Schopenhauer on Islam
"Consider the Koran, for example; this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value."
"Man betrachte z.B. den Koran: dieses schlechte Buch war hinreichend, eine Weltreligion zu begründen, das metaphysische Bedürfniß zahlloser Millionen Menschen seit 1200 Jahren zu befriedigen, die Grundlage ihrer Moral und einer bedeutenden Verachtung des Todes zu werden, wie auch, sie zu blutigen Kriegen und den ausgedehntesten Eroberungen zu begeistern. Wir finden in ihm die traurigste und ärmlichste Gestalt des Theismus."
"Everywhere where detestable Islam has not yet driven out the ancient, profound religions of humanity with fire and sword, my ascetic results would have to fear the reproach of being trivial."
"The usefulness of Mohammedanism lies in its intrinsic vacuousness: there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. This simple creed of the unity of God imposes no intellectual or higher spiritual demands upon the believer, but promises to satisfy all his most carnal urges, even allowing him to pursue a course of self-indulgence and extreme sensuality in the afterlife. - The Koran is a confused and disorganised literary production, an embarrassing potpourri of Talmudic fable and pre-Islamist paganism; yet despite its lack of sophisticated content, it is reputed by believers to be a miracle, for how could a book meant to be recited in such mellifluous cadences as our wonderful Koran be composed by Mohammed, an illiterate peasant, save by the inspiration of the Angel Gabriel? Thus, when recited, this demonic production seems to cast an hypnotic spell bewitching and subduing all those believers within hearing distance, which may explain the wild popularity of certain Koranic readers down throughout the ages, such as the mediaeval Hafiz. - Also, the bellicose character of this book with its repeated calls of "Raise your swords and slay the unbelievers!" is enough to inspire a savage fanaticism in even the simplest and most self-effacing of believers. This means that the Koran isn't so much a religious book as it is a fiery call to arms; as such, it is the most disgusting piece of propaganda ever written, shamelessly enlisting the disenfranchised and exploiting the emotional volatility of the young as the raw material by which it spreads its tentacles."
(The last quote from Arthur Schopenhauer I could never find in the German original. So it may not be from Schopenhauer, although it very much sounds like him.)
Sam Harris in conversation with Rory Stewart (comments)
"2 people who essentially agreed on everything except how important the problem was." That is a very good summary of the discussion, and basically amounts to saying that they completely failed to clear up the confusion that still exists on this issue. Because the importance of a problem is what makes a problem into a problem. Unimportant problems aren't problems that need not be discussed at all.
This whole exchange they're having about separating criticism of the religion from criticism of the people who follow the religion is puzzling. How can that even make sense? Except maybe in the sense of 'I hate the sin, not the sinner' (provided the sinner repents). Criticising religious beliefs nobody holds would be a waste of time. You criticise them because you find the people who hold them and act on them reprehensible. (And yes, you can even feel hatred for a couple who murder their daughter with kitchen knives because of an unwanted pregnancy.) Since when are people entitled to be shielded from criticism? As long as they have the opportunity to defend themselves and prove the criticism wrong? Now obviously the islamists when devising their islamophobia tactics have discovered that there is a similarity between their own honour-shame mentality and the recently developed victimhood mentality in the West (as opposed to the more classical integrity culture): it's enough to declare yourself 'offended in your honour' or 'victimised' to put the offender or victimiser in the wrong. Together with also more recent anti-discrimination legislation this offers nice opportunities for triumphalist religious warriors to attack their kafir fellow citizens: I declare this or that to be a requirement of my religion, and if you don't go along with it, I'll sue you for (islamophobic) discrimination on religious grounds. Endless battles about veils (a faux religious requirement), prayer times and spaces, separation of the sexes in public swimming pools, and so on and so forth. I finally made up my mind about the rules against veils in educational settings after reading a long article in the newspaper about a Muslim young woman complaining bitterly about the injustice of her giving up her dream to become a MD because of these rules. All I could think was: "Thank God, no patient will ever come into the care of that obtuse and narrow-minded woman!" PS: On integrity culture - Dante Alighieri in the 13th century wrote about how praise for your honesty constitutes an affront to every honest man, and similar things erased by our praise and victimhood feelgood culture.
"It’s always twisted so now Muslims feel like instead of tackling issues we have to defend ourselves from ignorant people who think all Muslims are the same." But why do they feel this way? Because ignorant people constantly say that all Muslims are the same? Very doubtful, because that doesn't happen. Or because they do feel that the criticism is hitting home and it makes them feel uneasy enough to wish to deflect? - So I also have the impression that far too many 'moderate' Muslims cannot handle criticism of Islam well, not because it is either absurdly unfounded or not concerning them (in which cases they would just ignore it), but exactly because it is founded and does concern them. And that is what makes them easy prey for the islamists, who succeed in convincing them that they are surrounded by hostile Western islamophobes. - Too many 'moderate' Muslims feeling offended by criticism of Islam also explains why this islamophobia accusation devised by islamists works so well with Western 'true' islamophobes like Rory Stewart, 'true' islamophobes being the not-prejudiced kind who sincerely do not want to give offence and take the islamists' accusation of prejudice to heart even when it is entirely unjustified! - Therefore Sam Harris is right to conclude that we have a serious problem with too many Muslims who cannot handle criticism well. Which is intimidating by and of itself.
You and Rory are indeed correct in your overall depiction of Muslims and Islam. But then you concede: "I am as Islamophobic as anyone when it comes to certain tendencies ..." Without making the slightest effort to address Sam Harris's fears about these 'tendencies' in the spiritual and political development of the Muslim world. Doesn't that mean that the way in which you and Rory are correct is entirely beside the point? - Since Oct 7 there is not only a war going on in Gaza, there is also an Al Aqsa Flood of anti-Zionist hatred pouring out from the Muslim world and its Western sympathisers. Searching for Muslim voices of reason, I did find out that on October 9, 2023 the Global Imams Council issued a Public Statement Condemning the Recent Hamas Terrorist Attacks. In that public statement the GIC referred to the fatwa issued against Hamas by the Islamic Fatwa Council on March 9, 2023. (Statement and fatwa can easily be found on their respective web sites.) From the fatwa I understand that the IFC had effectively called for #HamasSurrenderNOW even before Hamas had launched its attack. But clearly these Muslim voices of reason are completely ignored, not only by Hamas, but also by a man such as the American Islamic scholar Omar Suleiman, close to the Muslim Brotherhood apparently and with a huge following, who manifests himself on Twitter as a relentless 'compassionate' holy war propagandist without ever mentioning Hamas. Is then Sam Harris not right to worry about 'certain tendencies' promoting genocidal war against Israel in the name of Islamic justice and with the help of Iran and its IRGC affiliates?
I like Rory Stewart very much and find it very hard to believe that he is not a good-faith actor. But on this issue of islamophobia he is weirdly confused. I mean, how can he not see that this accusation of islamophobia has been devised by islamists and has been used relentlessly and in an organised manner for more than 20 years already to silence critics of Islam and to intimidate both 'moderate' Muslims and 'unbelievers' in the West? And with so much success that we are still debating the issue in 2024! How come the fatwa against Salman Rushdie of 1989 wasn't enough to let everybody understand? There is this Jewish American historian Richard Landes of BostonU who tries to explain that failure in his last book 'Can The Whole World Be Wrong? - Lethal Journalism, Anti-Semitism, and Global Jihad' (2022).
I read the book on his walk from Herat to Kabul. These hospitable encounters were rather formal affairs, with people sitting around rooms in a closely observed order. I don't think he ever got a chance to look behind the curtain where the women were kept. He admits that his walking alone was dangerous, but less so because he didn't carry a weapon, apart from his walking stick. He was close at one point to laying down in the snow to die, but his dog edged him on. He obviously knows a lot about walking. And also about the futility of nation building efforts by ever rotating Western consultants who do not speak the language. But he never even mentions the youth bulge explanation for the endless political violence disrupting every attempt at compromise and stability.
Rory Stewart didn't mention Sam Harris on this other podcast. But he did say that there is a movement that deliberately stokes islamophobia with exaggerated claims ('islamists are running the country' - 'the mayor of London is controlled by islamists') and that he considers it to be a greater problem than the threat posed by the islamists themselves. But this official line of 'islamophobia' is the bigger problem, put forward for more than 20 years already, is exactly what put wind in the sails of the anti-islamic movement. As long as the islamist activists are left to the police to deal with and not brought under control by the Muslim community itself, the threat they pose can only grow. And the Muslim community, which is the first target of the islamists, will be all the more intimidated by them when they get the justified impression that the government is ignoring the problem and leaving them to their own devices.
There is a true problem with islamophobia, although not the one we are normally reminded of. There are 4 groups of players in this game. (1) The bigoted Western islamophobes who hate all Muslims and seek to confront them, expel them, etc. (2) The honest Western islamophobes like Rory Stewart, who are sincerely afraid of giving offence to Muslims, who take the accusation of islamophobia to heart even when it is not justified, and who play the role of appeasers when they say that islamophobia is the bigger problem, not islamist activism. (3) The islamist activists who have devised the accusation of islamophobia, not to combat islamophobia, but to stoke it in order to provoke that 'clash of civilisations' between all Westerners and all Muslims they wish for. (4) Moderate Muslims, whom the islamist activists can easily convince that they are surrounded everywhere by hostile Western islamophobes and thereby separate from Western society, because they have difficulty distinguishing between prejudiced Western islamophobes of group (1) and honest Western islamophobes of group (2). The truly problematic group from the Western point of view is the group (2) of appeasers: although they are the natural allies of the moderate Muslims (4) against the islamist activists (3), they do not appear as sufficiently trustworthy to their natural allies, because they give the justified impression, by downplaying the islamist threat, of not being willing to address the threat effectively and leaving their allies to their own devices when confronting the islamist activists in their community. - Islamophobia being not yet the 'bigger problem' in our multicultural Western societies does not exclude that further neglect of the islamist threat cannot make it the bigger problem one day, and inspire populist politicians not to defend but to shut down our open societies in a potentially violent confrontation with our Muslim communities, exactly as wished for by the islamists.
Islamophobia is invalid criticism of a distorted perception of the beliefs and teachings of Islam that is meant to denigrate the people who believe in it and therefore offensive to people who do NOT hold these distorted beliefs. Valid criticism of the beliefs and teachings of Islam is not meant to denigrate people and only offensive to people who do hold them. In both cases the offended believers may defend themselves by accusing you of islamophobia. Although I suspect that in the first case the defence will be more often than not of the kind "you're talking islamophobic nonsense, no Muslim holds that kind of distorted belief". Which makes the true islamophobia defence of the kind "you just hate Muslims" utterly suspect as coming from a Muslim who cannot accept valid criticism. And that may be the core of the problem: that Muslims cannot allow their beliefs to be criticised. I mean, the most basic valid criticism of Islam after all is: "Who authorised you to call me an unbeliever?" PS: This 'can you still tell the truth when the truth hurts' conundrum only seems to come up in honour-shame cultures (you feel no shame so long as you're not caught) and in our present victimhood culture, much less in the more classical integrity-guilt culture (you feel guilt even when you're not caught).
What is frustrating and astonishing is that the 'you cannot generalise in this way' defence is still used so routinely, when it is nothing but a red herring. When I say 'Muslims this or that' I don't mean to say 'all Muslims ...' (or I would be saying it) nor 'a negligible number of Muslims ...' (or I wouldn't be talking about them), I mean to say 'too many Muslims ...' for me not to talk about them.
I more and more believe that this absolute prohibition on questioning the Quran and on leaving the faith, punishable not only in the afterlife, but already in this life (by death) is effectively the central tenet of Islam, asking for absolute submission and spiritual imprisonment. Tom Holland has this hypothesis that the Quran and the hadith were only written down after the conquest of Jerusalem and consciously devised to supersede the Christian and Jewish religion of the conquered peoples. The inspiration may have come from the Prophet originally, whose existence is not in doubt, but it is impossible to know what has been added, changed or omitted in the texts when they were fixed. Inserting the absolute prohibition to doubt that the text corresponds to the original revelation (God's word) looks very much like a master stroke of manipulation, if manipulation there was. Which we cannot exclude, as there is no way to prove the contrary. Checkmate!
Yasmine Mohammed is very good in evoking the spiritual prison of Islam as it is experienced in everyday life. "I was afraid even of contemplating being critical of my religion, because Allah would have found out immediately. - My mother had no other choice than to kill me, if she wanted to save her own soul from eternal hellfire." So it looks like Islam is a religion very much suited as the foundation for a police state, with informers informing also on themselves, something even the German STASI never attained. Nevertheless, in Iran there seem to be quite a number of people who have collectively overcome their religious paranoia. Institutionally the regime remains very solid, however, and one cannot expect it to go down without putting up a very bloody fight. It is scary, no doubt about that.
One would normally expect that Muslims living in the West would assimilate even without much intellectual questioning of their religion, simply by adopting the less repressive mores of their Western surroundings, and then exert a liberating influence on their family members back home. It is of course what the islamist activists are afraid of when they strenuously warn their coreligionists against assimilation, starting with their own families. Nevertheless, it remains somewhat puzzling that they seem to be so successful with their intimidation tactics. Women do after all go out and work (and no woman likes to be beaten up at home or even raped). Children do go to Western schools and have Western friends (and no youngster likes to have music or dancing forbidden to them). But Boualem Sansal somewhere points out that it isn't the Algerian Muslims living in France who try to warn their families in Algeria against the islamists, it's the other way around. The only explanation I can think of is that it's not just islamist activists who play a role, but Muslim men in general, and young men especially, who try to mask their own insecurity when growing up in the West by turning into homegrown little disciplinarians. But it's just weird in a way.
Even if Sam Harris (the West) gave the impression that he is thoroughly convinced that ALL Muslims are caught up in a violent and fanatical religion, in other words, that he is an incorrigible islamophobe, how would that deter the "substantial minorities (and in some countries, majorities) of Muslims fighting for modern, morally acceptable interpretations of the text"? Could it not on the contrary encourage them to fight even harder and more publicly in order to prove Sam Harris (the West) wrong? Do you honestly believe that anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world comes first and foremost from reforming Muslims offended by Western islamophobia? And not from islamists who do all they can to stoke islamophobia in the West in order to make the 'clash of civilizations' the unavoidable outcome they wish for? Was it really Western islamophobia that crushed the spirit of modernising Persians and thereby opened the way for Ayatollah Khomeini to successfully conduct a reactionary Islamic revolution in Iran? I understand Sam Harris as saying very boldly: I am indeed afraid of the spiritual and political development of the Muslim world in general, and here are my reasons. Why would you want him to tie himself into knots like Rory Stewart only to lose his audience both in the West and the Muslim world with a message no less confusing and ineffectual than the one already sent out by our US and EU governments?
What I would have liked to ask Rory Stewart: Why would Sam Harris, or anyone else for that matter, want to fight reforming and tolerant Muslims, when there are so many worthier adversaries in the Muslim world? Unless you categorically deny that those Muslim enemies of Western liberal democracies exist, why would you object to his 'tarring them with a single brush' when you keep in mind what Wikipedia calls the 'paradox of tolerance': if a society's practice of tolerance is inclusive of the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate, eliminating the tolerant and the practice of tolerance with them. (Karl Popper describes the paradox as arising from the self-contradictory idea that, in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.)
Jihad, and more generally the easy justification of violence, as if it were a legitimate substitute for negotiation, are one aspect of the problem. But more disturbing even is this supreme idea of Islamic justice that seems to go without even the notion of impartiality. As if Muslim suffering by itself were enough to prove injustice and hold the unbelievers to account. In Palestine under the British mandate, as the majority in the country they fought against Jewish immigration for their exclusive right of national self-determination in Palestine (or more exactly: Muslim supremacy), discounting diaspora Jews and refusing compromise, and then very quickly resorted to violence as if it were nothing. Since then they complain about the Nakba without even mentioning the war that led to it, as if the Zionists were to blame for both the war and the Nakba.
"The ability to develop mechanisms, let alone political institutions, based on principles of liberalism, secularism and pluralism have been made difficult by ..." Can we agree that the development of liberal and democratic institutions, even when they are made more difficult by outside interventions, will ultimately have to be accomplished by these Muslim-majority societies themselves? And that until now they have failed MAINLY for internal reasons to withstand the emergence of brutal dictatorial regimes almost everywhere? And as many of those regimes, including the initially secular regime of Saddam Hussein, have used political Islam to legitimise their brutal dictatorial behaviour in the eyes of the faithful, that political Islam is not to be discounted as a major obstacle? I mean, the secular Kemal Atatürk has tried to make a start with modernising Turkey, but has since then been supplanted by the populist Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has used political Islam to build his plebiscitary majority. And no, I don't mean to say that there is only one political Islam. There are obviously several of them. But they all seem to have a strong tendency to fight each other violently and not to submit to some institutional democratic compromise that regulates the competition for political power without the need for violence.
"Religion is used by the powerful to manipulate people." Which the powerful can only do successfully when the religion gains traction with the people and turns them into obedient pawns of the powerful. If your Marxian analysis agrees with that, what then is your point of contention with armchair philosopher Sam Harris? Sympathy with the powerful whenever they are anti-Western?
I would think that the House of Commons incident is less indicative of the danger to our open society from Islam than what is happening less visibly inside the Muslim communities of our European countries. So Rory Stewart can be right when he downplays the incident and still be wrong in a major way about the issue under discussion.
If his friend's reporting fits with Rory Stewart's point that Islamic repression of freedom of thought varies between Muslim-majority countries, how does that defeat Sam Harris's thesis that Islamic repression of freedom of thought is widespread in Muslim-majority countries and a major obstacle to the emergence of liberal and democratic institutions? - Holding the USA (or the West) solely and directly responsible for violent death in the world, when there were other actors such as fascists, communists and islamists actively participating in these conflicts, and most of the time even initiating these conflicts, is just stupid beyond belief. To be sure, that kind of simplistic and one-sided anti-Western sentiment is shared by a lot of ideologues around the world. Does that make it less stupid?
'Not all Muslims are the same' and 'Islam doesn't explain everything' are truisms, you do realise that, don't you? I don't know much about Sam Harris, but from what I have heard on this podcast, I find it hard to believe that he is out to disprove truisms. The Mossadegh story isn't as clear cut as you want us to believe. The Shah was an authoritarian, but a rather timid and naive one who wanted to be loved by his people while modernising the country. The Savak was bad, but feeble compared to the repressive apparatus set up by Saddam Hussein or Khomeini. The main point however is: the reactionary Islamic revolution conducted by Khomeini was entirely guided by his brand of political Islam and would not have succeeded without its Islamic appeal to the larger population of faithful Muslims. (The Shah's military also played a crucial role, by standing aside and not crushing the popular uprising, with the Shah himself abstaining from giving the order.) Why is that so difficult to accept? Especially since many intellectuals or politicians thinking along secular lines like yourself never expected that this inspiration by political Islam would be anything else but transitory, that acts of political and economical expediency would soon alter the course taken by the new regime and prevent an archaic theocracy from taking root. As a student I had a little essay to write on the Iranian events, and not knowing much about the events or Iran, I still remember how I ended it in typical journalistic fashion with a sentence somewhat like this: "Whether the mullahs will be able to govern a modern industrialising country in a way that finds lasting support from the majority of the population remains to be seen!" That their version of political Islam would be so suitable for organising a police state that more than 50 years later would become an even greater threat to the region than even the pessimists predicted, I couldn't fathom at the time. Why you, with the benefit of hindsight, still refuse to see it is equally beyond me.
Your allusion to the Islamic Golden Age in mediaeval times is a bit of a two-sided sword, I believe. The scientific, cultural and economic flourishing was actually driven mainly by the conquered (converted or tolerated) peoples and not so much by the Arab conquerors. It was made possible by the conquerors feeling solidly in power and confident enough to adopt a more liberal and tolerant attitude toward the peoples over which they ruled. So one could say that there is a sequence 'political/military supremacy' -> 'liberal and tolerant Islam' -> 'flourishing civil society' and another one 'political/military inferiority' -> 'repressive Islam' -> 'impoverished civil society'. Whether that corresponds to your idea of religion adapting to politics and not the other way around I don't know. One could draw from it the conclusion that in the West we can do no better than lay down our arms and let ourselves be politically conquered by the Muslims in the hope that they will then gradually adopt a more liberal and tolerant form of Islam. I find it a bit far-fetched and demeaning, but maybe that is what our left leaning elites have in mind, who knows? Michel Houellebecq wrote a whole book on it (which I haven't read).
You're touching on an aspect of Islam and Muslim societies that I believe isn't factored in enough: the way in which the religion of Muslim supremacy directly props up the self-esteem of ordinary people (the so-called Arab or better Muslim street). How political reforms granting civic equality to non-Muslims by the colonial powers or the Ottomans or the Shah could inflame the feelings of ordinary not very political people and instigate riots and mobs. It is said that Nasser was dragged against his will into the 1967 6-day war by the pressure of the Arab street he had whipped up beyond his control. When you hear Jews from Muslim countries describe their former life as dhimmi, it is all about the daily humiliation inflicted on them by ordinary contemptuous Muslims and the strict prohibition for them to defend themselves in the slightest, with children being trained even from a young age to spit on them or throw rocks at them in the confidence that they could not retaliate without suffering dire consequences. In other words, a Muslim commoner could deem himself socially superior to an unbeliever and express contempt for him even when that unbeliever was a renowned Jewish ophthalmologist. - A few years ago when a Jewish historian on some French radio programme alluded to this kind of quotidian antisemitism 'imbibed by Muslims with their mother's milk' the islamophobia crowd created a huge stink and with the help of respectable anti-racist human rights organisations dragged the poor guy through the courts (he was lucky and acquitted in the end).
You are indeed repeating yourself, without ever going beyond vacuous phrases like "religion never changes by itself, but only when it has to catch up with political reality". In a strange way you are very intellectual and unpolitical. What I think Sam Harris is trying to do is the following: convince people, and especially politically influential people in the West, that they have to send a much clearer message than they have hitherto done to both islamists and Muslims in general, that as an open society we will not tolerate intolerant religious beliefs and behaviours, and that we will act accordingly wherever that is constitutionally possible. (Banning of veils in educational settings and public sector employment; mosques and religious teacher selection; associations and their funding; etc.) It will help to 'change the religion' when it instils sufficient confidence into those Muslims in our Western countries who are willing to assimilate and to react in order to rid themselves of the oppressive influence exerted by the islamist activists in their midst who try to set them against Western liberal society. (How they are going to do that will be up to them, but especially local governments and schools should make it clear to them that they are willing to help wherever possible.) That it is still an uphill struggle is apparent from this podcast, when Sam Harris cannot even convince an open-minded British ex-politician that islamophobia is not the bigger problem in our multicultural Western societies, unless further neglect of the islamist threat makes it the bigger problem and inspires populist politicians not to defend but to shut down our open societies in a potentially violent confrontation with our Muslim communities, exactly as wished for by the islamists. I suspect that Sam Harris would also like to make intellectuals and politicians with a global reach better understand the nature and the gravity of the threat that emanates from the Iranian regime and its IRGC affiliates so that they make better choices when they are confronting that threat as in the current war against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Ansar Allah in Yemen, etc.
Commenter 1: "Rory, you are experiencing the intellectual turmoil that comes from rejecting reason ... don't fight it, you are a smart guy. (..) I was being facetious." - Me: "Really? But your comment is much, much better when it is not meant ironically, for Rory should indeed understand that the intellectual turmoil he's experiencing comes from his conscience rebelling against his rejecting reason." - Commenter 2: "I don't think Rory rejects Sam's reasons, just his own humanity and intuition is telling him that ultimately we are all human and that confuting an ideology so deeply rooted in a society and its people as innately bad isn't the way to address the issue." - Me: "If that were true, why doesn't Rory say so and explain how he would address Sam's legitimate concerns? - No, Rory is a true islamophobe, sincerely afraid of offending Muslims, because he cannot separate anymore the Muslim sinner from the Muslim supremacist sin. And that is a truly dangerous position, because it means that he has stopped recognising his own humanity in the other side (the Muslims). When you cannot tell your brother anymore why he is seriously wrong, you stopped being his brother, full stop. - The islamists have invented the accusation of islamophobia for their own Muslim supremacist reasons, and the West, like Rory Stewart, out of sincere islamophobia, has largely taken it to heart, which in the eyes of Muslims makes Westerners look devious and insincere. Because it would indeed be far more honest to respond to the charge of islamophobia straightforwardly with a declaration of war against ALL Muslims who do not renounce Muslim supremacism, as we cannot tolerate Muslim intolerance if we want to keep our open and free societies open and free. - When Muslims do not express revulsion at the idea of avenging the Prophet's honour by murdering the entire editorial board of Charlie Hebdo, how can they be surprised at being met with the same revulsion? But surprised they are. And therefore profoundly despised. - In the West we're all far more islamophobic than we care to admit. And not admitting it, even to ourselves, is a profound mistake. Because it reveals that we do not understand ourselves and our so called universal values we keep talking about without knowing how to embody and demonstrate them. And there can be no doubt about who's benefiting most from that confusion, when the West is clearly weakened by it."
I tend to think that the 'secular' misunderstanding of religion in the West is a major weakness when dealing with Islam and Muslims. Simply put: faith isn't science, we are all agnostic, i.e. unable to know anything about a transcendent God, and therefore we are all reduced to have faith, even when we do not recognize it as a religion. The question isn't whether you believe in God, the question is what it is you believe in. Religious doctrines are never more than signposts, they aren't the road itself, which leads to Rome even without the signposts. And the doctrines have normally arisen to guard against error, and are not meant to be taken as positive instructions for anything else. I only understood this after discovering Eric Voegelin, a not very well known German-American philosopher of history. Pope Benedict's thinking is close to Voegelin, and I still believe that the pope's Regensburg lecture of 2006 on 'Faith and Reason', in which he criticised both Islamic absolutism and Western scientism as rationally deficient, was the pope's honest and personal attempt to see whether a dialogue with Islam was possible. He was, of course, quickly deterred by the offended and violent reactions coming from the Islamic world, with Erdogan in the lead. In a similar vein, there is Frank van Dun, a not very well known Belgian philosopher of natural law, who has a convincing article on the Decalogue as the 'Perfect Law of Freedom'.
Sam Harris on Islamophobia
"The status quo is intolerable, and should be intolerable to Muslims themselves. They should be mortified that their community is so uniquely combustible, so uniquely uncivil, so incapable of self-reflection and self-criticism, so dangerously childish, so desperate to make the whole world its 'safe space'. (...) There is only one religion on Earth that has normalised this level of fanaticism. And it isn't an expression of bigotry to notice that this is totally antithetical to everything civilised people value in the 21st century. The Octobre 7th attacks in Israel changed the way many of us think about the vulnerability of open societies. They changed the way we think about immigration and failures of assimilation, and they revealed a level of moral confusion in our universities and other institutions that is as astonishing as it is masochistic. (...) There have been nearly fifty-thousand acts of Islamic terrorism in the last forty years, ninety percent of them have occurred in Muslim countries, most had nothing to do with Israel or Jews. There have been 82 attacks in France and over 2000 in Pakistan during this period. Do you want France to be more like Pakistan? You just need more jihadists, you just need more people susceptible to becoming jihadists, you just need a wider Muslim community that won't condemn jihadism, but pretends that the theology that inspires it will be true and perfect until the end of the world. You just need millions of people who will protest Israel for defending itself or call for the death of cartoonists for depicting the prophet Muhammad and yet who will not make a peep about the jihadist atrocities that occur daily over the world in the name of their religion. When hundreds of thousands of people show up in London to condemn Hamas or the Islamic State or any specific instance of jihadist savagery without bothsiding anything, then we will know that something has changed. When Muslims by the millions pour into the streets in protest not over cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, but over the murder of cartoonists by their own religious fanatics, we will know that we have made a modicum of progress. The Muslim world needs to win a war of ideas with itself, and perhaps several civil wars. It has to deradicalise itself, it has to transform the doctrine of jihad into something far more benign than it is. And it has to stop supporting its religious fanatics when they come into conflict with non-Muslims. This is what is so toxic: Muslims supporting other Muslims no matter how sociopathic or insane their behaviour. If the Muslim community and the political left can't stand against jihadism, it is only a matter of time before their moral blindness leads to right-wing authoritarianism in the West. If secular liberals won't create secure borders, fascists will. And that is a world none of us should want to live in."
