Are they doing it in Arabic, where Arab-speaking Arabs can hear? Yes, it matters.
There’s a dozen-plus countries that signed a public document aligning themselves with the US to oppose ISIL. Do you think that this Jeddah Communique is being kept secret from the people in their countries? That news of all these heads of state denouncing ISIL just simply doesn’t make the papers over there?
if it’s not on Fox, it didn’t happen.
No, it doesn’t. They don’t have a duty to say any of this shit at all, any more than you have a duty to apologize for Guantanamo or the KKK.
Far less, in fact. You could make an argument that citizens of a democratic country have a duty to publicly dissent from policies enacted in their name when they disagree. It is much harder to formulate that argument for 1.5 billion co-religionists (which is not to say they aren’t doing so–obviously they are and Fox News just covers its eyes and hums).
Harris says:
[QUOTE=Sam Harris]
Yes, many Muslims happily ignore the apostasy and blasphemy of their neighbors, view women as the moral equals of men, and consider anti-Semitism contemptible. But there are also Muslims who drink alcohol and eat bacon. All of these persuasions run counter to the explicit teachings of Islam to one or another degree. And just like moderates in every other religion, most moderate Muslims become obscurantists when defending their faith from criticism. They rely on modern, secular values—for instance, tolerance of diversity and respect for human rights—as a basis for reinterpreting and ignoring the most despicable parts of their holy books. But they nevertheless demand that we respect the idea of revelation, and this leaves us perpetually vulnerable to more literal readings of scripture.
[/QUOTE]
So in his view, Islam explicitly teaches some things, and “moderate Muslims” who disagree with him on these are obscurantists relying on “modern and secular values.”
He isn’t lacking a point (I take a more critical view of the primary sources than others in this thread), but because his definition of religion demands that an orthodoxy exist and be identifiable, he can’t deal well with people making interpretations that he sees as unreasonable or historically inaccurate. If one gets into an argument about what the ‘explicit teachings’ of a religion are, it detracts from the more important point (one that he alludes to in the end of this paragraph) that the disagreeable interpretations have validity because they are interpretations.
There’s no such thing as an interpretation-free version of a text–certainly not a text that is twelve centuries old, lengthy, contradictory, and shifts between story-telling and prescription. You necessarily have to add interpretive gloss to understand it.
If Harris’s claim is that it is easier to cherry-pick harmful passages from the Quran than from the Bible, I’m sympathetic to the claim. But if this claim is that the Quran means one self-evident thing and the moderates who think otherwise are just interpreting it wrong, then I think his claim is quite weak.
Well you can start with the various death fatwa’s against individuals for: rap songs, books, cartoons, movies etc…
Then you can move on to Islamic countries that have the death penalty for being gay.
Then you can look at how Islam dominates lists of terrorist groups.
Finally, you can explain why you think it’s some kind of mystery that so many groups within Islam follow a prophet who exhibited the same behavior.
They don’t HAVE to, but it tells Americans much more about what we’re dealing with here. If they won’t speak out out of fear, that’s something we need to know. But sure, I agree with your basic argument. I just believe that the context of our conflict with radical jihadists, it’s useful to know where people stand, what the extent of the problem is. I guess polling already tells us that though.
No, it’s pretty clear that his claim is that moderates are interpreting it to be more palatable to a modern, secular perspective, but still asserting that the book is holy and infallible. And that assertion lends strength to their more extreme co-religionists, because then you are granting the premise, that the book is holy and right, and after that it is simply a matter of interpretation. Which, as you note, it is easy to do in a harmful manner.
While I largely sympathize with your argument. The percentage of Muslims who are “Quran only” Muslims is probably smaller than the percentage of Jews who are “Jews for Jesus.”
That said, I think Harris, like many westerners makes the mistake of assuming that reading the Quran and the various hadiths will explain what Muslims think.
Most Muslims are vastly less likely to read the Quran than Christians are to read the Bible. In fact most Muslims effectively can’t read it because Qurans aren’t supposed to be written in anything other than Quranic Arabic, less than 10% of all Muslims are Arabs and even most Arabs would have difficulties reading Quranic Arabic.
Many Muslims can recite the Quran but they mostly depend on experts, who generally are conservatives not radicals to explain it to them.
Considering that less than 10% of all Muslims are Arabs this is a rather silly claim.
In fact, I’ve seen no figures, but I wouldn’t be surprised if more Muslims regularly converse in English than do in Modern Standard Arabic. My father knew far more Muslims in Iran who spoke English than could understand Arabic for anything other than reciting the Quran.
Here’s the thing about fatwas. Anybody trained in Islamic jurisprudence can issue one. It’s a legal opinion. So that link is basically just people shooting their mouths off. This doesn’t mean they can’t be serious…somebody can read it and be influenced to murder somebody. But, it doesn’t really have any special significance.
Side note, btw: a fatwa saying it’s permissible to kill a specific individual is almost always invalid. In Islamic law, if somebody’s committed a crime that’s punishable by death, they still can’t be executed until they’ve had a trial and their guilt has been proven. But, what are you going to do?
Thank you. That was the one I was looking for in my response. I hated falling back to “Christian Science.”
I still don’t get people who think Obama lied. There just is no way to come away from his speech with the interpretation that ISIL is not Islamic by the self-identification principle. You guys are arguing a definition that Obama wasn’t using, and made perfectly obvious he wasn’t using.
I also do think he’s not just a churchgoer making this claim. He may not be Muslim, but he did go to Muslim schools and have a Muslim father.
And the exact same claim can be made about much of Christianity. It’s just as false there, too.
I disagree. The same claim can be made about much of Christianity/(most other religions/ideologies) and is just as true there. At the very least, with hard, undeniable evidence, you can say extremist Islamists exploit the shared identity and fundamentals of Islam to drum up recruits.
I was about to reply to other posts in just this manner (but probably less concise). but bldysabba says it better.
This is exactly what I take from Harris’s article. And he is exactly right.
A massive part theology after all is the justification of multiple valid interpretations of a holy text. Now either all are allowed, none are allowed, or a certain subset are allowed (in which case why, and on who’s authority?)
We might have to agree to disagree on this, and the irony of that is not lost on me, but I don’t think this is what Harris is saying in that passage. It is one thing to say that many Muslims offer a frustratingly candy-coated view of their religion to outsiders that doesn’t reflect the complexity of the sources or what is taught and believed by many Muslims, and that does not allow fair critique of the Qur’an and Sunnah. But Harris is going beyond that in his condemnation of ‘moderate Muslims’ as obscurantists. Historically speaking, pre-modern Muslims had extremely varied positions, as Muslims do today, and the interpretative methods of at least some ‘moderate Muslims’ are inspired by long-standing traditions, even if their conclusions are innovative. And as Ibn Warraq said, the Qur’an and the Sunnah play varying roles in the life of believing Muslims.
I don’t think he is condemning them particularly, it certainly doesn’t read so harshly to me.
In any case, one reasonable definition of obscurantist is “being deliberately vague” and I think that fits perfectly well here. One only has to listen to pretty much any moderate religious person defending their faith to hear that deliberate vagueness at work. Unsurprising (and back to Harris’s point) as being vague about the literal meaning of holy text is how the moderate justify the positions they take.
And thank (whatever) gods for that!
There’s a difference in being deliberately vague or dishonest about texts or history, as in
“The Qur’an forbids slavery!”
And forming an interpretation:
“Islam forbids slavery!”
The first is rightly characterized as obscurantism. The second can be questioned and criticized for how it deals with the massive history against it, but there’s no getting around that it is now a relatively common interpretation. If a bunch of people find a way to reconcile it with themselves, characterizing it as being counter to “Islam’s explicit teachings” is not going to be accepted in mainstream secular scholarship on Islam, it’s going to be treated as activism (which isn’t necessarily bad at all, just arguably a different sphere). The fact that academics are usually far more vigilant about defending the validity of ‘moderate’ interpretations rather than ‘extremist’ ones is a fault of the field, I will admit. In Islamic Studies, where my experience is in, even respected professors in universities like Duke or Harvard fall far too often into apologetics. There’s a blurry line between scholar and cleric in modern Islamic thought.
Now, if you are confronted with statements like the latter statement, you can (and should!) point out that such an interpretation might be counter to how many Muslims behave today, counter to the history of Islamic opinion, counter to traditional exegeses of scripture and the hadith, and counter to the plain reading of those scriptures themselves, sure. But Islam doesn’t speak. Muslims do.