have in fact become more assertive and more self-confident. And in referring to the past, the article refers to medieval Arab and Persian poets and writers who were atheists, but then adds that “several were famously executed.” But such judgment has now been discredited by historians. We don’t believe, for example, that Ibn al-Muqaffa` or Bashar Bin Burd were executed for their atheism, but for their political inclinations or for their involvement in palace politics.

The shoddy quality of the article is further revealed when it concludes with an interview with “Ibn Warraq,” who is a right-wing Zionist propagandist who lives in the West under a false name because Muslims around the world – according to his tale – are chasing him because he is an ex-Muslim. But I have been an ex-Muslim since my mid-teens and I have not been chased by Muslims: not in the Middle East and not in the US, and I never hid behind a pseudonym.

The question is this: Why are some Western reporters so easily fooled, especially in cases when the lie and tale befits the paradigm of hostility to Islam and Muslims?

A former Muslim turned Atheist, Theodore Sayeed has in the past debunked the specious and weak arguments of the bigoted clown Sam Harris. Sam Harris replied to Sayeed’s article by claiming victimhood, stating that Sayeed is just another critic who has written an article that “misrepresents” him and his views. Seemingly, only those who agree with Harris’ bigoted propositions understand him.

The article below is Sayeed’s response to Harris’ claim that his article was a “misrepresentation,” and all I can say is that it completely eviscerates and exposes Harris for the moral coward, fraud, bigot and absolutist that he is.

One note that I would like to make is that I think Sayeed uses kid’s gloves on Richard Dawkins, who has his own track record of nasty bigoted invective and hatred, specifically against Muslims and Islam.

by Theodore Sayeed (MondoWeiss)

I wrote about Sam Harris a short while ago. In my article, I covered a number of themes that he’s discussed, primarily in The End of Faith, as well as in subsequent pieces. Among the subjects I reviewed were his support for Israel’s saturation bombing of Gaza and Lebanon, the Afghanistan war, the “humanitarian purpose” of the Iraq war, American-backed Arab despots, racial profiling, pre-emptive nuclear warfare, judicial torture, and life after death in the guise of reincarnation. In a response, Sam Harris has claimed that I misrepresent him. He does not say what part of my article, which quotes him at extreme length, is inaccurate.

It bears noting that it’s not the first time that Harris has claimed his opinions have been doctored. I share this intellectual sin with as motley a crew of people as Robert Wright, Chris Hedges, PZ Myers, John Gorenfield, and the editor of Free Enquiry Tom Flynn, all of whom Harris says have failed to depict him accurately.Unfortunately, in my case, he is correct. I must confess that I did not portray the full spectrum of his views with the justice that they warrant.I have left out much pertinent information from my article that I think would shed better light on what Harris believes. My excuse is that I ran out of space for which I apologise to readers and Harris alike, who deserve better from me. I will make amends in this article. It is misleading to say, for instance, that Harris advocates racial profiling, and let the matter rest there. The full story is richer than I have let on.

The truth is that he also thinks it is scientifically valid to hold that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, and that espousing this view is not a mark of racism. The context of his remarks was the appointment of Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health, against which Harris stood because of Collins’ belief in God. Harris argued that it should be a disqualification for a scientist of a religious cast of mind to be awarded such an eminent post and maintained that he should be treated in the same way as James Watson was when, in his opinion, he was unjustly forced out from his academic chair for making racist comments about the arrested intelligence of blacks with which his scientific colleagues did not want to be associated, comments that although Harris says are unpleasant, nevertheless have a “scientific basis” in truth which must not be denounced:

 It is worth recalling in this context that it is, in fact, possible for a brilliant scientist to destroy his career by saying something stupid. James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, a Nobel laureate, and the original head of the Human Genome Project, recently accomplished this feat by asserting in an interview that people of African descent appear to be innately less intelligent than white Europeans. A few sentences, spoken off the cuff, resulted in academic defenestration: lecture invitations were revoked, award ceremonies cancelled, and Watson was forced to immediately resign his post as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Watson’s opinions on race are disturbing, but his underlying point was not, in principle, unscientific. There may very well be detectable differences in intelligence between races. Given the genetic consequences of a population living in isolation for tens of thousands of years it would, in fact, be very surprising if there were no differences between racial or ethnic groups waiting to be discovered. I say this not to defend Watson’s fascination with race, or to suggest that such race-focused research might be worth doing. I am merely observing that there is, at least, a possible scientific basis for his views. While Watson’s statement was obnoxious, one cannot say that his views are utterly irrational or that, by merely giving voice to them, he has repudiated the scientific worldview and declared himself immune to its further discoveries. Such a distinction would have to be reserved for Watson’s successor at the Human Genome Project, Dr. Francis Collins.

Observe the way he shifts the mass revulsion expressed by academics like theFederation of American Scientists for Watson’s comments about black intelligence to the uncontested truism, inserted by him alone with no bearing on the question, that it would be surprising if there were “no differences between racial or ethnic groups”. There is of course outward variation in physical appearance between geographically isolated human beings, just as there is much greater inward genetic diversity between people of the same ethnic group; no child of five, let alone professor Watson, has felt the need to express such a trite view; the point under consideration, and for which Harris speaks in favour as a truthful idea anchored in biology that must not be attacked as “irrational”, is that whites are cognitively superior to blacks. Intelligence, not traits such as pigment or eye colour, is the topic under review.

The objection to Watson’s view is not that it is merely a relic of Nazi ideology and thus offensive, as Harris portrays the reaction of the scientific community. It is that his idea is pseudoscience. The supporting data Harris claims to show “detectable differences in intelligence between races” is lifted straight from the discredited racist tract The Bell Curve which has been debunked extensively by geneticists, most notably Steven Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man.

It is not the first time that Harris has promoted pseudoscience. A like fate as Watson’s befell a character named Rupert Sheldrake for whose professional disgrace Harris feels aggrieved. Students of the paranormal will be familiar with the name. Sheldrake is a noted parapsychologist who makes a living writing books that claim to show the existence of psychic ability in pets and humans. Peer review science journals dismiss him as a crackpot. But not Harris. He cites the work of Sheldrake’s in The End of Faith as evidence that “There also seems to be a body of data attesting to the reality of psychic phenomena, much of which has been ignored by mainstream science”.

The paranormal has not been ignored of course. It has been reviewed by competent scholars in the pages of Nature and shown conclusively to be erected upon acres of New Age superstition. It’s in the nature of conmen to plead persecution. Other practitioners of this subterranean magic endorsed by Harris include Dean Radin who, in books like The Concious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena, swears by the truth of telepathy, mind reading, clairvoyance and the capacity to move physical objects with the naked power of one’s mind.

But the prize for the most spectacular romance with sorcery goes to Harris for asserting that the brain is not the generator of consciousness. It was ideas like this that led the brain scientist Raymond Tallis to liken his work to “Neurotrash”. Science can resolve this question by a rather simple experiment: Let a believer in this theory submit to have his brain surgically extracted from his skull and observe for how long he retains the faculty of perception.

It’s not uncommon for Harris to speak tenderly of crankery.

Another crucial piece of detail missing from my original article centres on the question of anti-Semitism. In his book, The End of Faith, Harris charges critics of Israel with being Jew haters. The slur is familiar to those who think Palestinians deserve human rights, but given that Harris draws his material on the subject from Alan Dershowitz’s The Case For Israel, proven to be a hoax by Norman Finkelstein, who doused the author’s reputation in gasoline and struck the fatal match, that is not too surprising.

What is surprising is that after slandering critics of Israel’s brutality against Arabs as anti-Semites, Harris proceeds, with no trace of irony, to blame the monumental suffering of the Holocaust on the Jewish people. First consider the anti-Semitic accusation, taken from his intellectual hero Paul Berman who led the chorus for invading Iraq in a book described by Harris as “a beautiful primer on totalitarianism”:

 Berman observes, for instance, that much of the world now blames Israel for the suicidal derangement of the Palestinians. Rather than being an expression of mere anti-Semitism (though it is surely this as well), this view is the product of a quaint moral logic: people are just people, so the thinking goes, and they do not behave that badly unless they have some very good reasons. The excesses of Palestinian suicide bombers, therefore, must attest to the excesses of the Israeli occupation. Berman points out that this sort of thinking has led the Israelis to be frequently likened to the Nazis in the European press. Needless to say, the comparison is grotesque.

(The End of Faith, p. 135)

Decades of Israeli aggression and terror are fine by Harris, but calling the IDF names is just too much. No responsible critic of the occupation likens Israel’s crimes to the industrial horrors of the Third Reich’s, but after branding human rights activists as anti-Semitic, Harris steps beyond the standard AIPAC hymn sheet and in a surreal turn of logic that is redolent of neo-Nazi websites blames the Holocaust on Jews for not assimilating into German culture:

 The gravity of Jewish suffering over the ages, culminating in the Holocaust, makes it almost impossible to entertain any suggestion that Jews might have brought their troubles upon themselves. This is, however, in a rather narrow sense, the truth. Prior to the rise of the church, Jews became the objects of suspicion and occasional persecution for their refusal to assimilate, for the insularity and professed superiority of their religious culture – that is, for the content of their own unreasonable, sectarian beliefs. The dogma of a “chosen people,” while at least implicit in most faiths, achieved a stridence [sic] in Judaism that was unknown in the ancient world.

(The End of Faith, p. 93)

Can there be any doubt what howls of abuse would trail any critic of Zionism who even hinted at anything so revolting as the idea Jews brought Auschwitz upon themselves? But when you fly the Star of David high on your flagpole and pound your keyboard heroically against the Islamo-Nazi menace, you can expect your apologetics for anti-Semitism to go unremarked by the Anti Defamation League. Indeed, no less a figure in the Israel Lobby than Dershowitz will blurb your work enthusiastically.

But if he has many detractors, Harris does not want for friends. Richard Dawkins has come to his aid. This is understandable. Dawkins and Harris are personal friends. He’s promoted his work, blurbed his book and appears in public with him. That’s what friends are for. Dawkins does not attempt to deny that Harris is a national security hawk or that he is a New Age believer. There is too much damning evidence for plausible deniability. The matter he wishes to contest is the one he thinks, incorrectly, does most to discredit Harris: Torture. He claims that Harris does not really support it. And that he was only just floating moral hypotheticals without any practical application. If this is true, then I owe Harris a very sincere apology indeed.

As those conversant with Harris’s book will know however, he does not merely offer an academic what-if; he gives the names of particular individuals in US custody who he thinks merit torture. He specifically names Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and leaves open the possibility of Osama bin Laden. He does not merely advise we should torture KSM. He says that not to do so would be morally “perverse”:

The neuroscientist Patricia Churchland has said that “I think Sam Harris is a child when it comes to addressing morality”. His politics and science are scarcely more grown up.

Theodore Sayeed lives and works in London. Later this year he begins graduate study in biology. He may be reached at: Teddysayeed@gmail.com

A very important article on why it is perilous for Atheists to both engage in and ignore Islamophobia. The response to the article is filled with Islamophobia, so if you have time please do check it out and respond to some of the haters.:

Atheists Ignore Islamophobia at their Peril

by Chris Stedman (Religion Dispatches)

When I first heard that a white supremacist opened fire on a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin a few weeks ago, I froze. My stomach lurched and my thoughts turned to the friends I’d made in the Sikh community through my work as an atheist and interfaith activist.

In the wake of the horror I reached out to friends directly and logged on to Twitter to express my shock, outrage, disgust, and sadness—as a Millennial, I suppose you could say this is one way I engage in the collective processing of such traumas. Within minutes of my first tweet, I began to get responses from other atheists saying that interfaith work is bad, that I should be more concerned about atheists than Sikhs, and that “religion poisons everything.” The next day, I was called “a traitor” when I tweeted about efforts to raise funds to rebuild a mosque in Joplin, Missouri that was burned to the ground. When I tweeted about reaching out to the Sikh community and expressing solidarity, I was accused of trying to make atheism a religion.

And I wasn’t alone in facing such criticism. When skeptic blogger Kylie Sturgess wrote a post about the Joplin mosque she was called “a terrorist” by a commenter.

Of course, it’s hardly reasonable to be concerned solely on the basis of comments made by Internet “trolls.” Unfortunately, there are worrying indicators that public figures in the atheist movement are perpetuating and enabling a hostile stance toward Muslims—in many cases, above and beyond the criticisms they direct at other religious communities. One of the most widely-known atheists in the world, Bill Maher, for example, is alarmed by the number of babies being named Mohammed in the U.K., and said the following of Muslims and Islam: “What it comes down to is that there is one religion in the world that kills you when you disagree with them. They say, ‘Look, we’re a religion of peace and if you disagree we’ll cut your fucking head off.”

In December of last year, the president of American Atheists posted a status update to his public Facebook profile that read: “Never give up a right without a fight. I will defame Islam if I want to. It doesn’t mean I hate Muslims. It means Islam is a shitty religion that worships a pedophile as morally perfect.” When I expressed my concern about those comments, atheist blogger JT Eberhard wrote the following:

Islam is a shitty religion (more shitty than most, and try me if you don’t think we can defend that statement) and Muhammad was a pedophile, which has resulted in several Muslims continuing the practice. If Chris doesn’t like the word “shitty”, I wonder what adjective he would suggest. Horrible? Morally repugnant? Should we greet the anti-science, morally fucked up religion of Islam with an, “Oh shucks, that is pretty anti-humanity and doesn’t make much sense now does it?” How softly would be enough to get Stedman to relinquish his iron-clad grip on his pearls?  Frankly, to call Islam shitty is like calling the surface of the sun warm.

Later in the post he claimed to just be “factually criticizing” Islam and Muslims, but even if that were his aim, several of the claims he put forth about Islam and Muslims were not only false, but were framed in a way that is likely to inflame anti-Muslim sentiment. Another example is Ernest Perce V, the Pennsylvania State Director for American Atheists, notorious for a lawsuit resulting from his depiction of “zombie Muhammad” (the judge, who called Perce “a doofus” and ruled against him, was forced to relocate shortly after the ruling due to safety concerns over threats made against him). Perce has also made several statements that have inflamed anti-Muslim attitudes in Pennsylvania—his latest being that he plans to publicly flog a Koran on the Pennsylvania state capitol steps next month in protest of a state resolution to name 2012 the “Year of Religious Diversity.”

There is No Such Thing as Islamophobia

While these issues have been the subject of debate in segments of the atheist movement for some time, events this month have got me thinking about a new aspect of this issue: the problem of silence. As the Sikh community reeled from the tragedy in Oak Creek and prominent figures from a plethora of religious communities reached out to express their solidarity and sympathy, I was surprised that I didn’t see more notable atheists speak up. Browsing some of the most trafficked atheist blogs I saw that they posted little or nothing about the shooting—until Pat Robertson blamed atheists for the tragedy, an accusation that a sizable majority of atheist websites then addressed.

RationalWiki, an atheist wiki featuring a newsfeed and articles like “Atheism FAQ for the Newly Deconverted,” contained no mention of the Sikh shooting, but it did list an instance where a Florida door-to-door salesman was shot, and noted the recent mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado. PZ Myers, who is among the most visible atheist bloggers in the world, did write about the shooting twice, though one of his posts simply referenced the shooting as a way to condemn America’s “gun culture,” while the other focused on Pat Robertson’s comments. (Most of the more than 35 other dedicated bloggers on Freethought Blogs—a massive atheist blog network he co-founded—didn’t address it at all.)

But while this silence is deeply troubling, I don’t want to suggest that, like some of those mentioned earlier, the atheist community at large necessarily has an Islamophobia problem—or that legitimate criticisms of Islam (or any other religions) constitutes Islamophobia. The problem, I think, lies in a lack of sensitivity to or awareness of the rampant Islamophobia sweeping our society. A key offender in this respect is bestselling atheist author Sam Harris.

The day after the shooting in Wisconsin, Harris published a lengthy blog post decrying Internet trolls; bizarrely, though, he included yet another defense of his position that Muslims should face extra scrutiny at airports. He and I engaged in a back-and-forth about this issue earlier this year after he wrote a post where he first argued that “we should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.” In my response, I challenged his claims that talk of Islamophobia is “deluded” and that “there is no such thing as Islamophobia.” He responded, but largely neglected my concerns about Islamophobia.

Read the rest…