Nine years after Ben Affleck accused Bill Maher and Sam Harris of being "gross" and "racist" for criticizing Islam, Sam Harris engaged in a frustrating 90-minute debate with Rory Stewart on the same topic.
In other words I have no desire to denigrate the religion in some metaphysical way. I just see it as a relevant variable that’s more than useful in diagnosing threats to western liberalism
The usual absolutions by western apologists for Islam totally ignore the justifications provided by the religious books for violence, male domination, punishing women and discrimination against other religions. While carrying out the Mumbai terror attacks, the terrorists were constantly being fed with the promise of martyrdom and a fast track to paradise by their handlers over satellite phones - and the only motivating tool deployed to convince those young men was religion.
Vaish’s call to moderates to speak out is a courageous one. But for a Muslim moderate to speak out will require state protection, which is hard to provide even in liberal Western societies. The human rights movement in the West fails to acknowledge the majority of the reasons for Islamic extremism come from a literal interpretation of Islamic teachings. The flow of funds to the seminaries through the practice of Zakat from Iran, Wahabbis of Saudi Arabia and Qatar is the primary reason for the explosion of fundamentalist Islamic teachings. Even before the moderates can react, the Western states need to curb the flow of these funds from their countries to these seminaries. But these transactions are only increasing. The militants in Gaza now have a modern fighting machine and a war chest of Billions of dollars. Until this funding machine is dismantled, any amount of protest by moderates will be of little effect in changing the attitudes toward religious fundamentalism in Islamic countries.
Agreed. I hadn't thought of the concept of Zakat literally being the source of funds for mosques the world over. I'd be interested in knowing - What% of funding comes from gulf states? Out of non gulf state sources, what % of funds come from the top 20 to 30 families, individuals or institutions, or is it just an aggregation of small donations from millions of Muslims? My guess is a small group of gulf families are responsible fora large propotion of the funding. But these familites probably have generational relationship with clerics, that are hard to break.
Also on a related note - do you think MBS has actually clamped down on flow of funds- the rhetoric from him and around him seems to suggest so.
The Islamic forces aligned against the Western philosophy; political & military domination used Zakat very effectively to build forces to counter the West. Islam is a perfect platform to indoctrinate a believer in amplifying any grievance - religious, political, or social discrimination. And these grievances are legitimate. However, the indoctrinated do not understand that the fault lines lie within the Muslim community- lack of education and poor political and social leadership. Also, corrupt politicians take advantage of other communities, too- be it Christians, Hindus, etc.
Zakat flows through normal and grey banking channels, including 'Hawala'. Flow of Zakat can't be quantified empirically as most are in cash and transmitted through grey banking channels. This infusion of funds has persuaded several moderate Islamic societies in various countries to change how they interpret the holy book how they dress and mingle with other community members. This can be witnessed in the state of Kerala in India. A deep sense of victimhood has been drilled into amongst the believers. Even if moderates find a powerful voice, trying to change the attitude of fundamentalists through dialogue is futile. Islam is a young religion and will need more time, perhaps another 100 years, to shed the cloak of violence. This metamorphosis was evident in every other religion, too.
Finding a solution to the dire situation is possible if several of the grievances are resolved. There needs to be an urgent political detente between Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and the US in the ME. This will require the settlement of Palestinian statehood, reform in the political structure of Lebanon & Syria, and, most notably, a sustainable truce with Iran. The recalcitrant Islamic non-state groups must be controlled through a coordinated law and order organisation like Interpol and not by military forces. Even if we achieve such a detente in ME, low-level violence will occur periodically until the staunch followers of Islam realise God is within.
2.) you overlook aspects of Islamism/ Quaran which state that everyone must be converted or killed and that whatever land, people, places Muslims once attain, they are therefore entitled to it in perpetuity, but no one else is. Yes, this is similar to other religions, but they stick to a literal interpretation of the Quaran that seems (maybe/hopefully I’m wrong) to be endemic, so much so they require people to learn Arabic to read it and not legitimize any “translated” versions or interpretations, therefore it’s harder to “evolve” over time (hope it takes a lot less than 100 years.) Money from the Middle East to the radical aspects of the Islamic religion is for both religious and political reasons. I’m not sure that “marriage” will break down in a way in which we won’t have to fight against it; much like Christian Catholicism in Middle Ages.
3.) A 2-state “solution” wasn’t realistic given the Arab mentality listed above and the hatred of the Jews. Hamas has killed it, if not forever, at least for the foreseeable future.
4.) without these evolutions, there is no reason to think that things will change in the Middle East. No detente. We will have to see, but we had better wise up and be more pragmatic about it and stop imagining we can do anything without a major evolution in Islam.
I’m sure funds flow freely from the gulf, but I just want to remind you guys that Zakat is reserved for poor individuals and cannot be put into coffers of institutions, be they mosques, seminaries, madrasahs, what have you.
At least, not officially. The poor who receive these are free to use them as they will. Often they donate them. Some may even know that they donate them.
The poor are neither under the obligation nor in any condition to donate the one lump sum they get to collect each year, that’s the definition of poor. No doubt money reaches these institutions through grey channels, but thinking zakat is one of them is barking up the wrong tree.
Just yesterday I saw an old television show about Theo van Gogh, where they played an audio clip from his murderer. People assume he was insulted by Theo’s work, but he dispelled this assumption, saying “I am not insulted. I acted out of belief.” Such individuals take it upon themselves as a necessary effort of war, a contribution to the world (but mostly themselves). I suspect, like Theo, that this conflict (over freedom of speech) may endure for some time to come.
I heard this whole debate and I lost count of how many times Stewart fell back on the fallacy of there being “many Islams” - lefties fall back on this all the time because if you can’t define something you can’t critique it. It’s lazy postmodernist argumentation. Bravo for saying it out loud. Idk if you consider yourself “desi” in the broad sense, but those of us from Hindu (practicing or not) get as much shit as white people for being critical of Islam, but none of these people have good arguments. If I had been Harris I’d have gone off on him for being such a bad debater.
Totally. Sort of like refuting the existence of "woke". As Yashca Monk pointed out, we need to be able refer to your position and criticize it, so either tell us what you want us to call it or accept the label we give you.
Yep, I was born and raised in India, right up till high school. Yes, i've noticed that it's expensive for Indians to take a stance on this; lest you be labelled a Sanghi or something. And to be fair, the hindu right on twitter is really a bunch of low IQ incels who talk about nothing but Islam. So they deserve their reputation. But that association obviously shouldn't deter us because I really think it's the inability of Indian liberals to criticize Islam that's now providing all the fuel for the reactionary hindu right.
I have nothing but disdain for the sanghis and in college I went deep into the topic of Hindu nationalism because I couldn't square it with my personal sense of religion (as you know, the Indians of my parents' generation who emigrated brought 1970s India with them). So it's always been uneasy to critique Islam because I saw Muslims as victims of Hindu nationalism for so long. But both things can be true - Hindu nationalists are being discriminatory and I don't condone it, but the same nationalist and murderous fervor exists among Muslims too. Tribal hatred strikes people like us as a waste of time but for most people these things are a big deal, and actions have moral valences. Anyway, the inability to hold two thoughts in one's mind is why we can't have these conversations.
There may be such a thing as a moderate Muslim, but there is no moderation in Islam, and the practitioners of Islam all share common goals. The moderate Muslim may demur on tactics... but not on the goals.
Depends on what you mean by moderate. I'm reserving moderate as a phrase for those who culturally identify with being Muslim, but don't take any of the religious dogma seriously. We would call such people athetists but given the cost of self-identifying as an atheist if you're born into a Muslim family, I expect that for every Sarah Haider-esque person who was disagreeable enough to leave, there are 2 or 3 others that experience some amount of tension but have convinced themselves not to enrage friends, family etc. We need to get these people to either distance themselves from the community or better still, call out bad apples within their communities. But that can only happen once there's a critical mass of such people. And yes, we seem depressingly far from that in even America. Even though I have a weak theory of change, i don't need a theory of change to criticize islam or call it out. The truth is good enough of a reason to discuss this, especially when people are trying to suppress it. That's when telling the truth is even more of a reason.
I worry that you are making the same implicit assumption that causes most conversations about Islam to go off the rails -- namely that if (part of) a religion adopts bad/horrible/harmful theological views that get taken seriously then theological change is what's needed (this is also part of why the left is reluctant to call out the awful parts of Islam). Yah, there are all sorts of bad aspects to many current Islamic beliefs but when we look to history we see that people tend to choose different (or more accurately explain away those beliefs as metaphorical or not applicable) beliefs as soon as cultural changes peace, economic opportunity, literacy and trust in governmental institutions etc etc makes them want a kinder more inclusive religion.
I mean, let's look at the history of Christianity. For most of Christian history it had the same harmful aspects you identify in Islam. The crusades or the inquisition or religious oppression weren't mistakes **they are what taking Christianity seriously looks like**. And the crusades, the punishment of heresy, the use of religion to justify sexism racism etc occured repeatedly over 1000 years.
And this wasn't some weird take, it's the common sense response to a belief in salvation via faith and eternal damnation for non-believers. We know that exposure to other views increases the chance someone will believe them so, intuitively, the person who isn't willing to wade in the blood of heretics and non-believers to slightly increase the chance of saving one soul is the monster.
What happened wasn't some kind of theological revolution. I mean the theology of the Catholic church remained essentially unchanged from the end of the medieval period until Vatican 2. Rather, it was other cultural, economic etc changes that made people want a different kind of religion.
All those horrible bible passages or theological doctrines that were used in the middle ages to justify the worst kind of behavior remained present but changes in other factors made people who had previously searched for ways to justify using religion to be awful to do the opposite.
In every part of the world where Muslims are a minority they have resorted to extreme violence. Cameroon, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Philippines. No other religion has consistently had different ethnicities believers behaving like that.
But you are kinda answering different questions. Is it the case that the way Islam works in the world today tends to cause -- or correlate with -- violence and is it the case that's a consequence of the theology or just the cultural and social role it plays.
Switch them around so the Muslims had the same history and cultural factors but believed in the bible instead of the Quran and not much changes.
All religions tend to foster the values of the societies that dominate them. Modern Christianity fosters western European values because western Europeans essentially dominate that religion. Islam fosters something more akin to current Arabian/Persian values now and that's less good.
All European countries are now post Christian while virtually all traditionally Muslim countries are still overwhelmingly devout. That such different and distant Muslim minority cohorts resort to extreme political violence unlike other faiths makes it relevant in the debate
Yep, true. But with atomic weapons, other (communist) political theories using Islam as a sledgehammer in the world against democracy, tolerance, and peace, and AI 🤖 and other technologies, can we really wait for the “natural” evolution of Islam? A 1000 years for Islam, like Christianity? Unfortunately, I don’t think we have the time because of theses things.
Islam is different than Christianity, Judaism or any other religion in several ways which make this “rooting out” malice harder and even somewhat impossible.
Violence is ingrained in Islam.
Both in the verses of the Quran, as well as in the life story of Mohammed’s -
A 7th century warlord m, which had no problem beheading his adversaries, making false truces and marrying nine year olds.
Every Muslim is taught from childhood that he was the perfect man and that all should aspire to live according to his deeds.
Together with blasphemy and dissent laws, along with Tawriya, Taqqiya, Kitman, etc. - all permitting lies in the name of Islam - it is almost impossible to bring Muslim communities to the realization that they are on the wrong path to redemption (as evidenced by what is going on in 50 Muslim majority states).
Logic and coercion won’t work here.
Only violence to counter Islam’s violent Jihad can stop it in its quest of global domination.
Hopefully in several generations someone strong and brave enough can bring this desired peace, but for now - unfortunately there is no other logical solution than war
Have you read the christian bible? It has god commanding the Israelites to slay every man and take all the women and children as slaves in various battles. It demands death for disrespectful children etc etc...
We choose what parts of holy books to take seriously. When economic and cultural development made those aspects of Christianity less appealing we found excuses to ignore them. Muslims will do exactly the same under similar incentives.
You're still refusing to engage with the crux of the argument. Whether you can find verses in the bible that are as bad or not is irrelevant. Islam clearly correlates with violence and illiberalism in a way that can't just be explained by economics. So if the causal mechanism flows through scripture or scripture plus other things that Islamic cultures tend to gravitate towards couldn't matter less to me. We've identified the right variable so talking about Muslims and Islam as the problem is justified. I wish you'd stop reasoning from this implicit equality thesis and actually reckon with how Muslims seem to behaving, even when they are no longer poor.
If you're able to identify a variable that's more fine grained that we can act on, i'm all ears. But this "christianity also had issues" is really an overdone talking point that you can do better than.
I’m not sure why you say it can’t be explained by economics. Your title of the post is “numbers don’t lie” and you used one small back-of-the-napkin calculation to use that justification.
Numbers lie all the time, and that’s the foundation for why statistics exist, to find a context that the numbers can be useful, and you did not perform that basic duty in your analysis.
If you hate Muslims just say that, but don’t try to work backwards from your disdain to create a justification for it.
If I understand you correctly, but please correct me if I’m wrong here - what you are saying is - Islam is an idea (just like Christianity and Judaism are simply ideas). Ideas can be changed and thus Islamists can someday change their ways, just like Jews and Christians did before?
I’m not arguing with the fact that they can someway and someday change.
I’m also not arguing that perhaps there are cultural aspects involved, on top of religious aspects.
(as far as economics go, it’s enough to look at Qatar - one of the richest countries in the world - which spreads hate and war wherever and whenever it can reach to realize that economic factors are less the issue here)
What I am arguing is that Islam is a special kind of idea / story which is so much more potent and harder to change than the latter two religions.
It contains a stronger strain of virility which mandates its spread all over the world, the way it has for the last 1300 years.
Since Islam came after Christianity and Judaism,
it had ample time to learn from their “mistakes” regarding spreading and proselytizing the masses.
One might consider Judaism a version 1.0 religion, Christianity ver. 2.0 and Islam version 3.0,
with its many bugs and viral features.
As Vaishnav so eloquently and beautifully displayed using data - the Muslim’s world’s aggression and violence issues are not simply related to economics, to culture or to “being oppressed by the evil west”.
To try to explain why Islam is a different idea/story more specifically - let’s observe some of it’s viral features:
- Blasphemy laws
- Disallowing dissent (even though Muslims claim the religious Fatwas are “open” to interpretation the Muslim world somehow seems very united on some fronts)
- External Jihad - via war - the highest and noblest cause of Islam and the perfect way of showing servitude to Allah, by sacrificing one’s life to spread Islam and to slaughter infidels.
- Hijra (another form of external Jihad - allowing and encouraging immigration to spread Islam across the world)
- Forced conversion for Christians and Jews (or Jizya and Dhimmitude) and death to all other “non-believers”.
- Muhammed (a 7th century warlord) is the ideal man, to be aspired to in every way and walk of life.
- Martyrdom and the afterlife - no real meaning for human-life or for earthly suffering, allowing more and more suffering to spread in the name of some holy cause (or, most likely, some “holy” representative of Islam).
- Victim mentality - Islam, based on the teachings of the Quran and stories of the Hadith, is always on the watch from forces trying to attack it.
- Tawriya, Taqiya, Kitman, Muruni, etc. - all concepts which mandate lying, mainly to non-Muslims.
This seeps into other forms of permissive dishonesty and (imho) might prevent Muslims from encountering reality.
Except for the permissible-lying I think Christianity had some form of all these “features” throughout its crusades and inquisition periods,
however if you look at the bible, they are clear misinterpretations of its core teachings which allows for the exact opposites (e.g., turning the other cheek, etc.)
Judaism did have blasphemy laws, but dissenting Jews are mostly simply exiled from the pack (not at all crucified as some might wish so hard to believe). Also, Judaism never had any claims for global domination and is a somewhat “closed club (or rather sect)”, with its wars tied to a physical place (i.e., the land of Israel).
With Islam on the other hand, you simply need to read the Medina part of the Quran to see that a global Jihad is at its core, so unless you somehow get rid of all of Islam’s tactics of (forced) persuasion, you will never be able to get rid of the actual problem.
The “Muslim Brotherhood” strain of Islam -
which simply reads the Quran as is -
will always continue arising from the ashes, simply due to the nature of the viral methods used in the Quran.
It can only be suppressed by unequivocal and uncompromising force (and unfortunately probably via an endless war against it), and demonstrating that the utility function for trying to “politicize” the Quran is an unbearable and non-worthwhile cause.
What I'm arguing for is the thesis that religions are much less important than one might think and that religious ideas rarely are the primary force behind whether a region develops the kind of modern values we tend to see as desierable. All that work is mostly done by culture and economics with religion mostly being an effect not a cause.
Sure religion is always presented as the cause because that's what people cite as their motivation but when you zoom out it's economics and culture in the driver's seat not religion.
It suggests that the best way to deal with it is by focusing on the underlying economics. If you create the economic conditions which have made the west more liberal these places will tend to become more liberal as well. At least in the long term.
Though I agree you could have an outsized influence if you could change Saudi Arabia or Iran.
This is may be one of the scariest things I’ve ever read. I have thought about October 7 obsessively (and unhealthily) since it happened and I honestly didn’t think there was anything new for me to learn. But man, this is really cooking my noodle right now. The incentives here must be so much powerful than anything Westerners can fully understand.
“Hamas was able to mobilize over 1,000 people within Gaza's population of 2 million to embark on a suicide mission aimed at murdering Israeli civilians. The annual homicide rate in Gaza is a mere 0.8 per 100,000 people, and the suicide attempt rate hovers around 20 per 100,000. If you apply these rates to Gaza's population, you'd expect about 16 homicides and 400 suicide attempts in a typical year. Most suicidal people certainly aren’t homicidal and most homicides aren’t committed by people who would kill themselves or random strangers. In any given year, in the absence of religious justification, we might expect a handful of citizens that would be capable of suicide AND murder in its most gruesome forms.”
We have no theory of mind when it comes to the region. The author does a good job of explaining aspects of it. Especially terrifying is the impulse for Muslims who have immigrated to the West to agitate and riot over the Israeli Palestine conflict in particular. There are no shortage of Muslims dying throughout the region and around the world in various conflicts and societies and yet it is this one……Israel in particular that ignites the flame. The useful idiots protesting on campuses have no idea of the mindset they are toying with and conflating the grievances with colonialism and oppression narratives is beyond comprehension. Hey dumb white kid with the kefiyah, to them you are only an infidel.
“The useful idiots on campus have no idea of the mindset they are toying with”-this, by far, is the most disturbing and frustrating aspect of the Palestinian protests in the West. They genuinely believe that they are not a threat and that Islam is just like any other religion. They claim that there are a handful of “resistance groups” just doing what anyone would do if oppressed by evil white people like Israelis (lol). Even when you explain it by quoting Hamas from their own charter or show them other writings and statements by terrorists talking about their motives, they’re like “nah…they mean well, and are just like me.” It’s so stupid.
Then I suspect there are some that do know the truth and the danger, but just want to see the world burn, and protests make them feel alive and like they’re doing something that matters.
Yes, which unfortunately makes the religious aspect all the more compelling a reason for their actions. Until they are defeated in not only physical terms but in terms that require the evolution or their interpretations of their religion, we will have to change our thinking into a more pragmatic approach.
To be fair I would guess Gaza homicides and perhaps suicides are under reported. Who do you trust? The Gaza ministry of health? Hamas says their people don’t kill each other or themselves much. Do you believe them?
Lol lets just use the highest found in any country. pretty confident we won't get reassuringly high numbers to make it seem like a consequence of geography and oppression.
Suspect you’re right, but just thinking about it, even in the US army where you are self-selecting from the population for young, aggressive, violence-prone dudes, the percentage of guys who would be willing to do weird, stomach churning up close pre-meditated murders of women and children like October 7 is vanishingly small. And the suicide rate in the US army is much higher than the rest of the US population, but still a small percentage of the active military overall. Finding 1000 guys who would be willing to do both all in one operation? And keep it totally secret for the entire planning phase? I don’t think you could do it if you canvassed the entire service. Not in a million years.
Yaya Sinwar required a Hamas member to kill his own “traitorous” brother by burying him alive, which he did (I believe while sinwar watched(?)) Sinwar also admitted he strangled with his own hands “traitorous” Palestinians. Never underestimate the power of true religious belief!
Well, we know religion is not the only motivator. But i find it very hard to explain hate being weaponized (en masse) to do something so clearly and consistently self-destructive without Islam. The common retort is to point to the LTTE, that pioneered suicide bombing, the implication being that since the LTTE were mostly atheists, the concept of suicide bombing or self destructive behavior is not uniquely islamic. Well, it's not. I'll throw in one more example. The Japanese were famously suicidal and irrational in World War 2, with Kamikazes and more broadly the willingness to embark on suicide missions,. There were specific ideas of honor and shame in Japanese culture, and the way that it was enforced, that drove this behavior. So the claim is not that only religion or one such religion can ever inspire irrational behavior. But currently, as it stands, in terms of driving the sheer magnitude of violence and suffering, religious ones , not many variables can give Islam a run for its money, which seems to make existing political conflict much worse than it needs to be.
Also, it's worth reflecting - the LTTE eventually lost and gave up after 40 years. The Japanese gave up after World War 2. What's with the Palestinians?
Is there a history of Islamic states being suicidal though? I understand religious ideology motivating Muslims to kill, but that doesn't mean they should be absent of rational thinking or long term political goals. Anyone could have predicted Israel would've devastated Gaza after 7 October, so why did Hamas do what they did? I can't imagine Iran or Hezbollah launching attacks they'd know would result in their countries being annihilated. I don't even think the Taliban would do this.
Hamas didn’t think 10/7 would go so well. While planning for the “best”, they expected maybe 100 deaths, some hostages for some concessions, and another war like 2008-2009 or 2014. They wanted to scuttle or at least delay the Saudi peace deal, after which maybe they could scuttle it again.
On violence, suicide/certain death, religion and @vaish1's "what's with the Palestinians?", it's worth mentioning the partly-religious IRA's use of violent acts were orchestrated as much to garner self-sacrifice and martyrdom as ends in themselves as to create a sense of Irish nationhood. To fight was to win, not to fight was to lose. Violence was used to polarise, to prevent fence-sitting, and explains the Movement's opposition to constitutional paths to peace and the parliamentary process, just as Hamas have obstructed diplomatic paths to peace.
Hizbullah have since 2005 been in the Lebanese government (a state within a state that then colonised the state), while Hamas have so far not achieved statehood. Just as the IRA's violence forced the British state to capitulate in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and now in 2025 Northern Ireland is close to gaining independence from the UK because of nationalist birthrates and thus Sinn Fein's popularity, so Hamas' "self-destructive behavior" is not "irrational behavior". Not only were Hamas and the Palestinian cause fast disappearing from visibility due to Arab-Israeli rapprochement and lack of a Palestinian-Israeli war before that fateful day, but also the style of Israel's retaliation and Hamas' defence has brought the birth of a Palestinian state closer. On 10 May 2024, UNGA granted Palestine all the rights bar one of statehood in the UN.
Finally, while LTTE and Kamikaze death cults have died off or faded away, since 1949 UNRWA (by which I mean British and American taxpayers) has invested in keeping the Palestinian cause alive.
Yes, and don’t forget the Soviet investment in the Palestinians. I think keeping the “Palestinian cause Alive” all these years is a large part of the problem.
Unfortunately the Palestinians are living under an illusion (backed by history taught in their schools), that if they make Israelis lives difficult enough, the Israelies will pick up and leave. This is what happened with Algeria and the French. Listen to this podcast episode for details. https://spotify.link/VGlqKhXFSHb
I love listening to Haviv Rettig Gur. Certainly seems to be part of the story if not one of the main drivers, and one can see how the religious war element of it and reclaiming Al Aqsa and all of that jazz combines hatred with this "positive" payoff whether or not they successfully avenge their faith and people. And perhaps the religious element of it makes them unwilling to update when they see evidence that they're wrong.
It’s also worth noting that the Algerian Jews, despite being indigenous to Algeria, left and went to France. Israeli Jews are indigenous to Israel but hundreds of thousands of them live in the US. The US is who vetoes all the UN resolutions and so on. So they view Israel as a civilizational offshoot of the West (not totally wrong) that can be defeated with enough force.
The problem with this view is twofold. Firstly as is often said Israel is not anyone’s colony and the Jews don’t have anywhere to go. There’s some truth to that. Israelis could flee to America but antisemitism won’t stop there and everyone knows it. But I think it’s not as true as people often say, for the reasons I just described. Second they are just too weak and ineffective to do such a thing. They are third world and Israel is first world.
Great essay. I think the fundamental and inalienable doctrine of Islam that relegates the Infidel (Kaafir) as a second class citizen deserving different treatment is at fault here.
I think India is a great example to illustrate this point. From a distance , India looks like a single country but anybody who has lived in any two parts of this country would get to know it is a semi-miracle that a country with so much social , linguistic and religious difference has continued to exist as a single entity for the 70+ years with no major hiccups .
Now Muslims make up 15% of the 140 crore population and are scattered across each of its 28 states . Among the states with large populations , their share varies from 20% in states like UP in the Hindi heartland with 199 M total population to 7-10% in Southern states like AP, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
A majority of the news cycle in media hinges on politics of the Northern states of the Hindi heartland due to the media houses and newspapers being headquartered there but each state has a strong presence of local outlets that focus on the state politics . I have been living in one such state in the south for half a decade now and a trend that I am becoming aware of is the presence of an anti-Muslim plank in politics in each and every majpr state in the country.
This politics of anti-Muslim rhetoric can be explained away comparably easily for the Northern states . People on the Indian political right would ascribe this to the 1000 odd years of history of invaders of Muslim persuasion conquering , settling and ruling over vast tracts of the Northern country and then losing it to infighting or some another invader of Muslim persuasion .
I , for one , trace the roots of this politics to 100 years of conscious communal politicking that is more commonly known as the policy of ‘Divide and Rule' by the British in the aftermath of 1857 mutiny when the two communities combined and came close to overthrow its foreign yoke .
What I find perplexing is the presence of this plank in state politics of almost every state South of the Vindhyas. Things are not as bad as the Northern states but I would bet one can find at least one major state politician in each of these states whose current politics can be defined in a single sentence as bashing the Muslims of the state with rhetoric of any real or manufactured issue .
A majority of thinkers of center of left persuasion, who still continue to hold heft in the country's mainstream media and academics, would ascribe this to the blatantly communal top down politics of the ruling party , BJP . But I find this analysis lacking and kind of hand-wavy .
American conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart said that "Politics is downstream to culture". That while politicians can often accentuate the othering of a religious or ethnic community with despicable consequences , they cant invent that impulse from thin air . That impulse , however nefarious or illogical , lies latent in the society waiting to be fanned for political gains . I try to look at this phenomenon with the same lens.
The largest number of Indian recruits to ISIS were not from some Northern state of India but from the state on its Southern tip - Kerala. Now the Muslims of Kerala are unique because the first Muslims merchants settled on the state coast centuries before any ground invasion of the North took place . In 2010, the Muslim students of a university of the same state chopped the hand of a professor for blaspheming the Prophet .
So my conclusion is that the reasons of this presence of an anti-Muslim plank, no matter how minute, in the politics of different states with their local politics as different as chalk and cheese can only be ascribed to how the Muslim minority has existed in the societies of these states. And the common thread there are the inherent doctrines of Islam that promote othering of non-Muslims or collectivisation on the basis of brotherhood of Islam. When other communities see this othering in myriad ways , they start organising on the same lines themselves as a counter to it and then there are one or the other state politician ever present to accentuate and articulate the same through politics.
What this article really makes me wonder is: What is going on with secular English-speakers that we need someone to hold our hand and gently, carefully, thoroughly, explain to us that drawing obvious inferences about people can sometimes, occasionally, despite the way it may seem, be OK?
Most people who aren't scared of drawing obvious conclusions are naturally going to suspect that a religion advocating men beating their wives and subjugating members of other religions militarily is going to increase the endorsement of these attitudes among its adherents. It's a suspicion worth checking, sure - and then you check it and find, yep, OK, %Muslim explains 16% of national violence rates, and 20% of women's (lack of) civil liberties.
But then something really interesting happens. Because then we need to rush to say "Muslims are diverse, heterogeneous" people, and they're not all the same.
Yes, not all Muslims are the same. Absolutely. Not all rabbits or bears are the same, either - but do we really need to engage in a long conversation about why a grizzly may not make as good a house pet as a Holland Lop? If we do need this conversation, something is very wrong with us.
The fact that your post needed to be written at all should tell all the secular English speakers that Something Really Is Very Wrong With Us.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Believe it or not, the Sam Harris Reddit was rife with comments about how I should have run a comprehensive multivariate regression, and I can’t think of anything that misses the point more. The regressions are the least important form of evidence here
Maybe a shorter way to put this is: I doubt that if you switched Christianity and Islam in the world anything looks different.
Those of us in the west would find the same excuses to ignore the bad parts of the Koran we do to ignore the parts of the bible that tell us to stone disobedient children. The countries with repressive Islamic theology would just have repressive christian theology.
This doesn't mean that the awful beliefs widespread in Islam don't deserve to be called out as such. But it does suggest that it's less that the Koran or the theology is causing the problem as that there is a demand for this kind of repressive faith in these parts of the world without a balancing force. And it does suggest that fixing the problem isn't about reducing belief in Islam as much as creating the same conditions that encouraged western christians to reinterpret their faith more inclusively (and allowed the various relatively enlightened Islamic empires in the past to do the same).
According to David Bentley Hart, the Christianity of the Crusades et al were led by political agendas that leveraged religion than the other way around. When Church & State were finally separated, most of those ghastly mistakes went away. Being that Islam does not separate the two, it may explain some of the problem as well as suggest a solution.
It's not really clear to me that one can draw a coherent distinction in the way you seem to want to do. Yes, it may be that Christianity is now 'twisted' by the individual practitioners rather than powerful kinds but it's every bit as much changed to be convenient for the society in which it occurs.
If you gave someone who'd never heard of Christianity the bible and asked them to predict how Christians behaved or what they believed in they'd guess some blend of ISIS and radical communists. Almost every aspect of what we think of as Christian belief today is more a function of the kind of values that our economic, technological and political context make appealing.
When economic conditions made it appealing for women to work alongside men outside of the home suddenly Christians seemed to mostly forget all those passages about women being completely subservient to their husbands (even the tradwive types don't read that language the way anyone did in the 1800s). Same story when it comes to all the traditional stuff about criminal punishment in the bible and all that other stuff.
Basically, my thesis is that religion is mostly just a gloss on moral views we adopt for other reasons. Sure, it makes a difference at the margins but it almost never holds back the tide.
The way middle eastern Islam acts is pretty standard for cultures in a tribal society where most women are needed for domestic labor inside the home and are only a generation or so removed from a nomadic herding lifestyle. OTOH Islam as practiced in the Ottoman courts when they were leaders in technology and scientific discovery looked very different (though still barbaric to a modern eye as are pretty much all religions of that time)
I don’t think we are necessarily in any disagreement. In fact, I do basically agree that the culture of the day significantly impacts the practice of any religion. I’m just pointing out a significant historical piece of the puzzle: separation of Church & State removed the easy access to capital punishment/ murder from 1) religious extremists 2) the State leveraging religious sentiment to justify killing. The common misconception that DB Hart contends with is that medieval Christianity was the source of all the atrocities like burning witches, etc. when in fact, in most cases, it actually tried to stop said burnings.
As far as your thesis, it sounds reasonable. It raises the question about how the masses treat their holy books and if they can separate the culture described in them from its deeper message. “Forgetting” that the Jewish scriptures refer to women as essentially property might be more a realization that God did not ordain that, but rather God worked within a bad cultural framework to bring about gradual change that eventually ended up in the abolishment of slavery in the USA, for example.
But this may be getting too far from the main topic.
“When economic conditions made it appealing for women to work alongside men outside of the home…” Actually it was War (WWII) not really economics in the purer sense, that required that transformation, at least at first.
your idea sounds a lot like..." Since this is an era when many people are concerned about ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice,’ what is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?" Sowell
Is it Islam tho, or something about Arabic culture? Are Malaysia or Indonesia violent? Iran is also like, the government is crazy, but the people are pretty chill and open-minded.
The problem with Arabic cultures is that 120 years ago there were no nations, just tribes. The Ottomans, Brits, French did not allow nations to happen. And tribalism is violent.
Very true, everyone conflates arab culture with islam to condemn Islam as a whole. I think it’s a case of ego and observation bias, the harmful actors are more visible so you conflate their actions with the movement as a whole, ignoring the peaceful individuals.
In other words I have no desire to denigrate the religion in some metaphysical way. I just see it as a relevant variable that’s more than useful in diagnosing threats to western liberalism
Exactly! Separate the “political” from the religious.
Brilliant piece.
The usual absolutions by western apologists for Islam totally ignore the justifications provided by the religious books for violence, male domination, punishing women and discrimination against other religions. While carrying out the Mumbai terror attacks, the terrorists were constantly being fed with the promise of martyrdom and a fast track to paradise by their handlers over satellite phones - and the only motivating tool deployed to convince those young men was religion.
Excellent piece on a difficult topic.
Thank you, appreciate you letting me know :)
Vaish’s call to moderates to speak out is a courageous one. But for a Muslim moderate to speak out will require state protection, which is hard to provide even in liberal Western societies. The human rights movement in the West fails to acknowledge the majority of the reasons for Islamic extremism come from a literal interpretation of Islamic teachings. The flow of funds to the seminaries through the practice of Zakat from Iran, Wahabbis of Saudi Arabia and Qatar is the primary reason for the explosion of fundamentalist Islamic teachings. Even before the moderates can react, the Western states need to curb the flow of these funds from their countries to these seminaries. But these transactions are only increasing. The militants in Gaza now have a modern fighting machine and a war chest of Billions of dollars. Until this funding machine is dismantled, any amount of protest by moderates will be of little effect in changing the attitudes toward religious fundamentalism in Islamic countries.
Agreed. I hadn't thought of the concept of Zakat literally being the source of funds for mosques the world over. I'd be interested in knowing - What% of funding comes from gulf states? Out of non gulf state sources, what % of funds come from the top 20 to 30 families, individuals or institutions, or is it just an aggregation of small donations from millions of Muslims? My guess is a small group of gulf families are responsible fora large propotion of the funding. But these familites probably have generational relationship with clerics, that are hard to break.
Also on a related note - do you think MBS has actually clamped down on flow of funds- the rhetoric from him and around him seems to suggest so.
The Islamic forces aligned against the Western philosophy; political & military domination used Zakat very effectively to build forces to counter the West. Islam is a perfect platform to indoctrinate a believer in amplifying any grievance - religious, political, or social discrimination. And these grievances are legitimate. However, the indoctrinated do not understand that the fault lines lie within the Muslim community- lack of education and poor political and social leadership. Also, corrupt politicians take advantage of other communities, too- be it Christians, Hindus, etc.
Zakat flows through normal and grey banking channels, including 'Hawala'. Flow of Zakat can't be quantified empirically as most are in cash and transmitted through grey banking channels. This infusion of funds has persuaded several moderate Islamic societies in various countries to change how they interpret the holy book how they dress and mingle with other community members. This can be witnessed in the state of Kerala in India. A deep sense of victimhood has been drilled into amongst the believers. Even if moderates find a powerful voice, trying to change the attitude of fundamentalists through dialogue is futile. Islam is a young religion and will need more time, perhaps another 100 years, to shed the cloak of violence. This metamorphosis was evident in every other religion, too.
Finding a solution to the dire situation is possible if several of the grievances are resolved. There needs to be an urgent political detente between Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and the US in the ME. This will require the settlement of Palestinian statehood, reform in the political structure of Lebanon & Syria, and, most notably, a sustainable truce with Iran. The recalcitrant Islamic non-state groups must be controlled through a coordinated law and order organisation like Interpol and not by military forces. Even if we achieve such a detente in ME, low-level violence will occur periodically until the staunch followers of Islam realise God is within.
1.) Not all of the grievances are legitimate.
2.) you overlook aspects of Islamism/ Quaran which state that everyone must be converted or killed and that whatever land, people, places Muslims once attain, they are therefore entitled to it in perpetuity, but no one else is. Yes, this is similar to other religions, but they stick to a literal interpretation of the Quaran that seems (maybe/hopefully I’m wrong) to be endemic, so much so they require people to learn Arabic to read it and not legitimize any “translated” versions or interpretations, therefore it’s harder to “evolve” over time (hope it takes a lot less than 100 years.) Money from the Middle East to the radical aspects of the Islamic religion is for both religious and political reasons. I’m not sure that “marriage” will break down in a way in which we won’t have to fight against it; much like Christian Catholicism in Middle Ages.
3.) A 2-state “solution” wasn’t realistic given the Arab mentality listed above and the hatred of the Jews. Hamas has killed it, if not forever, at least for the foreseeable future.
4.) without these evolutions, there is no reason to think that things will change in the Middle East. No detente. We will have to see, but we had better wise up and be more pragmatic about it and stop imagining we can do anything without a major evolution in Islam.
You're all absolutely brilliant in your comments. I am enriched. Thanks
Iran is trying to conquer the Arabs on the cheap. If it weren’t so dangerous I would wish them. They would get no joy of it.
I’m sure funds flow freely from the gulf, but I just want to remind you guys that Zakat is reserved for poor individuals and cannot be put into coffers of institutions, be they mosques, seminaries, madrasahs, what have you.
At least, not officially. The poor who receive these are free to use them as they will. Often they donate them. Some may even know that they donate them.
The poor are neither under the obligation nor in any condition to donate the one lump sum they get to collect each year, that’s the definition of poor. No doubt money reaches these institutions through grey channels, but thinking zakat is one of them is barking up the wrong tree.
The poor don’t control those funds.
Thanks! Separate donations.
And the $$$ money 💰 from Qatar to the west’s colleges isn’t all beneficial.
Excellent point.
Iran is trying to conquer the Arabs on the cheap. If it weren’t so dangerous I would wish them luck. They would get no joy of it.
Exactly!
Just yesterday I saw an old television show about Theo van Gogh, where they played an audio clip from his murderer. People assume he was insulted by Theo’s work, but he dispelled this assumption, saying “I am not insulted. I acted out of belief.” Such individuals take it upon themselves as a necessary effort of war, a contribution to the world (but mostly themselves). I suspect, like Theo, that this conflict (over freedom of speech) may endure for some time to come.
I love having a platform that lets me randomly stumble across writing of this quality and clarity.
Subscribed, looking forward to more from you.
Thank you, appreciate it !
The number of hamas infiltrators into Israel at 7.10 is set at 6000 at the moment, six times as much as you mention.
I heard this whole debate and I lost count of how many times Stewart fell back on the fallacy of there being “many Islams” - lefties fall back on this all the time because if you can’t define something you can’t critique it. It’s lazy postmodernist argumentation. Bravo for saying it out loud. Idk if you consider yourself “desi” in the broad sense, but those of us from Hindu (practicing or not) get as much shit as white people for being critical of Islam, but none of these people have good arguments. If I had been Harris I’d have gone off on him for being such a bad debater.
Totally. Sort of like refuting the existence of "woke". As Yashca Monk pointed out, we need to be able refer to your position and criticize it, so either tell us what you want us to call it or accept the label we give you.
Yep, I was born and raised in India, right up till high school. Yes, i've noticed that it's expensive for Indians to take a stance on this; lest you be labelled a Sanghi or something. And to be fair, the hindu right on twitter is really a bunch of low IQ incels who talk about nothing but Islam. So they deserve their reputation. But that association obviously shouldn't deter us because I really think it's the inability of Indian liberals to criticize Islam that's now providing all the fuel for the reactionary hindu right.
I have nothing but disdain for the sanghis and in college I went deep into the topic of Hindu nationalism because I couldn't square it with my personal sense of religion (as you know, the Indians of my parents' generation who emigrated brought 1970s India with them). So it's always been uneasy to critique Islam because I saw Muslims as victims of Hindu nationalism for so long. But both things can be true - Hindu nationalists are being discriminatory and I don't condone it, but the same nationalist and murderous fervor exists among Muslims too. Tribal hatred strikes people like us as a waste of time but for most people these things are a big deal, and actions have moral valences. Anyway, the inability to hold two thoughts in one's mind is why we can't have these conversations.
There may be such a thing as a moderate Muslim, but there is no moderation in Islam, and the practitioners of Islam all share common goals. The moderate Muslim may demur on tactics... but not on the goals.
Depends on what you mean by moderate. I'm reserving moderate as a phrase for those who culturally identify with being Muslim, but don't take any of the religious dogma seriously. We would call such people athetists but given the cost of self-identifying as an atheist if you're born into a Muslim family, I expect that for every Sarah Haider-esque person who was disagreeable enough to leave, there are 2 or 3 others that experience some amount of tension but have convinced themselves not to enrage friends, family etc. We need to get these people to either distance themselves from the community or better still, call out bad apples within their communities. But that can only happen once there's a critical mass of such people. And yes, we seem depressingly far from that in even America. Even though I have a weak theory of change, i don't need a theory of change to criticize islam or call it out. The truth is good enough of a reason to discuss this, especially when people are trying to suppress it. That's when telling the truth is even more of a reason.
I worry that you are making the same implicit assumption that causes most conversations about Islam to go off the rails -- namely that if (part of) a religion adopts bad/horrible/harmful theological views that get taken seriously then theological change is what's needed (this is also part of why the left is reluctant to call out the awful parts of Islam). Yah, there are all sorts of bad aspects to many current Islamic beliefs but when we look to history we see that people tend to choose different (or more accurately explain away those beliefs as metaphorical or not applicable) beliefs as soon as cultural changes peace, economic opportunity, literacy and trust in governmental institutions etc etc makes them want a kinder more inclusive religion.
I mean, let's look at the history of Christianity. For most of Christian history it had the same harmful aspects you identify in Islam. The crusades or the inquisition or religious oppression weren't mistakes **they are what taking Christianity seriously looks like**. And the crusades, the punishment of heresy, the use of religion to justify sexism racism etc occured repeatedly over 1000 years.
And this wasn't some weird take, it's the common sense response to a belief in salvation via faith and eternal damnation for non-believers. We know that exposure to other views increases the chance someone will believe them so, intuitively, the person who isn't willing to wade in the blood of heretics and non-believers to slightly increase the chance of saving one soul is the monster.
What happened wasn't some kind of theological revolution. I mean the theology of the Catholic church remained essentially unchanged from the end of the medieval period until Vatican 2. Rather, it was other cultural, economic etc changes that made people want a different kind of religion.
All those horrible bible passages or theological doctrines that were used in the middle ages to justify the worst kind of behavior remained present but changes in other factors made people who had previously searched for ways to justify using religion to be awful to do the opposite.
In every part of the world where Muslims are a minority they have resorted to extreme violence. Cameroon, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Philippines. No other religion has consistently had different ethnicities believers behaving like that.
But you are kinda answering different questions. Is it the case that the way Islam works in the world today tends to cause -- or correlate with -- violence and is it the case that's a consequence of the theology or just the cultural and social role it plays.
Switch them around so the Muslims had the same history and cultural factors but believed in the bible instead of the Quran and not much changes.
All religions tend to foster the values of the societies that dominate them. Modern Christianity fosters western European values because western Europeans essentially dominate that religion. Islam fosters something more akin to current Arabian/Persian values now and that's less good.
All European countries are now post Christian while virtually all traditionally Muslim countries are still overwhelmingly devout. That such different and distant Muslim minority cohorts resort to extreme political violence unlike other faiths makes it relevant in the debate
Yep, true. But with atomic weapons, other (communist) political theories using Islam as a sledgehammer in the world against democracy, tolerance, and peace, and AI 🤖 and other technologies, can we really wait for the “natural” evolution of Islam? A 1000 years for Islam, like Christianity? Unfortunately, I don’t think we have the time because of theses things.
Islam is different than Christianity, Judaism or any other religion in several ways which make this “rooting out” malice harder and even somewhat impossible.
Violence is ingrained in Islam.
Both in the verses of the Quran, as well as in the life story of Mohammed’s -
A 7th century warlord m, which had no problem beheading his adversaries, making false truces and marrying nine year olds.
Every Muslim is taught from childhood that he was the perfect man and that all should aspire to live according to his deeds.
Together with blasphemy and dissent laws, along with Tawriya, Taqqiya, Kitman, etc. - all permitting lies in the name of Islam - it is almost impossible to bring Muslim communities to the realization that they are on the wrong path to redemption (as evidenced by what is going on in 50 Muslim majority states).
Logic and coercion won’t work here.
Only violence to counter Islam’s violent Jihad can stop it in its quest of global domination.
Hopefully in several generations someone strong and brave enough can bring this desired peace, but for now - unfortunately there is no other logical solution than war
Interesting point here.
Have you read the christian bible? It has god commanding the Israelites to slay every man and take all the women and children as slaves in various battles. It demands death for disrespectful children etc etc...
We choose what parts of holy books to take seriously. When economic and cultural development made those aspects of Christianity less appealing we found excuses to ignore them. Muslims will do exactly the same under similar incentives.
You're still refusing to engage with the crux of the argument. Whether you can find verses in the bible that are as bad or not is irrelevant. Islam clearly correlates with violence and illiberalism in a way that can't just be explained by economics. So if the causal mechanism flows through scripture or scripture plus other things that Islamic cultures tend to gravitate towards couldn't matter less to me. We've identified the right variable so talking about Muslims and Islam as the problem is justified. I wish you'd stop reasoning from this implicit equality thesis and actually reckon with how Muslims seem to behaving, even when they are no longer poor.
If you're able to identify a variable that's more fine grained that we can act on, i'm all ears. But this "christianity also had issues" is really an overdone talking point that you can do better than.
I’m not sure why you say it can’t be explained by economics. Your title of the post is “numbers don’t lie” and you used one small back-of-the-napkin calculation to use that justification.
Numbers lie all the time, and that’s the foundation for why statistics exist, to find a context that the numbers can be useful, and you did not perform that basic duty in your analysis.
If you hate Muslims just say that, but don’t try to work backwards from your disdain to create a justification for it.
If I understand you correctly, but please correct me if I’m wrong here - what you are saying is - Islam is an idea (just like Christianity and Judaism are simply ideas). Ideas can be changed and thus Islamists can someday change their ways, just like Jews and Christians did before?
I’m not arguing with the fact that they can someway and someday change.
I’m also not arguing that perhaps there are cultural aspects involved, on top of religious aspects.
(as far as economics go, it’s enough to look at Qatar - one of the richest countries in the world - which spreads hate and war wherever and whenever it can reach to realize that economic factors are less the issue here)
What I am arguing is that Islam is a special kind of idea / story which is so much more potent and harder to change than the latter two religions.
It contains a stronger strain of virility which mandates its spread all over the world, the way it has for the last 1300 years.
Since Islam came after Christianity and Judaism,
it had ample time to learn from their “mistakes” regarding spreading and proselytizing the masses.
One might consider Judaism a version 1.0 religion, Christianity ver. 2.0 and Islam version 3.0,
with its many bugs and viral features.
As Vaishnav so eloquently and beautifully displayed using data - the Muslim’s world’s aggression and violence issues are not simply related to economics, to culture or to “being oppressed by the evil west”.
To try to explain why Islam is a different idea/story more specifically - let’s observe some of it’s viral features:
- Blasphemy laws
- Disallowing dissent (even though Muslims claim the religious Fatwas are “open” to interpretation the Muslim world somehow seems very united on some fronts)
- External Jihad - via war - the highest and noblest cause of Islam and the perfect way of showing servitude to Allah, by sacrificing one’s life to spread Islam and to slaughter infidels.
- Hijra (another form of external Jihad - allowing and encouraging immigration to spread Islam across the world)
- Forced conversion for Christians and Jews (or Jizya and Dhimmitude) and death to all other “non-believers”.
- Muhammed (a 7th century warlord) is the ideal man, to be aspired to in every way and walk of life.
- Martyrdom and the afterlife - no real meaning for human-life or for earthly suffering, allowing more and more suffering to spread in the name of some holy cause (or, most likely, some “holy” representative of Islam).
- Victim mentality - Islam, based on the teachings of the Quran and stories of the Hadith, is always on the watch from forces trying to attack it.
- Tawriya, Taqiya, Kitman, Muruni, etc. - all concepts which mandate lying, mainly to non-Muslims.
This seeps into other forms of permissive dishonesty and (imho) might prevent Muslims from encountering reality.
Except for the permissible-lying I think Christianity had some form of all these “features” throughout its crusades and inquisition periods,
however if you look at the bible, they are clear misinterpretations of its core teachings which allows for the exact opposites (e.g., turning the other cheek, etc.)
Judaism did have blasphemy laws, but dissenting Jews are mostly simply exiled from the pack (not at all crucified as some might wish so hard to believe). Also, Judaism never had any claims for global domination and is a somewhat “closed club (or rather sect)”, with its wars tied to a physical place (i.e., the land of Israel).
With Islam on the other hand, you simply need to read the Medina part of the Quran to see that a global Jihad is at its core, so unless you somehow get rid of all of Islam’s tactics of (forced) persuasion, you will never be able to get rid of the actual problem.
The “Muslim Brotherhood” strain of Islam -
which simply reads the Quran as is -
will always continue arising from the ashes, simply due to the nature of the viral methods used in the Quran.
It can only be suppressed by unequivocal and uncompromising force (and unfortunately probably via an endless war against it), and demonstrating that the utility function for trying to “politicize” the Quran is an unbearable and non-worthwhile cause.
What I'm arguing for is the thesis that religions are much less important than one might think and that religious ideas rarely are the primary force behind whether a region develops the kind of modern values we tend to see as desierable. All that work is mostly done by culture and economics with religion mostly being an effect not a cause.
Sure religion is always presented as the cause because that's what people cite as their motivation but when you zoom out it's economics and culture in the driver's seat not religion.
How does this change how you deal with the problem that seems to correlate with Muslims/islam ?
It suggests that the best way to deal with it is by focusing on the underlying economics. If you create the economic conditions which have made the west more liberal these places will tend to become more liberal as well. At least in the long term.
Though I agree you could have an outsized influence if you could change Saudi Arabia or Iran.
This is may be one of the scariest things I’ve ever read. I have thought about October 7 obsessively (and unhealthily) since it happened and I honestly didn’t think there was anything new for me to learn. But man, this is really cooking my noodle right now. The incentives here must be so much powerful than anything Westerners can fully understand.
“Hamas was able to mobilize over 1,000 people within Gaza's population of 2 million to embark on a suicide mission aimed at murdering Israeli civilians. The annual homicide rate in Gaza is a mere 0.8 per 100,000 people, and the suicide attempt rate hovers around 20 per 100,000. If you apply these rates to Gaza's population, you'd expect about 16 homicides and 400 suicide attempts in a typical year. Most suicidal people certainly aren’t homicidal and most homicides aren’t committed by people who would kill themselves or random strangers. In any given year, in the absence of religious justification, we might expect a handful of citizens that would be capable of suicide AND murder in its most gruesome forms.”
We have no theory of mind when it comes to the region. The author does a good job of explaining aspects of it. Especially terrifying is the impulse for Muslims who have immigrated to the West to agitate and riot over the Israeli Palestine conflict in particular. There are no shortage of Muslims dying throughout the region and around the world in various conflicts and societies and yet it is this one……Israel in particular that ignites the flame. The useful idiots protesting on campuses have no idea of the mindset they are toying with and conflating the grievances with colonialism and oppression narratives is beyond comprehension. Hey dumb white kid with the kefiyah, to them you are only an infidel.
“The useful idiots on campus have no idea of the mindset they are toying with”-this, by far, is the most disturbing and frustrating aspect of the Palestinian protests in the West. They genuinely believe that they are not a threat and that Islam is just like any other religion. They claim that there are a handful of “resistance groups” just doing what anyone would do if oppressed by evil white people like Israelis (lol). Even when you explain it by quoting Hamas from their own charter or show them other writings and statements by terrorists talking about their motives, they’re like “nah…they mean well, and are just like me.” It’s so stupid.
Then I suspect there are some that do know the truth and the danger, but just want to see the world burn, and protests make them feel alive and like they’re doing something that matters.
Yes, which unfortunately makes the religious aspect all the more compelling a reason for their actions. Until they are defeated in not only physical terms but in terms that require the evolution or their interpretations of their religion, we will have to change our thinking into a more pragmatic approach.
To be fair I would guess Gaza homicides and perhaps suicides are under reported. Who do you trust? The Gaza ministry of health? Hamas says their people don’t kill each other or themselves much. Do you believe them?
Lol lets just use the highest found in any country. pretty confident we won't get reassuringly high numbers to make it seem like a consequence of geography and oppression.
I don’t disagree! Still it would be better and more intellectually sound if you had addressed that issue in the main post. Not a huge deal though. :)
Oh i thought i left the american numbers there. but looks like its in the draft. will edit. thank you :)
Suspect you’re right, but just thinking about it, even in the US army where you are self-selecting from the population for young, aggressive, violence-prone dudes, the percentage of guys who would be willing to do weird, stomach churning up close pre-meditated murders of women and children like October 7 is vanishingly small. And the suicide rate in the US army is much higher than the rest of the US population, but still a small percentage of the active military overall. Finding 1000 guys who would be willing to do both all in one operation? And keep it totally secret for the entire planning phase? I don’t think you could do it if you canvassed the entire service. Not in a million years.
Yaya Sinwar required a Hamas member to kill his own “traitorous” brother by burying him alive, which he did (I believe while sinwar watched(?)) Sinwar also admitted he strangled with his own hands “traitorous” Palestinians. Never underestimate the power of true religious belief!
I’m having trouble following why you think religion is motivating Hamas’s zeal on October 7 rather than vengeance.
Their usual murder rate is low because they don’t have Israelis to victimize on an average day
I think the religious motivation is the global caliphate concept. It seems to me that is part religion and part vengeance.
Oh yeah I’m sure religion motivates them overall. But a specific terrorist attack doesn’t prove religious zeal/motivation
Well, we know religion is not the only motivator. But i find it very hard to explain hate being weaponized (en masse) to do something so clearly and consistently self-destructive without Islam. The common retort is to point to the LTTE, that pioneered suicide bombing, the implication being that since the LTTE were mostly atheists, the concept of suicide bombing or self destructive behavior is not uniquely islamic. Well, it's not. I'll throw in one more example. The Japanese were famously suicidal and irrational in World War 2, with Kamikazes and more broadly the willingness to embark on suicide missions,. There were specific ideas of honor and shame in Japanese culture, and the way that it was enforced, that drove this behavior. So the claim is not that only religion or one such religion can ever inspire irrational behavior. But currently, as it stands, in terms of driving the sheer magnitude of violence and suffering, religious ones , not many variables can give Islam a run for its money, which seems to make existing political conflict much worse than it needs to be.
Also, it's worth reflecting - the LTTE eventually lost and gave up after 40 years. The Japanese gave up after World War 2. What's with the Palestinians?
Is there a history of Islamic states being suicidal though? I understand religious ideology motivating Muslims to kill, but that doesn't mean they should be absent of rational thinking or long term political goals. Anyone could have predicted Israel would've devastated Gaza after 7 October, so why did Hamas do what they did? I can't imagine Iran or Hezbollah launching attacks they'd know would result in their countries being annihilated. I don't even think the Taliban would do this.
Maybe the Hamas leadership is just dumb?
Hamas didn’t think 10/7 would go so well. While planning for the “best”, they expected maybe 100 deaths, some hostages for some concessions, and another war like 2008-2009 or 2014. They wanted to scuttle or at least delay the Saudi peace deal, after which maybe they could scuttle it again.
Instead they signed their own death warrant.
I should say, so “well” from the Hamas perspective. Meaning, so awful.
On violence, suicide/certain death, religion and @vaish1's "what's with the Palestinians?", it's worth mentioning the partly-religious IRA's use of violent acts were orchestrated as much to garner self-sacrifice and martyrdom as ends in themselves as to create a sense of Irish nationhood. To fight was to win, not to fight was to lose. Violence was used to polarise, to prevent fence-sitting, and explains the Movement's opposition to constitutional paths to peace and the parliamentary process, just as Hamas have obstructed diplomatic paths to peace.
Hizbullah have since 2005 been in the Lebanese government (a state within a state that then colonised the state), while Hamas have so far not achieved statehood. Just as the IRA's violence forced the British state to capitulate in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and now in 2025 Northern Ireland is close to gaining independence from the UK because of nationalist birthrates and thus Sinn Fein's popularity, so Hamas' "self-destructive behavior" is not "irrational behavior". Not only were Hamas and the Palestinian cause fast disappearing from visibility due to Arab-Israeli rapprochement and lack of a Palestinian-Israeli war before that fateful day, but also the style of Israel's retaliation and Hamas' defence has brought the birth of a Palestinian state closer. On 10 May 2024, UNGA granted Palestine all the rights bar one of statehood in the UN.
Finally, while LTTE and Kamikaze death cults have died off or faded away, since 1949 UNRWA (by which I mean British and American taxpayers) has invested in keeping the Palestinian cause alive.
Yes, and don’t forget the Soviet investment in the Palestinians. I think keeping the “Palestinian cause Alive” all these years is a large part of the problem.
Unfortunately the Palestinians are living under an illusion (backed by history taught in their schools), that if they make Israelis lives difficult enough, the Israelies will pick up and leave. This is what happened with Algeria and the French. Listen to this podcast episode for details. https://spotify.link/VGlqKhXFSHb
I love listening to Haviv Rettig Gur. Certainly seems to be part of the story if not one of the main drivers, and one can see how the religious war element of it and reclaiming Al Aqsa and all of that jazz combines hatred with this "positive" payoff whether or not they successfully avenge their faith and people. And perhaps the religious element of it makes them unwilling to update when they see evidence that they're wrong.
It’s also worth noting that the Algerian Jews, despite being indigenous to Algeria, left and went to France. Israeli Jews are indigenous to Israel but hundreds of thousands of them live in the US. The US is who vetoes all the UN resolutions and so on. So they view Israel as a civilizational offshoot of the West (not totally wrong) that can be defeated with enough force.
The problem with this view is twofold. Firstly as is often said Israel is not anyone’s colony and the Jews don’t have anywhere to go. There’s some truth to that. Israelis could flee to America but antisemitism won’t stop there and everyone knows it. But I think it’s not as true as people often say, for the reasons I just described. Second they are just too weak and ineffective to do such a thing. They are third world and Israel is first world.
Great essay. I think the fundamental and inalienable doctrine of Islam that relegates the Infidel (Kaafir) as a second class citizen deserving different treatment is at fault here.
I think India is a great example to illustrate this point. From a distance , India looks like a single country but anybody who has lived in any two parts of this country would get to know it is a semi-miracle that a country with so much social , linguistic and religious difference has continued to exist as a single entity for the 70+ years with no major hiccups .
Now Muslims make up 15% of the 140 crore population and are scattered across each of its 28 states . Among the states with large populations , their share varies from 20% in states like UP in the Hindi heartland with 199 M total population to 7-10% in Southern states like AP, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
A majority of the news cycle in media hinges on politics of the Northern states of the Hindi heartland due to the media houses and newspapers being headquartered there but each state has a strong presence of local outlets that focus on the state politics . I have been living in one such state in the south for half a decade now and a trend that I am becoming aware of is the presence of an anti-Muslim plank in politics in each and every majpr state in the country.
This politics of anti-Muslim rhetoric can be explained away comparably easily for the Northern states . People on the Indian political right would ascribe this to the 1000 odd years of history of invaders of Muslim persuasion conquering , settling and ruling over vast tracts of the Northern country and then losing it to infighting or some another invader of Muslim persuasion .
I , for one , trace the roots of this politics to 100 years of conscious communal politicking that is more commonly known as the policy of ‘Divide and Rule' by the British in the aftermath of 1857 mutiny when the two communities combined and came close to overthrow its foreign yoke .
What I find perplexing is the presence of this plank in state politics of almost every state South of the Vindhyas. Things are not as bad as the Northern states but I would bet one can find at least one major state politician in each of these states whose current politics can be defined in a single sentence as bashing the Muslims of the state with rhetoric of any real or manufactured issue .
A majority of thinkers of center of left persuasion, who still continue to hold heft in the country's mainstream media and academics, would ascribe this to the blatantly communal top down politics of the ruling party , BJP . But I find this analysis lacking and kind of hand-wavy .
American conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart said that "Politics is downstream to culture". That while politicians can often accentuate the othering of a religious or ethnic community with despicable consequences , they cant invent that impulse from thin air . That impulse , however nefarious or illogical , lies latent in the society waiting to be fanned for political gains . I try to look at this phenomenon with the same lens.
The largest number of Indian recruits to ISIS were not from some Northern state of India but from the state on its Southern tip - Kerala. Now the Muslims of Kerala are unique because the first Muslims merchants settled on the state coast centuries before any ground invasion of the North took place . In 2010, the Muslim students of a university of the same state chopped the hand of a professor for blaspheming the Prophet .
So my conclusion is that the reasons of this presence of an anti-Muslim plank, no matter how minute, in the politics of different states with their local politics as different as chalk and cheese can only be ascribed to how the Muslim minority has existed in the societies of these states. And the common thread there are the inherent doctrines of Islam that promote othering of non-Muslims or collectivisation on the basis of brotherhood of Islam. When other communities see this othering in myriad ways , they start organising on the same lines themselves as a counter to it and then there are one or the other state politician ever present to accentuate and articulate the same through politics.
What this article really makes me wonder is: What is going on with secular English-speakers that we need someone to hold our hand and gently, carefully, thoroughly, explain to us that drawing obvious inferences about people can sometimes, occasionally, despite the way it may seem, be OK?
Most people who aren't scared of drawing obvious conclusions are naturally going to suspect that a religion advocating men beating their wives and subjugating members of other religions militarily is going to increase the endorsement of these attitudes among its adherents. It's a suspicion worth checking, sure - and then you check it and find, yep, OK, %Muslim explains 16% of national violence rates, and 20% of women's (lack of) civil liberties.
But then something really interesting happens. Because then we need to rush to say "Muslims are diverse, heterogeneous" people, and they're not all the same.
Yes, not all Muslims are the same. Absolutely. Not all rabbits or bears are the same, either - but do we really need to engage in a long conversation about why a grizzly may not make as good a house pet as a Holland Lop? If we do need this conversation, something is very wrong with us.
The fact that your post needed to be written at all should tell all the secular English speakers that Something Really Is Very Wrong With Us.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Believe it or not, the Sam Harris Reddit was rife with comments about how I should have run a comprehensive multivariate regression, and I can’t think of anything that misses the point more. The regressions are the least important form of evidence here
ROFL
Maybe a shorter way to put this is: I doubt that if you switched Christianity and Islam in the world anything looks different.
Those of us in the west would find the same excuses to ignore the bad parts of the Koran we do to ignore the parts of the bible that tell us to stone disobedient children. The countries with repressive Islamic theology would just have repressive christian theology.
This doesn't mean that the awful beliefs widespread in Islam don't deserve to be called out as such. But it does suggest that it's less that the Koran or the theology is causing the problem as that there is a demand for this kind of repressive faith in these parts of the world without a balancing force. And it does suggest that fixing the problem isn't about reducing belief in Islam as much as creating the same conditions that encouraged western christians to reinterpret their faith more inclusively (and allowed the various relatively enlightened Islamic empires in the past to do the same).
According to David Bentley Hart, the Christianity of the Crusades et al were led by political agendas that leveraged religion than the other way around. When Church & State were finally separated, most of those ghastly mistakes went away. Being that Islam does not separate the two, it may explain some of the problem as well as suggest a solution.
It's not really clear to me that one can draw a coherent distinction in the way you seem to want to do. Yes, it may be that Christianity is now 'twisted' by the individual practitioners rather than powerful kinds but it's every bit as much changed to be convenient for the society in which it occurs.
If you gave someone who'd never heard of Christianity the bible and asked them to predict how Christians behaved or what they believed in they'd guess some blend of ISIS and radical communists. Almost every aspect of what we think of as Christian belief today is more a function of the kind of values that our economic, technological and political context make appealing.
When economic conditions made it appealing for women to work alongside men outside of the home suddenly Christians seemed to mostly forget all those passages about women being completely subservient to their husbands (even the tradwive types don't read that language the way anyone did in the 1800s). Same story when it comes to all the traditional stuff about criminal punishment in the bible and all that other stuff.
Basically, my thesis is that religion is mostly just a gloss on moral views we adopt for other reasons. Sure, it makes a difference at the margins but it almost never holds back the tide.
The way middle eastern Islam acts is pretty standard for cultures in a tribal society where most women are needed for domestic labor inside the home and are only a generation or so removed from a nomadic herding lifestyle. OTOH Islam as practiced in the Ottoman courts when they were leaders in technology and scientific discovery looked very different (though still barbaric to a modern eye as are pretty much all religions of that time)
I don’t think we are necessarily in any disagreement. In fact, I do basically agree that the culture of the day significantly impacts the practice of any religion. I’m just pointing out a significant historical piece of the puzzle: separation of Church & State removed the easy access to capital punishment/ murder from 1) religious extremists 2) the State leveraging religious sentiment to justify killing. The common misconception that DB Hart contends with is that medieval Christianity was the source of all the atrocities like burning witches, etc. when in fact, in most cases, it actually tried to stop said burnings.
As far as your thesis, it sounds reasonable. It raises the question about how the masses treat their holy books and if they can separate the culture described in them from its deeper message. “Forgetting” that the Jewish scriptures refer to women as essentially property might be more a realization that God did not ordain that, but rather God worked within a bad cultural framework to bring about gradual change that eventually ended up in the abolishment of slavery in the USA, for example.
But this may be getting too far from the main topic.
Fair enough.
So come back in 50 years and the native women of the Arabian peninsula will be like the women of the Cote d'Azur are now...
“When economic conditions made it appealing for women to work alongside men outside of the home…” Actually it was War (WWII) not really economics in the purer sense, that required that transformation, at least at first.
Yeah, I’ve thought that more recently too: separate the “political” from the religious aspects of Islam. Not at all easy.
your idea sounds a lot like..." Since this is an era when many people are concerned about ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice,’ what is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?" Sowell
Is it Islam tho, or something about Arabic culture? Are Malaysia or Indonesia violent? Iran is also like, the government is crazy, but the people are pretty chill and open-minded.
The problem with Arabic cultures is that 120 years ago there were no nations, just tribes. The Ottomans, Brits, French did not allow nations to happen. And tribalism is violent.
Very true, everyone conflates arab culture with islam to condemn Islam as a whole. I think it’s a case of ego and observation bias, the harmful actors are more visible so you conflate their actions with the movement as a whole, ignoring the peaceful individuals.