Making Sense with Sam Harris - #32 — The Best Podcast Ever

Episode Date: March 12, 2016

Sam Harris talks to Omer Aziz about Islam, Islamism, free speech, and related topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Okay. Well, I'm now going to do what I said I wouldn't do and release the whole conversation I had with Omar Aziz. Now, I'd like to take a few minutes to explain why I've decided to do this and provide some context of the conversation itself. First, why have I changed my mind? As I said before, I didn't want to release this podcast because I thought it was a terrible conversation, and terrible in ways that were not actually interesting. I was attempting something with Omer that he wasn't up to, and I failed repeatedly

to get the conversation on track. So it was a failure on both our parts to have a productive conversation. And I just felt that broadcasting this failure wouldn't be good for anyone, and that listeners would find it incredibly frustrating. But I've received an extraordinary amount of pressure, both well-intentioned and not, to release this podcast in response to the cries of censorship I heard from Omer and Glenn Greenwald and a wide range of silly people. And this pressure has come not merely from the silly themselves, but from my actual supporters who say that my not releasing the podcast is making the job of defending me much more difficult than it needs to be.

According to many of you, even though I told Omer in advance that I wouldn't release the podcast if I thought our conversation had been a total waste of time. My not releasing it is too easily spun as my hiding something, and incredibly as my infringing on Omer's right to free speech. Okay, so many of you tell me that I am harming my cause by not releasing it. Now, I don't know whether you're right or not, but I've decided to assume that you are. Now, paradoxically, my claim that the podcast was too boring to release is no longer true, right? Because given all the controversy and given the charges that Omer has leveled at me, given the speculation that he might have defeated me in a debate and revealed my ignorance of all things Islamic, the podcast is suddenly very interesting to many of you. Not to me, but to you.

So, I've decided to adapt to these changes and release the podcast. But before I do, I want to give you a few facts. I was absolutely clear with Omer about the format of this conversation in advance, about my reasons for insisting upon it, and about the fact that I might ditch the whole podcast if we proved unable to have a productive conversation. As you'll hear, we discussed the possibility of my not airing the podcast at the very end of the conversation, in a surprisingly collegial way, given how ugly this aftermath has become.

And he seemed to understand. Now, on this point you should know I've been on the receiving end of this sort of thing many times before. For instance, I once sat with Robert Wright, the journalist with whom I've had many disagreements, for a two-hour interview on his video podcast, The Meaning of Life TV. Now, to my knowledge, that conversation never saw the light of day. I have no idea why. It has never once occurred to me in the intervening years to cry censorship.

And Robert never explained why he didn't release the podcast. And he never told me that was a possibility. I once sat for an hour in the NPR studios and spoke with Guy Raz for his TED Radio Hour about the talk I gave at TED on the foundations of morality. Guy killed the episode because he had trouble finding another speaker to, quote, balance my views. Now, I found this annoying. It is annoying, but never in a million years would it occur to me to think that Guy had infringed on my freedom of speech, nor would it occur to me to publish an article in Salon alleging that Guy had infringed on my freedom of speech. Nor would it occur to me to publish an article in Salon alleging that Guy had said some extraordinarily hateful

and embarrassing things in our conversation as a way of trying to force him to release it as the only way to clear his reputation, which is what Omer has done to me. Now, when Omer grows up, if he grows up, he will realize that people make editorial decisions he doesn't always like. And unlike the way I've treated him, they usually won't tell him about this possibility in advance. And they won't let him make his own copy of the broadcast and release it just because he wants to. As I told Omer in an email exchange explaining my

position before our conversation, I once went on the Today Show. Okay, I took two days out of my life. I traveled across the country. I spent 90 minutes doing a roundtable interview with a few religious people in Meredith Vieira, and my appearance was cut down to a single sentence and a reaction shot of me looking confused. There is no recourse when this happens to you. People get to control their own broadcasts. So this charge of censorship is ridiculous. But I've been persuaded by many of you that even though it's ridiculous, it still looks like I'm hiding something. And that I don't trust people to come to their own judgments about who made more

sense in my conversation with Omer. And there is some truth to both of these claims. First, I have been hiding something. My decision not to publish this was, by definition, a decision to hide something. I've been hiding a fruitless and surprisingly painful waste of my time. And very early in this conversation, you'll hear my patience begin to fray. In fact, I don't start with a lot of patience. Because remember, I was talking to someone who had already proved to be amazingly dishonest in what he wrote about my book

with Manjit. He wrote a viciously stupid review in Salon to begin with. And this is why I wanted to talk to him. But once I started getting wrapped around the axle with him, in attempting to begin with. And this is why I wanted to talk to him. But once I started getting wrapped around the axle with him, in attempting to discuss his review, I got very annoyed. And that certainly didn't help the conversation get on track. And I absolutely consider that a failing of mine. This is not who I want to be in the world. And it's not who I want to be on my own podcast. So given that I couldn't get Omer to stay on topic, and I couldn't even get him to realize that he ever went off topic, and I grew more and more frustrated by this, and we never arrived at an understanding of anything of substance,

it's only natural that I didn't want to publish the result. In fact, when I declared the broadcast too boring to release, that wasn't quite accurate. The truth is, I found it too boring to even review. I started to listen to it, but I found that I just could not bear to spend any more time with Omer, really with me and Omer. I hate who I was with Omer. But in response to this controversy, I've now listened to the whole thing for the first time, and most of it is terribly boring. But parts of it aren't, actually, and I recommend the last hour over the first two if you're only going to listen to part of it. I can't say I recommend you listen to any of it. In my view, this is a conversation that should have never happened. I should have recognized,

based on what Omer wrote in Salon the first time around, that there was no way I could have a real conversation with him. Now, as to the second point about my not trusting people to come up with their own intelligent assessment of what went on here, that's actually somewhat true. There are many people I don't trust to do this. In fact, I trust that they will come to the wrong conclusion about what happened here. In fact, some already have based on the excerpts I released in my last podcast. Many people have declared that I broke my promise to Omer by releasing those clips. I said I wouldn't edit him, and now I have. But of course, I only released those clips to respond to the false charges

he's now made in multiple articles online. In any case, you and Omer are now getting the whole podcast. Be careful what you wish for. But let me give you one example of how many will get confused by Omer. Consider this a brief field guide to human stupidity. Listen to this clip that I aired on my podcast. So, I mean, the problem for me in general, just to step back before we get into the text here, is that I understand Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi better than you understand me and Majid. And I can actually say this with certainty because you are absolutely wrong about me and Majid. And I could ascribe beliefs to al-Baghdadi at random and do a better job than you've done here. I could throw the I Ching and come to a better understanding of his motives than you have come to an understanding of ours

by reading and reviewing our book. The only thing I want to say to that is I think I understand al-Baghdadi better than you and Majid understand Baghdadi because I actually factor in to account his political strategy, his geostrategic policy that he's had in Syria and in Iraq that's allowed al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic State in Iraq, to go from being a ragtag group of rebels that was decimated in 2011 to be this very powerful militia in 2016. And the political factors, and I hope we get to them, those are things that you and Majid don't discuss. I don't see you taking an interest in. Okay, but that's a totally separate point. I mean, whether you understand Baghdadi better than I do, we can discuss. I'm saying that I understand him, this person who is practically infinitely distant from me on the moral and political and religious and intellectual spectrum, from me on the moral and political and religious and intellectual spectrum better than you understand me and Majid. And we have told you our motives for writing this book, right? So that's

what I find so strange here. Sam, I don't care about your motives, though. I mean, it's what the book says and what you said before. You describe, we're going to get into this, because one of the things I'm going to take issue with very early on in your review is your ascription of motives to us. Here is what actually happened there. I made a point about how completely Omer misunderstands Mai and Majid's motives for writing our book. He did this in his Salon Review, in the very opening paragraph. I sought to illustrate this by saying that I understand Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi better than he understands me and Majid. It may have seemed like a hyperbolic example, but it actually isn't. I'm claiming

that is literally true. Omar then just changed the subject and claimed that he understands Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi better than either Majid or I do, because we ignore politics and he doesn't. When I pulled him back to the actual topic I had raised, he claimed not to care about our motives in the first place. This is wrong on every conceivable level. He changed the subject. What he said was just a non sequitur. He then made a claim about Mayan Majid's ignoring politics, which is itself untrue. It's especially untrue of Majid. His whole focus is on political Islam. And then when I brought him back to the topic, he denied that he cares about our motives at all,

okay, which is also totally false. The first paragraph of his essay directly impugns our motives. He claims we wrote our book just to make money. And he had said as much on a previous podcast. So this is a small masterpiece of deflection and dishonesty, which, yes, many people will not recognize for what it is. Even now, when I perform an autopsy on this moment, many people will not understand what Omer did wrong.

In fact, I've already heard from people who listened to that clip on my last podcast who said, he really got you there on politics. He understands al-Baghdadi better than you and Majid do. These people are destined to love Omer's side of this podcast. But for anyone actually paying attention, you will hear me struggling in vain to keep Omer on topic. He confidently asserts points, like the point about al-Baghdadi you just heard, that are non-sequiturs. Sometimes I follow him down that rabbit hole and we wind up discussing these topics, and sometimes I don't. And when I don't, I am sure his audience will interpret that as my

having conceded the irrelevant point he just raised. But as you'll hear all too clearly in places, I found the resulting conversation deeply frustrating. If there is anything in this podcast that embarrasses me, it's just how annoyed I let myself get, and very early on, merely having a conversation with another human being. And not to demonize Omer, I think that most of this behavior on his part is probably unconscious. Most of the time he's going off point and being effectively evasive. I don't think he even knows what he's doing. He's very articulate, and he has these chunks of language on the hard drive he wants to download. But the true things he says are

usually irrelevant, and the relevant things he says are usually false. And that is a toxic combination, especially for me. That is my kryptonite. So you will hear me at my least patient, and I'm not proud of who I was in those moments. And you will also hear a fair amount of despair from me at points. This is not the despair of someone who was worried he was losing a debate. Now, on the contrary, if you want to view this as a debate, there are several moments where I appear to win it outright by full knockout. True to form, Ulmer didn't realize he had been knocked out, but you will. I wasn't trying to have a debate.

I was trying to have a truly honest conversation. And the despair you hear, especially at the end, was over the discovery that this just wasn't possible. But here's what you will not find in this podcast. You will not find any of the things that Ulmer says you would find there. Virtually every word in his recap of our conversation on Salon is a lie. He claims that I said things I didn't say. He read into my silences other things I don't believe and would never say. He claims to have demonstrated my ignorance on topics about which I'm not ignorant and which were among the many irrelevant points he raised and we barely touched. But most incredible of all, he said that somewhere in this conversation you are about to hear, I quote, demonized Muslims to such an extreme degree that it verged on blood

lust, and that I communicated in some way that quote, Muslim-looking or brown-skinned bodies were of no human value to me. Now, I don't know how he thought he could get away with that. The man, and he is a man, he's not a teenager. He's a journalist in his 20s getting his law degree at one of the best law schools on earth. He's published in the New Republic and the New York Times. He's an adult, and he is attempting to destroy my reputation by alleging that I said things I didn't say in a conversation that was recorded. And I have the recording, which I can choose to release, as I'm doing now. And he did this so that I would release it. What on earth was he thinking? Well, I'll tell you what I think he's thinking. I think Omer understands that

he is writing primarily for an audience that does not care whether or not he is honest. They just want to see the people they disagree with demonized. And this is the audience that Glenn Greenwald writes for and Chris Hedges and Reza Aslan. And I'm afraid Omer is right. But that's not my audience. And when you guys tell me that I've done something that makes me look less than honest, that matters to me. A lot. And what's more, it quite obviously matters to you. I'm often charged by people like Glenn Greenwald with having a cult of followers who just agree with everything I say. As far as I can tell, your tolerance for me appearing to be intellectually dishonest

is non-existent, and I wouldn't have it any other way. And the fact that so many of you thought it looked shady for me not to release the full podcast, that really bothered me. So, here it is. Now, as you might imagine, I've elected not to spend the $500 to $1,000 it would have cost me to clean up all the breaths and mouth noises. We've edited out all the big Skype glitches and bathroom breaks and coughing fits. And there were many moments when Omar and I were talking over one another, which on Skype just becomes a total mess and you can barely understand what's being said. And the same thing winds up being said a moment later once one person just stops trying to interrupt the other.

So, in the interest of preserving your sanity and your hearing, we cut those bits as well. But just to be clear, every meaningful sentence of our conversation has been preserved. And now, for better or worse, I give you Omar Aziz. I've got Omar Aziz on the line Omer, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Sam. I expect this will be a difficult conversation. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's going to be difficult, but hopefully it will also be useful. But before we get into it, please tell our listeners a little about yourself and where you're from and what you're doing now. our listeners a little about yourself and where you're from and what you're doing now.

Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. I'm looking forward to exploring our areas of disagreement and potentially of agreement. So I'm a law student at Yale Law School. I focus on human rights and foreign policy. First and foremost, I consider myself a writer. I studied in England and France and Canada and now the US. Born to Muslim family that originally came from Pakistan. And I'm interested in all of these issues around religion, around human rights, around foreign policy, and exploring fundamentally the best way forward. So in a nutshell, that's what I'm about. So you're getting your JD now at Yale, right? That's right. So what did you do your undergraduate in and where'd you do that? So I did my undergraduate in politics, but really more so in books because I spent it more not going to class, of course.

And I did it in Canada at Queen's University. I did my master's in international relations in Cambridge. But again, I didn't go to class. I spent my time traveling throughout the Middle East. And I think that was really where my perceptions of Islam and the Muslim world changed a lot. I think before that, I was reacting, as many people who come out of religious families do, towards sort of the religion and culture of their birth. And so I probably would have agreed with you more at that point. But then I went to Iraq and Jordan, for example, and did some reporting and saw it for myself

and then went and came to Yale to begin my JD. Are you a practicing Muslim? You were born into a Muslim family and have been identified as a Muslim all your life or you say you came to your commitment to Islam later in life? Yeah, well, I mean, I come from an interesting family that I think is representative, really, in terms of one of my parents being very secular and very skeptical, one of my parents being very believing, but not proselytizing. And so I was practicing at one point, I don't like that term now, I identify culturally, as a Muslim and was within the community of Islam, because it was part of my upbringing. You know, when Eid comes around once a year, I want to be with my family and want to celebrate,

but I'm philosophically agnostic. And so you could say I might even agree with you on the question of whether God exists. Right, right. Okay. Well, I'm talking to you now because of the book review you published in Salon, my favorite website, in which you wrote very critically and dismissively about the book I wrote with Majid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance. And so rather than just talk to you about the review in general, I'm going to have you read it out loud on the podcast so that we can discuss it point for point. Now, you've agreed to do this, but under some duress. You told me by email you think this is a terrible idea. But I want our listeners to understand why I've structured the

conversation this way. Now, first, you can say anything you want. I mean, I'm simply insisting that you also read every word of your review so that our listeners can hear it and I can respond to it. But you can make any caveats or supporting points you want, and we can talk about anything under the sun. I just want to deal with your review first and pretty systematically. So just to be clear, there's absolutely nothing about this that is closing down debate or conversation. I'm not going to edit anything you say unless you ask me to. And so here's why I want to focus on the review. First, it's a very common experience for a person to read a review like this or even to write one and to have no idea what the target of this kind of criticism could

or would say in response, because there's simply no good format in which to answer charges like this. And so as an experiment, I want to use my podcast for this, if only just this once. And in particular, I want our listeners to know what it's like, and I want you to know what it's like for me to read a review like this, actually almost in real time, sentence by sentence. Because it seems to me you can't possibly know how fully this essay of yours misfires from my point of view. I mean, you took the time to write it. Presumably, you think your statements are clear and accurate and that you've built a very damning case against me and Majid, in particular me. But there's almost no single sentence here

that survives scrutiny. And I want to demonstrate this for you. Yeah. And let me just make a quick point. My initial reservations to doing it in this format, and I highlighted this when you said it's never been done before. And my suggestion that it's never been done before is because this could descend into a kind of Talmudic parsing of, you know, single sentences and words that won't be helpful at all. Now, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say that's not going to happen. On the second point, I think in an earlier podcast, you said that I really hate you and or i hate majid and i hate you even more and i want to correct that i don't hate you and i don't hate majid i find some of your ideas to be repugnant and i was responding to those i didn't

call you a racist i didn't call you a bigot at all i didn't call you any names i'm merely contending and responding to the ideas that i read in your book and so that was my my intention at least okay well that's fine and we'll and we'll get into what you said specifically and its implications. And again, it's not going to be a rabbinical parsing of every word, but I do want to move through it systematically. And I want to also make clear that my goal isn't to embarrass you. And my goal really isn't even to debate, ultimately. I'm trying to bridge the gap between your essay and the cynicism that it communicates to me and what I would consider a real conversation. But I think doing this is going to take some real work because I think we're very far apart on the page. And

obviously, I'm going to cut you some slack because I understand that no one writes an article like this anticipating to then have to read it to its primary target. And I can only assume that even if you kept your opinions about me as they are, you would probably phrase a few of these points differently in the context of an actual conversation. So I think one thing to make clear up front is that your insults don't matter to me. I don't take anything you've written personally. Good, you shouldn't. The problem is I don't take anything you've written to heart at all because it's as though you're writing from another universe here.

And this is what I find so troubling, and this is why I want to have this conversation. So the problem for me in general, just to step back before we get into the text here, is that I understand Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi better than you understand me and Majid. And I can actually say this with certainty because you are absolutely wrong about me and Majid. And I could ascribe beliefs to al-Baghdadi at random and do a better job than

you've done here. I could throw the I Ching and come to a better understanding of his motives than you have come to an understanding of ours by reading and reviewing our book. The only thing I want to say to that is I think I understand Baghdadi better than you and Majid understand Baghdadi, because I actually factor in to account his political strategy and his geostrategic policy that he's had in Syria and in Iraq that's allowed al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic State in Iraq, to go from being a ragtag group of rebels that was decimated in 2011 to be this very powerful militia in 2016. And the political factors, and I hope we get to them, those are things that you and Majid don't

discuss. I don't see you taking an interest in. Okay, but that's a totally separate point. I mean, whether you understand Baghdadi better than I do, we can discuss. I'm saying that I understand him, this person who is practically infinitely distant from me on the moral and political and religious and intellectual spectrum, better than you understand me and Majid. And we have told you our motives for writing this book, right? So that's what I find so strange here. Sam, I don't care about your motives, though. I mean, it's what the book says, right? And what you said before. You describe what we're going to get into is because one of the things I'm going to take issue with very early on in your review is your ascription of motives to

us. But again, let me just step back for a second. You're a very smart person who is capable of writing about these issues honestly. I mean, in fact, I told you by email that you had a piece in the New Republic about jihadism. I think it's called The Soul of a Jihadist that I totally agreed with. So that's the mystery I want to attempt to resolve, that you could write an article on jihadism that I could recommend almost without reservation. And yet you could review my dialogue with Majid so uncharitably that I can honestly say from my point of view that you communicated nothing but your own confusion and prejudice. Okay. So my goal here, again, just to be clear, is I want to bridge that gap essentially between your two articles. But I really think it's not going to be easy because from my point of view, almost no sentence in your review does what you think it does. That's where we're starting. And I think the only other thing I want to say before you start reading your review

is that our listeners should know that I've sent you a version of it where I've marked many places where I think there's something for us to talk about. And I did this because given the time lag on Skype, I didn't want to continually be talking over you as you began reading a new sentence or paragraph. So you have the complete text of your review marked by me, and you'll just read sections, and then we'll pause and then begin speaking about relevant points. Yeah, sure. And I hope that, you know, just to respond to your previous point about my

New Republic piece, which I still stand by, of course, there's a difference between examining the assumptions, the beliefs, and the motivations of an isolated extremist, and then extrapolating that and saying that that is either representative of an authentic or legitimate form of Islam. And my intention in writing this piece and in critiquing your views is that how do we actually get a reformation? How do we actually get cultural liberalism in the Middle East? And I propose that your solutions and Majid's solutions, which focus on verses almost to the exclusion of politics, is the wrong way forward.

So that's what I'll say on that. Okay, let's go. Please start with the title. Sure. So the title that the Salon editors put on this, and these are the only words in the entire piece that are not my own, is Sam Harris's Detestable Crusade. And I think that I also want to have my original title which i put which they changed of course it was originally called the poverty of the intellectuals sam harris majid nawaz and

the illusion of tolerance and look i wouldn't use a phrase like detestable crusade because to me that's clickbait nonsense and that's what all editors from time immemorial have done and so you can you know you can rebut that and we probably agree that that's not a helpful title. But I stand by my own in saying that the ideas in here, in this tract, were very often impoverished, yes. Okay, well, that's very interesting. So please just read the full title and the subtitle, and then we'll talk about it. Yeah, sure. Just give me a... Here, so the full title was Sam Harris's Detestable

Crusade, How His Latest Anti-Islam Tract Reveals the Bankruptcy of His Ideas. And the subtitle was Harris's Haughty Ignorance and Chauvinism Are on Full Display in His New Book, A Dialogue with the Former Radical by Omar Aziz. Right. Okay. So it's interesting to, as I expected, you didn't write this title and you're not actually happy with it, which is, so now you are, I think the third writer from Salon who I've communicated with. One of them is another Muslim who's just as critical of me as you are, who felt the need to apologize for the title that Salon put on there. No, no, I don't want to apologize. I don't apologize because this is not my, these are not my words. They're not in my article, but this happens with, you've written before for public magazines as well, and you're well aware that editors choose

the titles. I'm not saying you're apologizing for yourself, but it's not a title that you stand behind. Let me just point out in case this blew by people too quickly, you know, as with almost every other Salon article about me, there isn't even a pretense of journalistic objectivity here. I mean, there's clearly an editorial policy there to make me look as bad as possible. And here the reader is told, just straight out told, that my work is detestable, my ideas are bankrupt, that I am haughty, ignorant, and chauvinistic. And I pointed this out in my last interview with Salon. This is the behavior of a tabloid. I mean, no real magazine or newspaper does this. But in any case, just get into the article. Yeah, sure. So let's start.

There are a few get-rich-quick schemes left in modern publishing, but one that persists could be called Project Islamic Reformation. Writing a book that fits in this category is actually quite easy. First, label yourself a reformist. Never mind the congratulatory self-coronation the tag implies. It is necessary to segregate oneself from all the non-reformists out there. Second, make your agenda clear at the outset by criticizing what is ailing Islam and Muslims. The Quran is a good place to start because Muslims, especially in the Middle East, surely treat their holy book more like a military instruction manual than anything else. Third, propose a few solutions. Lest you be accused of nuance, the more vague and

generic these are, the better. Fourth, soak up the inevitable publicity that awaits and with it your hard-earned cash. Voila, Sam. Okay, so you actually believe that writing a short book like this about reforming Islam for Harvard University Press is an extremely lucrative thing to do? I mean, if you do, I need to educate you about the reality of publishing. No, I don't think it's lucrative. Even if it were lucrative, it's easy though. It's simple. It's intellectual fast food, Sam.

You describe this as a get rich quick scheme. Okay. And even if this were a great way to make money, which it isn't, you actually think that money would be our primary motive in writing a book like this? I'm not sure what your primary motive is. I know that if I were to dish out a book about Islam and use the words reformation and terrorists, I could get a book like this? I'm not sure what your primary motive is. I know that if I were to dish out a book about Islam and use the words reformation and terrorists, I could get a book deal in about five seconds. In fact, I could write that kind of book in my sleep. It's not that difficult to do.

To me, this is intellectual fast food. And frankly, I think you guys could have done better. I mean... It's a different point. Okay, I understand you don't like the book and you think we could have written a better book. You're ascribing motives to us here, right? This is the first paragraph of your piece. You describe this as a get-rich-quick scheme. Now, I'm talking about your understanding of

what Majid and I are up to. Now, I find your cynicism here fairly breathtaking. I mean, you think Majid's career as a reformer, okay, as a former Islamist who spent years in an Egyptian prison and who now seeks to deprogram Islamists and jihadists, incurring massive security concerns as a result and foregoing every other opportunity he might have. You actually think that this is a get-rich-quick scheme on his part? You think this is how he thinks he can make the most money? Look, I tell you that there's been a litany of books that have been published very recently. They're not scholarly tracts that repeat the same slogans over and over again. They're short pamphlets. And yes, I mean, maybe it's not get rich quick, but it's get rich soon, at least.

You build a platform on it. You accumulate a mass following based on people who love the idea of saying, telling Muslims that they should reform by cutting out verses of their holy book, which no other religion has been expected or demanded to do. And yes, I mean, I don't think it's a serious, serious intellectual exercise. And again, again, Omar, it's a different point. We can talk about whether it's a serious intellectual exercise, but I think it's difficult to call for a reform of Islam in America today. Do you actually think it's difficult? Does it threaten your security? Absolutely. We will get into this. This is why we have to be- One of the major

parties of the democracy have been calling for this in very fascistic tones. I don't think it's an intellectually brave thing to do. I'm sorry. Omer, we got to move through this systematically, all right? I'm talking about your description of motive. You are making assumptions here which are flat wrong. First of all, there's Majid's case of being a reformer. Yeah. Very little standing in Muslim communities. The price he's paid for this, all right? So the fact, I mean, he lost a wife and son over this, all right? And you are describing him as an opportunist who's just out to make a buck, okay? Now, and I want to return to that. I think Pauline's affiliation with right-wing organizations is probably why I would do that.

I mean, there are plenty of reformers that are working on the ground every single day. I'm not filibustering. I'm trying to get back to the first point you're jumping off of, right, which is the ascription of motive. Now, speaking personally, I'm giving you information you don't actually have about me, all right? Speaking personally, right, the challenge for me is to make the work I do on this topic, the topic of Islam, remotely viable and not to have the resulting damage done to my reputation by people like you not close the door to other opportunities. Viable to whom? Viable to whom? To Muslims?

No, no, no, no. To even get paid for it. OK, well, you describe this as a get rich quick scheme. Right. You describe this as a get-rich-quick scheme, right? But you realize that having people call you a racist and a bigot and a chauvinist and an Islamophobe isn't good for your career, right? You realize there's a cost to this. Do you realize that many people who agree with me on these issues just across the board won't touch this topic because they don't want to deal with the defamatory nonsense I deal with on a daily basis. Look, there are many white non-Muslim authors that have written books about Islam.

This is not about you in particular. And you don't have the kind of offensive language in here that you've said before in terms of we are at war with Islam or all kinds of, yes, chauvinistic viewpoints. But I mean, back to my earlier point, I think that doing something like this is not difficult. And yes, it does make one money. In fact, I've been offered to do it myself. And I'm not afraid of being called anything. And I am critical of Islam. So I mean, if you want to complain about having your feelings hurt, that's one thing. But let's have an actual discussion of the merits of what reformation looks like. It has nothing to do with having my feelings hurt. Again, I have to linger on this point because you're so far from reality here and you're so satisfied that you're in touch with it. So just listen to me for a second. Again, I'm talking about me, my career as a bestselling writer and scientist, right? You've made certain assumptions here.

And they're totally wrong. Sam, you made your career by attacking religion, and that's totally fine. What were you doing before you wrote The End of Faith? Seriously, you were a PhD neuroscientist, right? You made a lot of money off of this. Here is a fact. Focusing on Islam, right, to any degree, writing this book with Majid, having this, having you on my podcast now, okay, alienates a significant percentage of my core audience. I mean, even the people who know I'm not a bigot, the people who see no more merit in defamatory salon articles than I do, right, don't want to hear me talk about Islam and Islamism

because it's the most boring thing in the world. Now, I can tell you that there is almost no one in my core audience who wants me to spend any more time reiterating my concerns about Islam. And yet you seem to think that I am pandering to a huge audience for mercenary reasons. There's not a scintilla of truth to this charge. You just conjured it out of just an unfriendly act of imagination. Yeah, well, I mean, look, if I look at your career and the things that you said before Sam Harris became waking up and meditation Sam Harris, it's all been attacks on religion. And that's fair.

But some of the things, of course, that you said about Islam before, which garnered a lot of controversy, rightly so, and I hope we can talk about that, your rhetoric, those are things that you should expect to be criticized for. And look, I don't want to talk about Islamism either. I've got a wide variety of interests

and creative pursuits that I'd rather be doing. So this is on me as well. And if your listeners are going to be alienated by an opposing point of view... They're not going to be alienated by an opposing point of view. It's your assumption that Majid and I, I mean, it's especially egregious with Majid, but I'm focusing on my part for the moment. It's your assumption that I am pandering to an audience that is hungry to hear me reiterate the problems with Islam and that this is a lucrative thing to do. What sort of advance do you think Majid and I got for this book? I mean, you've probably heard that bestselling authors get six-figure or seven-figure advances for books. What do you

think we got here? I'm not sure. You tell me. There was no advance, right? Yeah. And how much, and can I ask you, I mean, look, I don't want to go into your finances, that's your personal business, but look, this is Islam and the future of tolerance. You weren't talking about reformation of Islam five years ago or four years ago. You were just talking about attacking Islam. And this was originally supposed to be a blog post let me just make one quick point this was originally supposed to be a blog post and this reads like a long email exchange between two people I can't believe I spent $20 on it or

whatever the price was but and Majid proposed that it be a book and I think part of the reason for that it's fair to assume is that you would have made more money by publishing as a book than you would have by publishing it freely on your blog. People pay a premium to read something that should not have a premium price attached to it. This is my point here. Okay. Well, no, that's not your point. It's one of my points. You're not in touch with reality here. You're not in touch with the cost professionally, reputationally, for touching this issue. You think that there are windfall profits for anyone who wants to say something negative about Islam. That's just simply not the case. So let me just give you another

example here. When Ben Affleck called my comments about Islam racist on Bill Maher's show last year, I was trying to launch a book about meditation and the nature of consciousness and a rational approach to spirituality. And that's a book that I actually had been paid a fair amount to write. And there was literally not a moment for the rest of my book tour where I could talk about my book. Instead, I had to deal with idiots who thought that Affleck made sense. And honestly, I've spent much of the last year doing that. Now, do you think, just consider this with fresh eyes for a moment, do you think that when you're trying to launch a book about spirituality and meditation and a scientific understanding of consciousness,

do you think that having to endlessly beat back charges of racism and bigotry is a good thing for marketing that book? Is that a moneymaker? Two points. The first is that there is a huge audience in the United States for right-wing politics and right-wing views about Islam. This is not new, right? I'm sure that you are aware of this and you encounter it all the time in the media and half of American democracy, at least one of the two major parties, has been caught up in this. The second point is that the reason why people were so critical of you and asking you all

those questions is because on that appearance on Bill Maher's show, you called Islam the motherlode of bad ideas. You threw out a number that at the time, I think that this is where some of your critics were unfair, where they said you pulled it out of thin air. And I don't think I give you more credit than that. But you called Islam the motherlode of bad ideas. And the guy next to you, Bill Maher, who I also really like, I think he's a funny comedian and I love watching his show, but he compared Islam to the fucking mafia. Those are his words. Now, what do you expect people not to raise those questions when you're going around? The point I'm making is that there is a cost for this. This is not a self-serving, opportunistic, profitable thing to do. And most people who agree with me won't go near this topic because of all the pain it causes them can sell books pandering to what you might call,

I think more legitimately call, a racist or xenophobic or bigoted audience. But that is not the market for Majid and me. And I mean, it's just, it's incredible that you're not seeing this, okay? So I am someone who deals with many other topics, whose audience wants him to deal with other topics. At this point, almost anything but Islam, right? I mean, just picture this, right? I mean, do you think that anyone pays a lot of money to hear me come tell their students or employees that Islam is a terrible religion? No, I mean, look, I'm not sure what your sources of income are and who pays you and who doesn't pay you. But I'm certain that if tomorrow or in some time in 2016, you were to say,

expand the part of the end of faith dedicated to Islam and write out the most withering critique of Islam that you could possibly write, I'm sure that would sell very, very well, especially in the United States, especially in Europe where people are getting very antsy about Islam. I mean, look, if you think that criticizing Islam and doing it in very heated rhetoric doesn't sell well, then honestly, dude, you're deluded, man. Like, it sells extremely well.

You get platforms. You can go on the media. You can market your books, and you get more followers and more readers, and people want to hear that. You're wrong about this. Okay, you can go on the media, you can market your books, and you get more followers and more readers, and people want to hear that. You're wrong about this. Okay, you're wrong about this. I have five New York Times bestsellers under my belt now. The first one being The End of Faith, The Criticism of Religion, which started it all. Yes. Okay. But there's much more to the book than that, and it is not focused on Islam. And it was the first book in a wave of, quote, new atheist books that started this publishing trend.

You couldn't publish the same book today and hope to get lots of readers. And my book with Majid was never expected to be a New York Times bestseller, hasn't been a New York Times bestseller, was not written because we thought this was a great angle to make a New York Times bestseller, hasn't been a New York Times bestseller, was not written because we thought this was a great angle to make a lot of money. It was written to communicate specific ideas, which I hope we will get into. And it was written as an example of a conversation that succeeded, right? Majid and I started out far apart when we first met. And we converged in a very happy collaboration. And we're putting it out there as an example of how a conversation on this topic could and we

think should start. Now, the fact that you don't understand the reputational costs to this, the fact that you don't understand how much damage has been done to our public conversation on this topic by articles like the one you just wrote, right? And by periodicals like Salon that title them the way they title them. It's flabbergasting to me. And I'll draw the picture even wider for you here, because you really just, you do not understand the implications of this. I mean, do you think that when it comes time to get your kids into elementary school, okay, after handing in an application, right? Do you think that having to warn the director of admissions that a Google search on daddy might just turn up charges of racism and bigotry that aren't true, right?

I didn't call you a bigot once again. Chauvinist is in the title of the article, right? Yeah. I'm just saying that. I hope they would move past the title, which is what an informed reader is supposed to do. But you're... Well, they don't. But first of all, you're deliberately missing the point here. The reality is that to deal with this topic, especially as a white guy, but even Majid doesn't escape charges of bigotry and even racism. Even Ayaan Hirsi Ali doesn't escape charges of bigotry and racism.

I mean, Sam, the reason that, okay, finish your point. The point is that to broach this topic is to guarantee a whirlwind of unjustified charges of bigotry, chauvinism, racism, xenophobia directed at you, and an endless trail of this online. And this is something that self-respecting public intellectuals, public intellectuals who value their time and their sanity, are avoiding at almost any cost. Okay, I know these people. They're my colleagues. And the fact that you not only don't see this,

just see it as just pure upside. For anyone who wants to defame Islam, they're just going to get a book deal, they're going to get rich, they're going to get fettered in chauvinistic circles, and it's just going to be a gravy train of bigotry that they can ride for the end of their days. That is insanity. There are always costs to entering the marketplace of ideas, regardless of what those ideas are. And there are, of course, benefits as well. And it's, in my estimation, the benefits in this case of attacking Islam and attacking Muslims, there are greater than the cost. And there should be criticism and there should be withering

criticism of people like yourself and of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who basically call for war against Islam. Let's boil this down, because you're not an impartial arbiter or peddler of sophisticated arguments. You have said some very chauvinistic things, and you have rightly been criticized for them. Now, no one should be attacking you personally. No one should be threatening you. No one certainly should not be threatening your livelihood or your life. But people should have the right and the responsibility and I think the obligation to offer withering rebuttals to that kind of rhetoric. When someone says that it is time we admitted that we are not at war with terrorism, we are at war with Islam, that deserves extreme scrutiny because it is an extreme statement. Okay.

Do you disagree? Look, if I came out, let me reverse this quickly. Let me reverse this quickly, right? I think Israel has a right to exist, and I think that its occupation in the West Bank is illegal, and ultimately there's going to be a two-state solution. Now, as a brown-skinned Muslim-named person, I am aware that if I came out and said,

you know, we are at war with Judaism, with the Jewish people or with Zionism, what do you think the response would be? I just don't understand how you're missing this point. Okay, so we can talk about all of that, all right? I am still stuck on this get-rich-quick scheme, this attribution of motive, this picture you have of everything in the marketplace. How much money did you make off the book? How much money did you make off the book? I mean, since you claim that there's only cost associated with targeting Islam. Okay. What's interesting. Okay. So here's a nice question. How many Twitter followers have you gotten? These are all things that accumulate on your platform.

Nice question. So since we didn't get an advance for the book, right, then it's all about royalties now. I should be very concerned about book sales. How many times do you think I've checked with the publisher to see how many books we've sold? I don't know, Sam. I don't know. That's right. You don't know. Zero. Zero is the number you're looking for there. So- So you made $0 off of this? No, I'm sure we've sold some books. I have no idea how many we've sold. So this was a blog post that turned into a book. So you went from $0 to X that's greater than zero, right? So you've made money off of this.

And look, to me, that's a secondary point, but you want to focus on it. No, the point is your attribution of a sinister, mercenary, opportunistic, cynical motive to something that is a pure effort to have a publicly valuable conversation, that is what I'm focusing on. I mean, Omer, honestly, your reluctance to concede this point, okay, your reluctance to concede that you actually had no information about publishing here or about our motives or about how much money we were going to make, that you were just saying something that sounded right to you, that you wanted to believe is true, but now actually want to give you information. You have just admitted that you made money off of this, number one. Number two,

it was originally supposed to be a blog post. And number three, the new atheist books, The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, End of Faith, of course, as you mentioned, would not be published today. They've already been published. But would you deny that Project Islamic Reformation, books on demanding reformation, are not in vogue now? That articles calling for reformation don't go viral every two days? Would you deny this? That there's a great market and a great readership and a great listenership

for this these kinds of ideas yes okay no no i would no i would deny it it is the least lucrative and most costly thing i could be doing right and i'm informing you about this i don't expect you to know this but what i'm saying is true and your reluctance to step back at all from your get-rich-quick scheme claim says a lot about you. You're getting your JD at Yale. What could you possibly hope to do as a lawyer if you're showing this little concern, not only for the truth, but for the perception of your commitment to the truth. I mean, look, my commitment to the truth is completely independent from and I think should not factor in financial profit of any kind, right? I think it's a corrupting motive, number one. And number two, as an attorney and someone who is actually interested in reforming many communities and inducing cultural liberalism. I want to work with these communities, which is apparently what Majid wants to do.

And here's something. I'll tell you that this book is going to influence and change precisely very few opinions in the Muslim world. Again, you're changing the subject. The truth I'm talking about here is you made a claim about our motives that is demonstrably false. Okay, I've given you several reasons why you should- You just admitted that you've made money off of it. We have sold some books, but-

Yes, from a blog post. Originally, I thought we could do a blog post. It became such a substantial conversation and it was taking so much of our time and we wanted to do it right and we wanted to spend more time doing it that it justified the further effort to make it a book, right? So then we wrote a book together and it was a great collaboration that many, many people have found valuable.

We haven't even gotten into the substance of the book yet because I'm trying to get you to concede that the information that you thought you had about our motives and about the reality of publishing and about the lack of security concerns that people like Majid and I have, right? All of that was delusional, okay? And I've given you several reasons to recognize that your charge is false. And I can assure you... The fourth point... Listen to me, Omer. I can assure you...

I'm going to quote you my own words. What I can assure you... The fourth point... Listen to me, Omer. I'm going to quote you my own words. What I exactly said was, soak up the inevitable publicity that awaits, and with it, your hard-earned cash. You have received plenty of publicity for this book, and you have already conceded that you have received cash for this book. So I'm not sure what your quibble is. Is it with the facts? No, no. You describe it as a get-rich-quick scheme. I've heard you on another podcast confidently describe it as a get-rich-quick scheme. I've heard you on another podcast confidently describe it as a get-rich-quick scheme. You describe... There's a lot of money to be made. You already said there's a big market for it. No, I did not. It is the worst possible market for me. And it comes with massive costs,

security costs. It comes with reputational costs. It comes with the cost of having to try to take people's words out of your mouth. It comes with the cost of having to try to take people's words out of your mouth. It comes with the cost of a conversation like this that many people could find excruciatingly boring. I mean, this is all bad news from my point of view, and yet I do it because I think it's an important topic to raise. And the reason why I'm having this conversation is not just to deal with the topic of Islam and Islamism and our disagreements here, but I'm trying to have hard conversations like this because I find the inability of people to get through hard conversations and to converge, right? The inability of people to have their minds changed in real time, the inability for people to admit that they were wrong in real time,

that I think is actually the biggest social problem we have. It's much bigger than the problem of Islam or religion. Racism is the biggest social problem we have, but maybe this is a close second. I would seriously disagree with you there. But the point is that two people have to be able to disagree and find some way of talking about that disagreement in a way that's productive. And even on this point, where I have all the information, right, where I know about the economics of publishing, where I know what I get paid and when I get paid and when I don't,

when I know about the reputational costs and the security costs, and you know none of these things, you still won't back off an inch. Yeah, look, I've seen the books that have come out according to what I call Project Islamic Reformation, both yours and Majid's as well as Ayaan Hirsi Ali's. I recognize that there is a market for it because I could very easily enter this market and make money off of this kind of project. And you've already admitted that you made money off of this. And so look, to me, this is a secondary point. But if you cannot concede the fact or admit that there is money to be made and readers to be had

by criticizing and denouncing Islam or calling for an Islamic reformation, then I don't think we live in the same world. I mean, it's so clearly... My point, Omer, is not that there's no money to be made. My point is that this is the least good way for me to attempt to make money. And Majid could make much more money doing something else.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali could make much more money doing something else. We'll get to those because later in your article, you make charges against them that I want to address. But here, we're still on the first paragraph here, right? This is the problem, all right? I've given you several reasons to recognize that this charge that we're involved in a get-rich-quick scheme is false. And I can assure you that our listeners will recognize it to be false. And you're tenaciously holding to it

past the point where it's falsity is obvious to everyone, makes you look like an asshole. Yeah. Look, we've already established that there is a market for this and a readership for this and that it is a trend. You know what you should have done then? If you don't want to create a perception of trying to make money,

if you and Majid don't, go and do a scholarly, serious study of Islam and what needs to be done rather than a 128-page pamphlet. And this creates the perception of a financial interest, which is just as bad as having a financial interest. No, no. I'll tell you about why the book is short.

Why the book is short is because people love short books now. And the reason why there aren't more of them, and again, let me just educate you. Please do not speak to me in such domineering tones. I do not need to be educated. I'm an educated individual. This is something you can't possibly know because everything you say suggests you don't know it. So let me just tell you, how many books have you published? Well, soon to be my first. Okay. Well, let me tell you a dirty little secret about why there aren't more short books in publishing. They're not more short books in publishing because publishers can't figure out how to make a lot of money publishing short books. They want to publish a 300 or 400 page book and charge you $30 for it. This is the way the costs

scale in publishing. And if you publish the 100 page version of a book that really doesn't have to be any longer because it's a very short argument and you would just be padding it to make it longer. And it's actually what people want to read because they can read it in a single sitting and they don't have to decide whether or not they can sacrifice that much time to the book. They can just sit down and read it. Publishing has not solved the problem of how to publish those books. And contrary to what you assume, this is a money losing move from a publishing point of view. To publish a short book and sell it for $17 or $18 is much worse from a publishing point of view than selling a big $30 book. And that's why more people

don't do it. And when Manjit and I write a short book because we think it should be a short book that we want people to absorb in a single sitting, we are pushing against the merely mercenary, merely cynical, merely profit-seeking attitudes in publishing, contrary to what you assume. Let me just ask you a question then. Do you think that writing a book about Islam, which encompasses quarter of the world's population, as you know, and over a billion people, as you also know, and the subjects of tolerance and the future, do you think, do you not think that merits a deeper and longer study? And Majid and I have made absolutely no pretense to delivering the last word on this subject. We're trying to deliver a starting point, a novel starting point, which we did. But the price you pay for writing a comprehensive, scholarly, endlessly footnoted book is that you lose the people who can't invest that much time and energy into reading that book.

And that's totally understandable. There's a place for both sorts of books. And we tried to write the book that you could hand to your friend who's been worried about this topic, but hasn't spent any time thinking about it, and say, listen, just take an hour and read this. Okay? And that was our goal. And it's a goal we've accomplished. But the problem is you are... That's not the people you should be addressing, are they? You want to address Muslims. Again, wait— Not the person who doesn't know anything about Islam. It's a separate topic.

All right, let's— No, it's the same thing. We're talking about who's going to read your book and what's the project that you want to accomplish, which is reform. All I've been talking about thus far is you're ascribing motives to us that are completely false. And you conceded all the factual points about the market existing, about you making money off of it. No. This is a stupid little trick that you have to stop using because it makes you look terrible, all right? To falsely summarize what someone has conceded is not only annoying, it is effective only with stupid audiences, right? It's

going to get you fucking nowhere. So just listen to me. I didn't concede that point. Sam, don't speak to me in those tones. You're becoming an incredibly frustrating person to talk to because you're wandering, endlessly wandering off the point. And you're pretending to be a mind reader. I mean, everyone on the left these days is pretending to be a mind reader.

So you're in good company. But on the right as well, who think Muslims are bloodlusting, violent jihadists, all of them. Well, no, even the worst people on the right with whom I have no connection aren't saying that, but I'm certainly not saying that. No one is saying they're all jihadists, and no one is saying they're all bloodlusting. Well, I mean, you did say the Muslim world is utterly deranged by its religious tribalism, so that gets very close to it. If you want to read all of that in context, then we can talk about what I actually said. Again, Islam varies from religious ecstasy,

sectarian hatred, and a triumphalist expectation of world conquest in a way other religions do not. Is that Islam or is it ISIS, or are they the same thing? Again, you're changing the subject. I hope to get into those subjects. I can only aspire to get into those subjects with you. But you're digging in here. This should be the easiest point we discuss, right? The point where you really have no information and I have all the information, right, in terms of what it's like to publish on this topic. But you have dug in so deeply here. Okay, a simple question for you, Sam. Is there money to be made or is there not in publishing a criticism of Islam? If you sell a single copy of your book on macrame, there is technically money to be made selling one book on macrame. Fine. That is a point that has absolutely no relevance to our conversation. The point I was making, and I'll continue to make as it comes up here, if Majin and I were trying to get rich, if we were trying to make money in a way that was as painless as possible

and as lucrative as possible, we would not be doing what we're doing. We would be doing anything but what we're doing. Making money in the intellectual sphere, in the publishing world, does involve criticizing Islam, or criticizing Islam is one way to do it. It does not, but publishing on other topics does not involve these endless charges of bigotry and racism. It does not involve the security concerns you reap when you deal with this topic. I could write books about Mormonism and never look over my shoulder, never worry about

security concerns, never worry about being attacked as a racist or a bigot, and make the same points about religion in general. This is a unique problem to Islam. If I took all your words that we replace Islam with Mormonism, I'm sure that you would get some very strong rebukes from the Mormon community. Nothing analogous to what happens with Islam. But let's continue. We literally just went through one paragraph. Yeah, okay, let's continue. So we are at... Let me just turn the page here.

The books. Okay, yes. The books that make up Project Islamic Reformation are not works of scholarship or even well-crafted popular texts. They are almost exclusively political pamphlets of a very personal nature that often begin as biography and end as self-help. Except the self, in this case, includes a quarter of the world's people

and the help may or may not come at the end of a missile. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who deserves empathy for her personal ordeals but not her conclusions, Ali, who deserves empathy for her personal ordeals, but not her conclusions, released such a book earlier this year with neat Manichaean categories delineating good and bad Muslims, as well as the expected checklist of proposed reforms. More tracks will certainly follow because publishers love a good reformist and the affluent Western audience that consumes these books loves having most of their pre-existing beliefs confirmed rather than challenged. Okay. Well.

Let's talk about this. Okay. Again. So why you pay lip service to Ayan deserving some sympathy. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's not. It's not. I would never attack her personally.

I think that she went through a tremendous ordeal and that people who do attack her personally for what she went through or deny the immense ordeals that she went through are locking in moral empathy. Okay, but you still cynically imply that her work as a critic of the very ideology that produced this misery for her is purely opportunistic and driven by a desire to make money. I mean, you realize— I think you hit the nail on the head perfectly there when you said that the ideology that put her through this ordeal. Because you and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other people, what you guys do is you do not distinguish

between a particular political ideology, which is fascistic and totalitarian and Wahhabist and Salafist and very violent, and the doctrine and religion of Islam. And that is the major criticism. That's not true. I do that across the board every time I raise the issue. That's just simply untrue. Really? Okay. Yes, I talk about ideas.

Is Islam the motherlode of bad ideas, or is Wahhabism the motherlode of bad ideas? Does Islam marry religious ecstasy and sectarian hatred, or does Wahhabism marry religious ecstasy and sectarian hatred? It is, well, as we make— Is Islam especially belligerent in your words and inimical to the norms of civil discourse or is Wahhabism and violent jihadism especially belligerent and inimical to the norms of civil discourse? We will get into that. But as you know, the problem is bigger than Wahhabism. And the fact that you would circumscribe it just to Wahhabism is a real problem, right?

So I want to get into that. Wahhabism is the prime mover of it. I want to get into that. But I'm just now focused on Ayaan. I want to move through this systematically because what should be interesting from your point of view as a writer and should be interesting, I hope, to our listeners is just how this piece of yours that you took the time to write and that you think just makes the case clearly against us communicates nothing to me but your misunderstanding of the situation. And that is a mis... I quote you and I quote her words,

Omer. What in that paragraph did you... Do I not understand your views? Your treatment of Ayaan here. So you say, yes, she's had this terrible experience, but again, of Ayaan here. So you say, yes, she's had this terrible experience, but again, she is just an opportunist who's out to make money in this Reform Islam program. And just consider her circumstance for a second. I mean, you realize how much easier her life would be if she were part of the herd that just refuses to engage these issues. I mean, do you realize how talented she is? Do you realize that when a person starts out as an uneducated Somali girl who doesn't speak a word of Dutch and in a few short years gets a degree in political science and becomes a member of parliament and who speaks half a dozen languages at that point,

you realize that there are other things she can do in life if she just wants to get ahead and make money beyond just pissing off a mob of religious maniacs, and then having to suffer not only their threats, but just the condescending stupidity of critics who don't have a fraction of the courage she has, who haven't suffered any of the abuse she has, who haven't taken any of the risks she has, but who then decide that it is probably a good idea to make her situation even more dangerous by attacking her as a bigot. Okay, I mean, you want to talk about opportunism? The opportunism is on the side of the Islamist assholes at the Council of American Islamic

Relations, CARE, who try to get Ayaan disinvited from speaking at universities and pretend that she, okay, one of the most persecuted public intellectuals in living memory, is the one infringing on people's civil rights. Yeah, I mean, look, that's nonsense. And when she was supposed to speak at Yale, I think it was either canceled or there was some kerfuffle about that. And look, I'm a free speech fundamentalist and I defended her right to speak as Bill Maher or anyone because, you know, the marketplace of ideas should not have this kind of estrangement But look you're peddling a fall a fallacy here because basically what you're you are saying is that because of her personal ordeals We that that exonerates or excuses the words that she has spoken her arguments

This is what I'm focusing on the arguments that she has made. She said Islam must be defeated She said that we are at war with Islam. She said that we should bomb the lands of Islam. To me, her personal story now is irrelevant. I'm focusing on exactly what she has said. And to me, that is a deranged, deluded conclusion. And that if you do not speak up against that, I think that, well, your morals and ethics should be questioned. If anyone else said it, you wouldn't say, oh, look at all these things that they've done. Look at the personal ordeals that they went through. Look at their CV. No, absolutely nonsense. You'd attack the arguments. People are not attacking her arguments. First of all, you just conceded that the work of an organization like CARE that tries to get her deplatformed, right, that goes after her rather

than going after the theocrats who are hunting her. I'm not a representative of CARE, Mr. Harris. No, I understand. Why go after Ayaan and not go after the core problem here, which, I mean, you limit it to Wahhabism, but why not go after... I have gone after Wahhabism, actually. And I think anyone who supports that, including the Saudis who are now funding an institution at Yale, should be barred from doing so and should be criticized very loudly and roundly. But also, an obligation of a writer and an intellectual and someone in the public sphere is to stand up for minorities, the people who would be bombed under Ayaan Hirsi Ali's policy, the people who we would be at war with do not

have a voice in this debate. Ayaan does not have a policy of bombing the Middle East. Now, Ayaan's probably more hawkish than you are. I'm probably more hawkish than you are. hawkish than you are. I'm probably more hawkish than you are. But if Ayan's views have been treated to the misrepresentations that mine have, and I'm sure they have, I've followed this reasonably closely, I have no confidence that you even know what her views are. And certainly, you're not disposed to give a charitable reading of something in context or something that she might have said in an interview that didn't come out exactly right and that a further examination of her views in her

books or in other interviews would give you a bigger picture of what she said. The editors of Reason magazine were bewildered when she said this and they asked her to clarify in the most charitable way that they could and she still didn't. In fact, she doubled down and recently she's called for Benjamin Netanyahu to win the Nobel Peace Prize. I hope that's a position you disagree with. She's a great supporter of Sisi who has launched a war not only on Islamists, remember, but on atheists as well and killed more people than Morsi did, probably more than Mubarak has. And so this is a support, she's supporting right-wing dictators in one case, a right-wing, extreme right-wing chauvinistic politician in

another case, and then calling for wars with Islam. I mean, at this point, the personal ordeal and her immense tragedy is irrelevant to me as much as I empathize with it. I'm focusing on her arguments, and you should too, instead of defending and giving her cover if you're a serious intellectual. Listen, I do focus on all of these specific claims, and all of them are incredibly complex to get into. No, no, no. Let's get them. We will get into them. But the fact that we can't even get through the simplest of all possible disagreements, where information is very clear to put forward, right, doesn't give me much hope that we can deal with deeper issues here. Take, for instance, your claim here. And this, again, this is why I want to move through

your review systematically. You have this line about Manichean categories, right? Delineating good and bad Muslims. Okay. What are you saying here? I mean, are you doubting whether there are good and bad Muslims or tolerant and intolerant strands of Islam? I don't think you can be, right? No, no, no. What I'm saying is that someone from the outside putting Muslims into a category of Mecca and Medina Muslims is ultimately unhelpful and counterproductive. It's not going to reach anyone. The people you want to convince are not going to listen to you.

And in general, I think it's a Stalinist technique when people from the outside begin categorizing. She's not from the outside. She's from the inside. She's an ex-Muslim, right? Okay. She has lived in the Muslim world begin categorizing. She's not from the outside. She's from the inside. She's an ex-Muslim, right? She has lived in the Muslim world as a Muslim, was driven out of the Muslim world by violent theocrats, and lives every minute of her life under the shadow of their threats.

She is in the Muslim world arguably more than you are. She's certainly not perceived to be, and she's not perceived to be an honest interlocutor because of her very militaristic views. Okay, but that says a lot. Forget her militaristic views. No, they're central. No, but they're not central to why she's not perceived as an honest interlocutor. She's not perceived as an honest interlocutor because she's an apostate. People are not trying to kill her because of her militaristic views. People are trying to kill her before she had any views because she was an

apostate, right? Everything is backwards for you. Yeah, certain fascist groups, Islamic fascist groups are after her. It's not just certain fascist groups. The level of support for the killing of apostates in the Muslim world, as you undoubtedly know, is shockingly high, and it's not limited to Wahhabism, okay? Way too high. And look, people are... Do you want to talk about apostasy now, or do you want to talk about it later? No, it'll come up later. But you can't just say way too high, way too high. You just tried to limit the problem to Wahhabism. You just tried to paint Ayaan as being someone who has been marginalized for her hawkish views, right, which you still have not characterized accurately.

I quoted you her words directly. That Reason interview is a famous instance of someone misspeaking, not giving a full context for her views. I mean, like, look, how do I respond to something like that? If you say something chauvinistic and militaristic, you misspeak. It's an unfalsifiable position. It is impossible. No, it is falsifiable because she will not hide her views when you talk to her at length, right?

She has written about these things. She's been interviewed again. I've interviewed her trying to put her comments in context. You could throw back at her what she said about Anders Breivik, right? That has been distorted and spun and used as a way of lying about her actual beliefs. This has been done to me endlessly. The Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas statement on Bill Maher's show. I have already said I misspoke there. I should have said it was a motherlode of bad ideas. And I can talk to you for an hour about why I think I should have said that.poke there. I should have said it was a motherload of bad ideas. And I can talk to you

for an hour about why I think I should have said that. But there are still people who want to hold me to it is the motherload of bad ideas as though there is no other source of bad ideas on earth, right? You either want to understand where someone is coming from or you don't. No, it's not that. It's that you should hold people accountable for their words. You don't hold them accountable for their misstatements that they then clarify. How is it a misstatement? This entire interview, which I hope your readers and listeners read from 2007 in Reason Magazine, she says that Islam must be defeated. Do you mean radical Islam? And she says, no, Islam, period. That's a clear statement. Okay, I have said the same things.

This requires textual hermeneutical interpretation here. It's very clear. No, it does, because what does it mean to say Islam has to be defeated? Islam is a set of ideas. She's not calling for genocide there. She's calling for defeating the ideas. I think Islam is a dangerous religion. I have made no secret of that.

I have said things just like that. Islam has to be defeated. I'll say like that. Islam has to be defeated. I'll say it now. Islam has to be defeated. Why? How is it that that kind of statement should not be perceived as atheistic? I think all religion has to be defeated. All right?

I'm an atheist. Okay, but an idea is not merely defeated. You're talking about the people who believe in this idea. I have written an article titled Science Must Destroy Religion. Okay? So these are ideas that we can talk about. And it never will. I mean, on that point, it never will. Listen, the problem here is an unwillingness on your part to enter an open ended conversation

about ideas, about what your partner, your opponent in this case, thinks that is proceeding on the basis of a modicum of charity where you actually want to understand what the other person's view is. No, because look, the game is rigged. There's a double standard here. If someone criticizes you or Ayan that we're attacking your motives or being uncharitable, but if you say militaristic, chauvinistic things, then you're misspeaking. Absolutely not. No, no, no. She misspoke. You misspoke. It's the same thing over and over again. I rarely misspeak, okay?

I occasionally misspeak, but I rarely do. And I rarely, obviously, misswrite. But I am increasingly on my guard through cruel experience, I've been taught this, against people who are only pretending to want to have a conversation on this topic and are just trying to defame another person. Now, Ayaan, you are talking about her as though she would execute a nuclear first strike on the Muslim world, right? That's your position, right?

That is a position that has been ascribed to me by utterly dishonest people, right? Now, I hope you were joking. No, I mean, there were certain preconditions that, of course, that you gave. You didn't say, please correct me if I'm wrong, that we should have a nuclear first strike against any country. But if an Islamist regime came to power and had nuclear weapons, that's a possibility you would entertain. Is that a clear understanding

of your view? Well, certainly not the way it's situated in your brain. It's not. Again, this is something that will be obvious to our listeners. I mean, the fact that you think you're entering this conversation in a way that is intellectually honest and open to having your views challenged and responsive to evidence that you didn't have a moment ago. I mean, it's as pure an act of self-deception as I've witnessed in a long time. You are so defensive. There is nothing I could say to you about the reality of publishing, or about my experience as an author, or about the opportunity cost, or the security cost, or anything else that only I in this conversation

am in a position to talk about. There's nothing I can say to you that modified your view of my opportunism and get-rich-quickery even slightly. And now we're proceeding onto much more difficult ground, right? Now we're talking about Ayaan, now we're going to talk about Islam and apostasy. And I mean, this is not how you have a conversation with another human being. You have this, you repeat this mantra over and over again as if you are the arbiter of truth. I've quoted you your own words, you dismissed them. I've quoted you Ayaan's words, you dismissed them.

You dismissed them. You said it only, okay, well, you were very condescending, let's just say. And you don't want to engage with the text of your own words that I'm quoting back to you now. Of course I will engage with it. And I can justify saying something like, Islam has to be defeated, right? Please do. As you notice.

What do you mean by that? Islam has to be defeated. Let's tease this out. Well, because I can say that I think religion has to be defeated. I think, I think. How do you defeat Islam? You're asking a different question now. You're asking how? You think it's an unrealistic... I wonder what you mean by that statement.

Otherwise, you're going to say I'm misquoting you. I think believing in revelation is intrinsically dangerous. I think that believing that one of your books was dictated by the creator of the universe is a stupid, divisive, dangerous thing to do. I think it goes nowhere worth going. I think the harms produced by this attitude are obvious, undeniable, and among the worst harms that humanity has ever suffered. And we have to get out of this business of believing in Revelation. Now, how do you do that? As you rightly observe, I have spent a lot of time focused on that problem. It's not exclusively what I focus on, and less and less do I want to focus on it because I am just repeating myself. I've said more or less everything I think on that topic. So it's both boring for me and boring for

my listeners. But I think, yes, we have to get out of the religion business. We have to defeat religion. I can say it in a nice way, and I can say it in a provocative way, but I can certainly defend the claim, and I've said it every which way. Now, I also have justified ad nauseum a focus on specific religions on specific points where they present specific liabilities. I think that individual religions are not interchangeable. They have very different theologies. They have different ideas. They make different behavioral and logical commitments. Can I just respond to what you said before? Yeah. Because, yeah, okay. So, look, saying that the Quran has problematic and violent verses, that is a statement of fact, okay? Anyone who disagrees with you there is lying. But saying

that we are at war with Islam, saying that the central message of the Quran is jihad, these are value judgments. And in my mind, in my opinion, in my estimation, they're very ill-informed ones, and they're ultimately going to lead to counterproductive strategies. And for me, this boils down to what do you think Islam is? Is it just the text, the jihadist verses in the Quran, or is it more capacious than that? Earlier, I mentioned scholarly works, serious scholarly works on Islam. I'll give you the name of one that just came out from a very serious scholar, PhD in history who died recently. He was fluent in eight languages, traveled throughout the Middle East. His name was Shahab Ahmed, and he wrote a book called What is Islam?

And his definition of Islam was the capacious lived tradition of Muslims throughout history and how it actually exists today. So that includes, for example, poetry that includes wine. I hope that you would not want to defeat either wine or poetry. It includes music and includes a whole host of legal and political and spiritual motivations that are inherent in the lived tradition. It's not just about jihad. So when you say Islam must be defeated as a kind of blanket statement, that to me is ultimately very dangerous and ill-conceived one,

because you're not getting at A, the heart of the matter, which is a political ideology that I refer to as Wahhabism, and is a state ideology of our ally Saudi Arabia that propagates this and that did not exist before a specific period in history did not exist. And number two, I think you denigrate or deny or reduce the actual tradition that people live in to this kind of slogan of jihad that the extremists are parroting. And so we miss the nuances when we use these kind of blanket statements.

The pause you hear from me is I'm trying to figure out how to proceed here because given how we have foundered on very simple points, I'm reluctant to just set sail on a rougher part of the sea here. So briefly, Islam is many things. And on one level, you can define it as Islam is the way 1.6 billion Muslims live it. It's whatever they think it is. And now we know a fair amount about the moral and political and theological attitudes of Muslims based on a lot of polls. And most of those polls are, frankly, terrifying, both in the Muslim world and in— And most of those polls are bullshit, too. I don't know how you would know that. If you ask 50,000 people a question and they give you an

answer, I don't know where you stand. But no, but the reason... No, no, no. Let me tell you why the polls can be bullshit. But let me just finish this point. I don't think we should spend a lot of time right here, right now. The problem for me about Revelation, and this is why I focus on the text, is that the texts are essentially a software program for rebooting a worldview. I mean, so we could forget about Islam for a thousand years, and someone could discover the full text of the tradition, the Quran and the Hadith and the biography of Muhammad, in a cave somewhere, and read it and accept its most straightforward, most literalistic claims, I mean, just to give a very plausible, literal reading of what they have there, and essentially reboot Islam for themselves. And it would be a particular kind of Islam. It would

be an Islam that would not at all be influenced by anything else surrounding them because all of that would have been lost. There'd be no architecture, there'd be no art, there'd be no tradition, there'd be no food, but they would have the texts. And if they understood the texts in a plausible way, my problem is that what they would get is something very much like Wahhabism and a lot less like Rumi, okay? And that's a problem. A plausible reading of the text, I'm not saying it's the only reading, and again, Majid and I get into this in real detail, but a plausible reading gets you something totalitarian, intolerant, a rather unlucky circumstance for women. Contradictory as well, right? Schizophrenic, you could say, intellectually schizophrenic.

No, but not as contradictory as one would hope. It's not as contradictory as Christianity or Judaism. And that's the problem. There's no compulsion in religion and the sword verses. But if you have a doctrine of abrogation that makes sense of that, then it's smooth sailing. Of course, many people don't adhere to that. What you're basically parroting here is the Salafist version of Islam, which is a particular interpretation that comes out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 17th, 18th century, and is led by a totalitarian radical who's not trained in Islamic tradition at all. And the West and the Ottoman Empire

tried to put it down until it grew. So look, this is a specific political interpretation. If I give you a text, Sam, it doesn't matter what it is. If I give you a text and I tell you you can interpret this however you want, you're going to interpret it according to your political ideology. No, no, no. But there are more and less plausible interpretations of any text. And what is problematic... And who says that the 99% of the Muslims who interpret it and live peacefully is less plausible? It's not because it is not 99% who have peaceful attitudes that are commensurate with the values of an open civil society. That's simply untrue. How many people are in ISIS? 20,000 maybe? 99% of Muslims are supportive of Ayaan's right to apostatize. 99% of Muslims are supportive of the rights of cartoonists to cartoon anything they want about Islam?

Are you telling me you believe that? So on the point of free speech, that's actually more of a cultural issue than it is of a theological issue. And I hope we can make that distinction. There's nothing in the Quran that says, nothing in the text or the tradition, the history even, that says that you cannot depict the Prophet. In fact, in Shia Islam and throughout Islamic history, there were depictions of the Prophet. No one is limited to— I'm clarifying this point for you so we can get into the nuances. But you're also making a tendentious, illegitimate move.

You're limiting it to a depiction of the Prophet. That's not the free speech issue. The free speech issue is I should be able to say that Islam sucks, and I should be able to say that as a Muslim. I should be able to apostatize. That is free speech. Yeah, yeah. And look, you can say that as a Muslim. I should be able to apostatize. That is free speech. Yeah, yeah. And look, you can do that in the West. And you can get your head cut off in any Muslim society on Earth.

And many Muslims, many, many Muslims, in many cases, majorities support that. A fundamental principle of every human being in terms of their dignity is to have whatever private theological views that they want. Now, whether that translates into a public political view is another matter. Egyptians say 86% of them think that apostates should be killed. Now, A, they think this is the word of God, apparently, according to you. They think it's the word of God. They don't go out and they don't kill ex-Muslims. They're friends with them. You can go to Egypt and go to Cairo and you see that. They had the opportunity to vote and put in apostasy into their legal code. They didn't do it. They didn't do it in Pakistan either, where there was an election.

Haven't done it in Iran either. So people can have all kinds of dangerous, deluded, backwards views. And you're right. You have the right to that, as many evangelicals in America do. But to translate that into a political program is something that's very different. And I think that we should be mindful of that distinction, rather than saying that, oh, these people over here are so backwards, that 99% of them or 80% of them think that apostates should be killed. And that's the end of the story right there. No, it's a little bit more complicated than that.

And I want to bring that to light. Again, this is a distinction without a difference. When you have a lynch mob that's willing to enforce their religious attitudes, whether or not there's a formal law against blasphemy on the books, they're willing to kill blasphemers or kill someone who is merely rumored to have burned a Quran or kill someone who was apostatized or hunt them to the ends of the earth in other societies, right? Suborn their murder with fatwas that now have global reach. That is a problem that is bigger than the statutes that were written or not written in any society. 5% of Saudi citizens are convinced atheists, and more than that, about 15%,

or probably about 6 million, around 20% are not religious people. Are there lynch mobs against them? Yes. Are they being beheaded? Yes. Omer, I hear from these people. They're in hiding. They can't even tell their parents they have doubts about God for fear of being murdered by their own families.

And many of them are in open. Many of them are open. You go to the cafes of Cairo. You go to Riyadh. You go to Amman. You meet openly critical people, you meet openly agnostic and atheistic people. So it's not as simple, it's not as simple, Sam, as saying that 86% of Egyptians think apostates should be killed, therefore all those 86% are all backwards people.

So if we did the same thing to the United States, we'd think that- Oh, please. Omer, please. You're telling me that Raif Badawi is one of the 5% of Saudi atheists who's just free to be an atheist? Stood up for him many times when other people on the left did not. And I don't deny that there needs to be a liberal and constitutional revolution in the Middle East and South Asia. In fact, I want to bring this back to the broader point that I'm making, is that your strategy and Ayaan's strategy of telling Muslims we have to excise verses, let's just say even if it's the most intellectually honest position that anyone could have, let's assume that. Strategically and politically, it's never going to happen because people believe in the Quran and their tradition, and they're not going to take a razor to their holy books. What I want to see happen is a liberal and democratic and constitutional revolution that happens across the Middle East and South Asia, where we support the left, the progressive opposition that exists in every country, the democratic opposition that exists in every country. But because of US foreign policy

and because of domestic tyrants and because of religious tyrants, the religious right, that hasn't been allowed to emerge. And when that opposition comes in, the cultural change they'll implement will be permanent. And so that is basically my view on this. How do you engender those liberal attitudes when a majority of people believe, as is written in the books, whether you're talking about the Quran or you're talking about the Hadith or you're talking about the Quran or you're talking about the Hadith or you're talking about the biography of Muhammad, they believe things like women are essentially the property of the men in their lives or at the very least second-class citizens, or they believe things like apostates should be put to death, or they believe things like infidels and polytheists

They believe things like infidels and polytheists are forever your enemy, right? You have attitudes that can be lifted directly out of the text based on not only a plausible reading. I would say on certain of these points, the most plausible reading, even on certain of these points, the only plausible reading. And you are saying that these texts are forever to be held sacred. One can never disavow any line in them. Yeah. I mean, like, look, they're not, here's the thing. If you were to present this to a actual believing, you know, liberal Muslim who believed every word of it, what they would basically do, it doesn't matter what, and I've engaged in this exercise many times and probably ended up as frustrated as you have. What they would basically do is that A, they would contextualize it to the point, and then they

would contextualize it first, and then they would neutralize the view, right? So they would say, for example, that apostasy, leaving Islam in the ninth century when the Quran was revealed, would amount to high treason because the Islamic community was very small. Now that doesn't amount to high treason anymore. So Muslims should be free to leave and to of course, to enter the faith. I think the second thing that they would do is to highlight the importance of interpretation.

The fact that 86% of Egyptians are not going out and killing apostates who are in many cases, their friends signifies to me that mentally they've already excised those verses they've already neutralized those verses they're focusing on the part of the quran the tradition broadly speaking the rumi and the poetry and the music and the spirituality which i know that you are a fan of at least in some context they're focusing on those elements of the religion okay I think we should be mindful of that. And look, the polls are contradictory as well.

Across the board, you see 97% of South Asians and 85% of Middle Easterners say religious freedom is a good thing. A higher number of Palestinians believe in evolution than evangelical Protestants do. Stop with that first poll result. That's not actually the paradox you make it out to be. Stop with that first poll result. That's not actually the paradox you make it out to be. People can answer that question saying that religious freedom is a good thing purely as it applies to me. I want to be free to practice my Salafi Islam, right? Religious freedom is a good thing, okay? Should apostates be killed? Oh, of course. We have to kill them, right?

There is no paradox there if you understand religious freedom to be your own religious freedom. So let's break this down logically. So like these Salafis, who I hope you appreciate, are not the majority of in these countries. So these Salafis believe that the Quran is the literal interpretation of God. Their reading of the Quran is the most plausible. They think that if you do not, if they do not implement God's will, that they will be sinners. So why don't they go and do it? Is it fear of secular law? Just to back up, let me concede a point you made, which I have made many times before. Perhaps this would surprise you. We have agreement. There is some distance between what people profess they believe and what they actually

believe, or people hold these beliefs to greater or lesser extents. And, you know, they're the things they think are probably true. And then they're the things they will bet their life on, the things that are just absolutely going to rule their behavior and emotion whenever that belief becomes relevant. So to have, you know, 86% of Egyptians say that apostates should be killed, that doesn't tell you that 86% of Egyptians would kill Ayaan with their own hands, right? Nor would they vote for someone who had that as their platform. Okay, so yeah.

Which is the important part. But what percentage would? What percentage would vote for that platform? I don't know. In the Egyptian elections, 48%, 49% voted for the liberal. And the party, Mohamed Morsi's party, the Freedom and Justice Party, had 50 years of political organization and development. And they still could only muster 53%. I'm agreeing with you that these numbers come down when you actually ask people to take concrete steps.

Yes, so the numbers are bullshit, Sam. Every one of these numbers matters. It's just because the people who will say apostates should be killed are on the wrong side of this free speech issue. They're doing nothing good for free speech. And what they're doing is quite harmful. And many of these people, maybe not 86% in the case of Egypt, but some intolerable percentage would vote the wrong way and would just stand by and watch a mob kill a so-called apostate? Is everyone in the mob who isn't helping someone who's about to be lynched, is everyone in the mob culpable, equally culpable? Well, no, not equally. They're the people who are actually doing the lynching. Then they're the people who are just standing there with their cell phones, right?

But all of these people are part of a problem, okay? And yes, there are gradations of belief. There's gradations of support for terrorism. There's gradations of commitment to jihad. This was the concentric circle image that I talk about in the book and that I tried to talk about on Bill Maher's show. There are the people at the absolute center of the bullseye who, yes, they are strapping on the C4 now because they're going to do an operation today. Let's say a Sunni who wants to blow up a Shia mosque, right? That is a full commitment. And where's the theological prerequisite or injunction for that? The whole phenomenon of takfirism and the whole phenomenon of judging other people to be

apostates or infidels or polytheists, whether or not they... Takfir for 1400 years was not practiced. And when it was practiced, it was by a very highly institutionalized and legalized profession of scholars. The independent Takfiri fatwas only begin in the 18th century and are perfected by bin Laden. Again, specific political ideologies, specific political circumstances, and specific political actors. We can get it. We can get into history if we ever get there. But the issue is that today, every one of these degrees of commitment to attitudes and behaviors that are totally hostile to everything we care about in an open civil society, there are degrees of commitment to those noxious and divisive and

dangerous beliefs and behaviors that one can draw directly out of scripture. And yes, undoubtedly, there are Muslims who want to live in open, creative, peaceful societies. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.