Sober Sons of Abraham

Hassan Quazwini, American Crescent:

A Muslim Cleric on the Power of His Faith, the Struggle Against Prejudice,

and

the Future of Islam and America

[Introductory note:  This is a comment I wrote originally in 2010; it has been revised extensively for this forum.]

I was attracted to “American Crescent” in part because its author, Hassan Quazwini, has made his career in Dearborn, Michigan, another suburb of Detroit just across town from the one where I grew up.  Dearborn today has one of the highest proportions of Arab-Americans in the United States (and is sometimes termed “Dearbornstan”).  Quazwini presently serves as Imam at Dearborn’s Islamic Center of America, the largest Muslim congregation in the United States.  His odyssey to Dearborn started in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, from which his Shiite father and family fled in the 1970s, first to Kuwait, then to Iran.  In 1992, Quazwini left for the United States, living in initially in the Los Angeles area before migrating to Dearborn. Quazwini responded positively to presidential candidate Governor George W. Bush’s appeal in the 2000 presidential elections for his support with a pivotal group in a pivotal state.  In 2003, Quazwini broke openly with President Bush over the latter’s decision to go to war with Iraq.

In “American Crescent,” Quazwini delivers an impassioned argument that Islam fits comfortably into America’s religious pluralism.  The question whether Islam and democracy are compatible is “no longer open,” he says (p.202).  Quazwini’s faith in the American dream appears from his book as strong as his Islamic faith:

Muslims embrace Americans’ generosity and add to it.  They value America’s commitment to education and come from all over the world to take part.  They accept that their neighbors won’t necessarily worship the same way they do, or at all, and they appreciate the American idea of pluralism.  If one were to draw a circle on a piece of paper representing Islam’s values and the boundaries of what it permits, that circle would fit easily within the larger circle of what the American legal system, and its cultural standards, permit.  However you wish to view Islam, nothing about it disserves the American way of life (p.202).

Quazwini spoke out strongly after the September 11^th attacks, indicating that Muslims were “as appalled by the 9/11 attacks as any other Americans.”  Those who carried out these horrendous acts were quite simply “not Muslims” (p.132).

After terrorism, my greatest concerns about Islam are its treatment of women and homosexuals, and the anti-Semitism associated with wide swaths of Islamic thought.  Quazwimi addresses each of these fundamental human rights issues, but with a euphemistic, “we’re-all-sons-of-Abraham” gloss.  “Islam holds that men and women are absolutely equal, but that they have different talents and should focus their efforts accordingly” (p.59).  Islam’s position on homosexuality is “essentially the same as that of Judaism and Christianity,” acknowledging that in Middle East culture there is “strong disapproval of homosexuality” (p.246).  As to Judaism, Quazwini laments that “too few” Muslims will join him in his “utmost respect” for the Jewish faith, confessing to admire Jews for their ability to assimilate into mainstream America (p.153).

I’m viscerally drawn to a “we’re-all-sons-of-Abraham” approach.  I thus found Quazwani’s embrace of America and American religious pluralism highly endearing and a good rejoinder to the anti-Islamic currents circulating in parts of our country.  He presents a sound case that America’s religious pluralism is broad enough to embrace most forms of Islam.  Moreover, I found implicit support in “American Crescent” for my view that integration of Muslims into the American mainstream is significantly less complicated than parallel integration in Europe.

Yet, Quazwani’s tip toeing around Islamic views of women, homosexuals and Jews is a reminder that rooted deeply into Islamic thought are tenets which I hope would be rejected by all but the most marginal of America’s other religions.  America’s non-Muslim sons and daughters of Abraham should accord Islam the respect which one of the world’s great religious traditions merits.  But they need to do so soberly, without illusions.

Thomas H. Peebles

Rockville, Maryland

July 1, 2012

Is Europe Burning?

[Introductory Note:  I have again spliced together two short commentaries which I wrote earlier: on Phillips in 2009 and on Caldwell in 2010.  I owe reading of both to my college friend Tom Fagan.  Tom pointed me to Phillips’ book, which I fortuitously found in a used bookshop for $2.  A little later, Tom sent me Caldwell’s book as a holiday present.  Two thought-provoking books for a total of $2.  That’s an excellent return on a modest investment.  Thanks, Tom]

 

Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: 

Immigration, Islam, and the West

and

Melanie Phillips, Londonistan

Europe’s fiscal and financial crisis undoubtedly constitutes its foremost contemporary challenge.  But the challenge of integrating ever-growing Muslim populations into its cultural mainstream is not far behind – and in many ways is linked to European economic woes.  These two books address Western Europe’s efforts to find a place for Islam.  Christopher Caldwell surveys approaches across Europe, while   Melanie Phillips focuses exclusively on Great Britain.

Caldwell’s title is an allusion to Edmund Burke’s 1790 “Reflections on the Revolution in France.”  Caldwell starts with a 1968 speech by British Tory parliamentarian Enoch Powell on April 20, 1968, two short weeks after Martin Luther King was killed in the United States.  In this speech, Powell decried rising immigration into Britain.  He forecast American-style urban ghettoes and said that watching immigration into his country was like “watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre” (p.5).  I was living in London at the time, and remember well Powell’s speech, which was the subject of much discussion with my British friends.  Although the term “politically correct” was not yet in use, it was very clear to me and my friends — all of us wise and worldly 20 somethings — that Powell’s ideas were most incorrect politically.  My recollection is that we almost unanimously compared Powell, an erudite classics scholar, to the retrograde Southern racists whom we assumed were responsible for King’s death.  Since that time, however, as Caldwell states, all British discussion of immigration may be reduced to whether Powell was right.

Caldwell traces how both Britain and continental European countries increased immigration in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s of the last century, without sufficient forethought of the consequences.  He outlines the differences between European countries, with varying rationale for opening borders and diverse approaches toward absorbing and welcoming immigrant populations.  Caldwell considers judiciously both sides of the arguments that Muslims can be integrated into these countries, but leaves no doubt that in his view such integration is a steep, uphill battle across Europe, not least because a certain part of the European Muslim population is “dedicated to Europe’s destruction by armed violence” (p.172).

Caldwell describes two models for immigrant assimilation, British and French.  Britain’s model is “multicultural,” holding that one may “keep one’s culture as long as one [obeys] the law of the land” (p.151).  Caldwell prefers the French model, which holds that immigrants “should become French in their cultural loyalties” (p. 151).  Despite – some would say because of — its multi-cultural model, Britain remains “by far, the European country with the most serious dangers of violence and political extremism” (p.301).  France’s republican traditions, by contrast, “give it the best chance of fully assimilating the children and grandchildren of immigrants.  It is the only country where a European equivalent of the American dream is likely,” Caldwell concludes (p.301).

Although Caldwell’s purpose is not to compare European and American approaches to immigration, he regards Hispanic immigration to the United States as an altogether different phenomenon from Muslim immigration to Europe — far more benign, far less threatening to our culture.  Latin American immigrants come with a European language, he says, which is “inevitably discarded for English by the second generation.”   Latinos’ “cultural peculiarities” are “generally antiquated versions of American ones” (p.12).  They have “less money, higher labor-force participation, more authoritarian family structures, lower divorce rates” than native white Americans.  Their culture, in its broad outlines “is like the American working class culture of forty years ago”  (p.12).

I would have liked more discussion in Caldwell’s book about non-Muslim immigration to Europe.  Are the prospects for integration of West Indians, sub-Saharan non-Muslim Africans, and Asians from India, Vietnam, Cambodia and China as bleak as those for Muslim immigrants?  It was immigrants from all these places, not simply Muslim countries, which prompted Powell’s 1968 remarks. But Caldwell’s critique of the effect of Muslim immigration on today’s Europe, while provocative, is well-reasoned and cogent.

In “Londonistan,” British journalist Melanie Phillips comes across as Enoch Powell on steroids.  She would surely agree with Caldwell that Great Britain today is “by far,” the country most vulnerable to Islamic violence and political extremism, and would not hesitate to attribute Britain’s vulnerability precisely to the multi-cultural model of assimilation which Caldwell describes.  Phillips starts with the July 2005 London bombings, which revealed a society initially in denial that these attacks had been carried out by home-grown Muslims, “suburban boys who had been educated at British schools and had degrees, jobs and comfortable families” (p.viii).  As denial faded, Phillips found Britain pitifully unable to confront the threat posed by the violent ideology she terms “Islamism”:  a “particular interpretation of authentic Islamic principles” (p.168) that is the “dominant contemporary political force within Islam. . .. an ideology that seeks to destroy Christianity and its values” (p.141).

In Phillips’ view, Britain’s ability to counter Islamism is undermined by a flabby and permissive social culture dominated by “secular nihilists” who disdain the country’s Judeo-Christian values.  Secular nihilists are infatuated with the “doctrine of multiculturalism,” and obsessed with the rights of victims and minorities.  Phillips contends that an unquestioning tolerance for non-Western cultures, militant feminism, exaltation of gay rights, and a judiciary which has supplemented the common law with more general human rights norms have, taken together, rendered Britain ineffectual in countering the grave threat to its existence growing in its midst.  Today’s Britain is “locked into such a spiral of decadence, self-loathing and sentimentality that it is incapable of seeing that it is setting itself up for cultural immolation,” (p.189), Phillips warns direly, echoing Powell’s 1968 clarion call.  Ironically, “self-styled progressives of the British left” have aligned themselves with Islamism – “which denies female equality and preaches death to gays” — to advance their common goal, “the destruction of Western society and its foundation values” (p.xxiii).

I agree with Phillips’ core message that tolerance is no virtue in dealing with violent Islamism and that the West needs to defend its democratic values unapologetically.  But she loses me when she radiates out from this core to suggest that secular Enlightenment values – secularism, equality, respect for minority rights – are incompatible with taking a strong stand against what she terms Islamism.  Phillips’ analysis seems at times to gravitate toward the comments of the late Reverend Jerry Falwell, who inanely attributed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks in the United States to “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way–all of them who have tried to secularize America–I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.”

Further, there is irony in Phillips railing against many of the manifestations of modernity in today’s Britain, when the most common prescription for bringing Islam out of the dark ages and into the 21^st century is some form of Muslim Enlightenment – development of a secular sense and a more general spirit of free inquiry, with recognition of equality for women and homosexuals.  Phillips’ strong condemnation of the anti-Semitism which pervades much of the Muslim world is to be lauded.  But she is far less critical of the subordinate role of women in Islamic societies and I had to wonder whether this was because excessive feminism figures so prominently among the reasons she contends that Britain is incapable of countering Islamism.

Phillips recommends requiring a civil marriage certificate before an Imam could perform a marriage ceremony, thereby, she hopes, halting the drift toward parallel Sharia jurisdiction where polygamy is recognized; instituting tough controls on immigration “while Britain assimilates the people it has already got” (p.188); and teaching Muslims “what being a minority means” (p.189).  These measures may be reasonable but the likelihood that they will make any serious dent in Islamism seems at least as dubious as the outreach efforts to moderate Muslims which she belittles throughout her book.  Like everyone else struggling with the issue of assimilation of the Muslim population into Western European societies, Phillips falls short in specific solutions.  Finding such solutions ranks among the most pressing challenges facing contemporary Europe.

Thomas H. Peebles

Rockville, Maryland

June 5, 2012

The Limits of Toleration

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel,

and

Irshad Manji, The Trouble with Islam Today

[Introduction: This is a commentary I wrote in September 2008.  At that time Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book was on the best-seller list, and her general profile has risen even further since 2008.  Today, she lives in the United States and is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.   Although less well-known, Irshad Manji’s profile has also risen since 2008.  She too recently migrated to the United States, from her native Canada.  She is presently director of the Moral Courage Project at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, which aims to “challenge political correctness, intellectual conformity and self-censorship.”  She is a frequent “talking head” on a diverse range of TV news programs.  I have edited the original commentary only minimally, adding notably the reference in the final paragraph to the “Arab spring”]

“I believe that Islam is no different from the world’s other major religions; that it has a strong humanistic component; and that many, hopefully most, of its adherents are altogether capable of living harmoniously with persons of other faiths.”  Thomas H. Peebles, 9/12/06 (email correspondence to friends)

Was I hopelessly naïve when I wrote the above, or just ignorant?  In my defense, I did not have the benefit of having read “Infidel,” by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, nor had I read Irshad Manji’s “The Trouble with Islam Today” — two books about contemporary Islam, written by brilliant young Muslim women.  Ali’s is a poignant, riveting personal memoir, whereas Manji offers an analytical prescription for changing Islam, well captured in her subtitle, “A Muslim’s Call for Reform of Her Faith.”  Ali’s book was difficult to put down, and left me inspired yet emotionally drained at the end.  Initially, Manji’s book rubbed me the wrong way.  She seemed too glib and perhaps a little too full of herself.  But by the end, I developed a respect for her too.  In her breezy, informal style, Manji conveys a wealth of knowledge and insight about Islam and the Islamic world.  Among her contributions, she shows that the Muslim Holy Book does not support the anti-Semitism that seems endemic in many parts of the Muslim world (p.21, 39).  But Ali’s book is more complex, unsettling, and challenging – a spellbinding story that contains powerful messages about freedom and its limits, democracy, and human rights.

I was reading both books with the hope of validating the views which I went out on a limb to express in 2006, quoted above; or, to quote from the “discussion questions” for book clubs inserted at the end of Ali’s book, using both to help me reexamine whether Islam is “compatible with Western values and culture” (book club questions are a feature I had never seen before, then found again at the end of Manji’s book).  Manji’s answer to the book club question is a definite “maybe.”  Throughout, she leaves no doubt that a more open, less dogmatic Islam, although difficult, is attainable.

Much of Ali’s book, by contrast, lays out the case that Islam is altogether incompatible with Western values.  Muslim culture, based on the Koran, is “brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women, and harsh in war,” she writes (p.272).  I had the sense she was killing me not so softly when she belittled those Westerners who argue that Islam is a peaceful and humane religion.  Looking at “reality, at real cultures and governments,” Ali sees that “it simply isn’t so” (p.349).  Westerners swallow these arguments, she says, “because they have learned not to examine the religions and cultures of minorities too critically, for fear of being called racist.”  Ouch!  That hurt.

But, surprisingly, a close reading of Ali’s book reveals that for her, too, Islam is at least potentially compatible with Western values: Ali proffers a highly tentative maybe, rather than Manji’s definite maybe.  The key for both is that the Muslim world needs to undergo its own version of the Enlightenment, similar to that of Western Europe and North America in the 18^th century, when the notion of a secular state that promotes equality and encourages tolerance began to take hold.  Manji’s book throughout is a plea for what she calls a “reformation” in Islam (p.30).

Ali too uses the word “reformation,” which she describes as moving “from the world of faith to the world of reason” (p.347).  “In the past fifty years,” she observes, the Muslim world has been “catapulted into modernity.”  Muslims “don’t have to take six hundred years to go through a reformation in the way they think about equality and individual rights” (p.350).  Just as the West freed itself from the “grip of violent organized religion,” Ali assumes that the “same process could occur among the millions of Muslims,” infusing traditions that are “rigid and inhumane with the values of progress and modernity” (p.272-73).  Surely, she says, now it is “Islam’s turn to be tested” (p.282).

Still, overall, Manji’s vision is far more optimistic, in large measure because she was brought up in a Muslim family in dour but diverse British Columbia, Canada, where the more stifling aspects of Muslim culture are counterbalanced by the province’s general openness.  Growing up amidst war, dictatorship and rigid patriarchy in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya afforded Ali no such advantage.  Ali’s description of her youth in these countries is chilling in many respects, never more so than her description of the genital mutilation she was forced to undergo as a girl.  But this is simply the most graphic example of a suffocating Muslim culture that subjugates women and leaves little room for free inquiry for either sex.  And it is striking that Ali dwells far more on the intellectual rather than economic impoverishment she encountered as she moved between four different countries as a girl.

Similarly, when Ali moved to the Netherlands to avoid an arranged marriage, she was captivated far more by the country’s spirit of openness and free inquiry than by its material prosperity (and we can argue well into the night on whether there is a connection between the two: do you need one to have the other? if so, which is the chicken, which is the egg?).  In the portion of her book on the Netherlands, where she transforms from outsider to insider, Ali found a “post-religious,” highly secular society, where people “openly disbelieved every aspect of religion” and “God was mocked everywhere” (p.239).  She also found Holland to be a “post-patriotic” society, “uncomfortable with the symbols of Dutchness,” where being Dutch seemed to mean “absolutely nothing“ and nationalism was seen as “almost the same thing as racism” (p.257).  Nobody, she emphasized, “seemed proud of being Dutch” (p.257).

Despite its openness – or maybe because of its openness – Ali perceives clear limitations to Holland’s ability to absorb and integrate outsiders.  When massive immigration to the Netherlands began in the 1980s, there was a “sense among the Dutch that society should behave with decency and understanding toward these people and accept their differences and beliefs” (p.246).  But the result was that “immigrants lived apart, socialized apart.  They went to separate schools – special Muslim schools or ordinary schools in the inner city, which other families fled” (p.246).  While the Dutch contributed generously to international aid organizations, they were “also ignoring the silent suffering of Muslim women and children in their own background” (p.246).

For Ali, the Dutch form of toleration – that paradigm Western value – subverts individual freedom when applied to Muslim women.  To paraphrase Barry Goldwater’s famous 1964convention line, Ali contends that toleration of a system that systematically subjugates women and deprives them of their rights is no virtue.  Indeed, the chapters in her book on the Netherlands might have been titled “The Limits of Tolerance.”  Manji reaches a similar conclusion.  She says that as Westerners “bow down before multiculturalism, we often act as if anything goes.”  The “ultimate paradox,” she says, is that in order to defend Western tolerance and diversity, “we’ll need to be less tolerant” (p.199).  This is also Ali’s “ultimate paradox”: Western tolerance should not extend to systemic human rights abuses practiced in minority cultures.  Thus stated, the principle seems self-evident, but Ali’s example of the Dutch Ministry of Justice’s refusal to record honor killings of women because it would “stigmatize one group in society” (p.295-96) shows how well meaning, tolerant officials can have difficulty applying it.

In this vein, in his introduction to Ali’s book, the late Christopher Hitchins contends “without equivocation” that:

[i]f Muslims want to immigrate to open and developed societies in order to better themselves, it is they who must expect to do the adapting.  We no longer allow Jews to run separate Orthodox courts in their communities, or permit Mormons to practice polygamy or racial discrimination or child marriage.  That is the price of ‘inclusion,’ and a very reasonable one (p.xviii-xix; emphasis in original).

Does anyone disagree?

Even with these reservations and insights into the limits of toleration, perhaps the most striking aspect of Ali’s book is her affirmation of the superiority of Western values over those of the societies she grew up in.  Having made her journey from the “world of faith” to the “world of reason,” she has particular credibility when she says she knows that:

one of those worlds is simply better than the other.  Not because of its flashy gadgets, but fundamentally, because of its values . . .Life is better in Europe [and I hope she would include North America] than it is in the Muslim world because human relations are better, and one reason human relations are better is that in the West, life on earth is valued in the here and now, and individuals enjoy rights and freedoms that are recognized, and protected by the state (p.346).

Manji, who grew up in a Western culture and could take its individual liberty and spirit of inquiry for granted, is just as emphatic.  She opens her book by paying homage to the freedoms afforded her in the West: “to think, search, speak, exchange, discuss, challenge, be challenged and rethink” (p.19).  Unlike Ali, she never had to choose between Islam and the West.  As she puts it, “the West made it possible for me to choose Islam, however tentatively.” Manji not only reaffirms the superiority of Western values but also sees Western Muslims as “poised to demonstrate the possibilities of reforming Islam” (p.186); or, as she puts it at the beginning of her book, having the capacity to restore Islam’s “better angels” (p.4).  Muslims in the West have the “luxury of exercising civil liberties, especially free expression to change tribal tendencies,” Manji asserts.  “Are we leveraging that freedom? Are enough non-Muslims challenging us to do so?” (p.186).

But only a miniscule portion of the world’s Muslim population lives in Europe and North America.  Most still live in predominantly Muslim countries and unless these countries undergo sweeping transformation, reform of Islam is unlikely to be widespread.  And here Manji’s analysis conveys a better sense of the diversity and dynamism within the Islamic world.   Somalia and Saudi Arabia are not the only models.  Manji cites  Turkey, flawed in many ways but nonetheless the Muslim world’s most mature and secular democracy (p.156).  Today, she would be likely to cite the democratic sentiments so widely manifested in the “Arab Spring” — although she would probably want to add a word about how the Arab Spring also demonstrates the difficulty of utilizing those sentiments to build sustainable democratic institutions.  Indeed that very difficulty demonstrates that there is still today, as in 2008, a long way to go before a Muslim Enlightenment takes hold in the Islamic world.  But if counterparts as articulate and clear-eyed as Ali and Manji can be empowered in that part of the world, it would be imprudent to discount this possibility as hopelessly naïve.

Thomas H. Peebles

Rockville, Maryland

May 7, 2012

Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

[Introduction: This is the last of my comments that I can locate from 2006, written after my high school friends and I had discussed an earlier Sam Harris book, “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.” In our exchanges, I found myself alone among my friends in arguing that the taboo against delving deeply into the faith of others is a socially useful convention, enabling people of many different religions to co-exist in relative tolerance and harmony. My friends found that view antiquated and wimpy. The comment below reprises these themes. I have rewritten the final paragraph in light of events since 2006].

This slim book, less than 100 pages, is intended as a sequel to Harris’ earlier “The End of Faith.” My own spiritual inclinations might best be described as secular humanism; I respect but reject Christianity and organized religion generally. I therefore found myself in agreement again, as I did in Harris’ earlier book, with most of his fervently argued points about Christian theology. But the fervor of his argument suggests that Harris’s letter is really for like-minded secularists. Although he makes a few concessions and includes some efforts to be respectful to the hypothetical Christian he is addressing – the person who believes, “at a minimum, that the Bible is the inspired word of God and that only those who accept the divinity of Jesus Christ will experience salvation after death” (p.viii)– the style overall is very much “in your face” and not designed to win many converts among such Christians. Rather, he has set out, as he says with no tinges of false modesty, to “demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms” by engaging Christianity “at its most divisive, injurious and retrograde” (p.ix).

I don’t think we get very far by demolishing the foundations of others’ theology. I look at theology as a set of beliefs based on faith, which many people decide, for all kinds of interesting psychological reasons, to place outside the usual empirical and scientific processes that we try, however imperfectly, to apply in other aspects of our lives. Rather than seeking to show the scientific dubiousness of Christian theology, I would have preferred a letter which tries to convince devoted Christians that their religion should be an essentially private matter, rather than one that animates public policy. In many ways, this is a tougher argument. Christians arguing for a religious role in public life usually cite the religious motivation of many abolitionists in the 19^th century, and of course, Martin Luther King in the 20^th . (Two recent Washington Post columns present good arguments for minimizing religion in public life: Michael Gerson, a conservative who served in the George W. Bush White House: “Too Much Religion in Politics,” Washington Post, March 27, 2012:

http://cjonline.com/opinion/2012-03-29/michael-gerson-too-much-religion-politics;

and E.J. Dionne, a liberal Catholic: “A Holy Week Entreaty,” Washington Post, April 5, 2012:

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/ej_dionne/e-j-dionne-jr-a-holy-week-entreaty-on-religion/article_317e8b3c-b92e-5557-81e1-5d42c792dfed.html).

I couldn’t read either Harris book without thinking that his real point is that anyone who embraces Christianity in any of its forms is at best intellectually dishonest. This leads to a problem I have seen among many — but certainly not all – atheists: a tendency to demonize theists. Although understandable for atheists who are routinely demonized by some true believers, this tendency in my view should nonetheless be avoided. My problem is that I know too many highly intelligent people from all walks of life — doctors, educators, investment counselors, carpenters, auto mechanics, even an occasional lawyer – who are very intelligent and profess to be Christians. Does their faith approach that of the dogmatic hypothetical recipient of Harris’ letter? Are they at base intellectually dishonest? For the most part, I can’t say. I have assiduously applied the taboo that Harris wishes to discard, which cautions against probing too closely into other folks’ religion. But I do know many hyper-intelligent practicing Christians, and am not comfortable with Harris’ attempt to belittle if not demonize them.

Further, as in Harris’ earlier book, I remain unconvinced by his analysis of Islam. The idea that Islam is a “peaceful religion hijacked by extremists” Harris writes, is a “fantasy” and:

it is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge. It is not at all clear how we should proceed in our dialogue with the Muslim world, but deluding ourselves with euphemisms is not the answer. It is now a truism in foreign policy circles that real reform in the Muslim world cannot be imposed from the outside. But it is important to recognized why this is so – it is because most Muslims are utterly deranged by their religious faith. Muslims tend to view questions of public policy and global conflict in terms of their affiliation with Islam. And Muslims who don’t view the world in these terms risk being branded as apostates and killed by other Muslims.

(p.85; emphasis in original).

I found this passage “way overstated” in 2006 and still do, six years later. If Harris is even close to the mark, there is hardly any point in “dialogue with the Muslim world.” I was curious whether the on-going “Arab Spring,” in which millions in Muslim countries have manifested their preference for a more pluralist democracy in their countries, might have prompted some modification in Harris’ views. While I didn’t find anything “directly on point,” as the lawyers say, last month, Harris posted an article, “Islam and the Future of Liberalism” (www.samharris.org/blog/item/islam-and-the-future-of-liberalism). There, Harris writes:

Of course, millions of Muslims are more secular and are eager to help create a global civil society. But they are virtually silent because they have nothing to say within the framework of their faith. (They are also afraid of getting killed). That is the problem we must keep in view. And it represents an undeniable difference between Islam and Christianity at this point in history.

Many people who would like to see pluralist democratic institutions established in their predominately Muslim countries have been anything but “virtually silent.” No small number have been killed, others tortured, yet the strength of their democratic vision has prompted Muslims and non-Muslims in the Arab world to continue to manifest their belief that democratic institutions offer the best way forward for their beleaguered countries. The Arab Spring has a long, uphill way to go before such institutions become firmly rooted, and fundamentalist religious groups may yet prevail. There is probably less reason for optimism today than six months ago. But the heartening aspect of the Arab Spring is that so many democratic-minded Muslims have not been silent.

Thomas H. Peebles

Washington, D.C.

April 16, 2012