Making Sense with Sam Harris - #356 — Islam & Freedom

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

Sam Harris and Rory Stewart debate whether Islam poses a unique threat to open societies. 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. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. 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 one. I am back with Rory Stewart. Rory, thanks for doing this. Hello, Sam. Thank you for having me back. Yeah, so this is an unusual podcast. I haven't done one quite like this before, and obviously this will not see the light of day

unless each of us believes the conversation is useful. So if you're hearing this, that's what we thought, for better or worse. So I'll just kind of set this up to remind both of us and our listeners what's happening here. So you came on my podcast a few weeks ago, and I thought we had a great conversation. We discussed many things related to the failures of nation building, about which you know more or less everything, and the unraveling of world order. And then afterwards, a listener surfaced some remarks that you made on your own podcast, which I'll drop in here for listeners about 60 seconds or so. about 60 seconds or so. One of the things that I've noticed recently, particularly since October the 7th, is an increase in people making stereotypical comments about Muslims. I mean, I just did an interview with an American podcast guy called Sam Harris, who was hammering me for

nearly an hour saying, yes, but surely, Rory, you have to admit there's a connection between Muslims and suicide bombers and Muslims and terrorists. He just wouldn't let it go. And I wondered, is that something that you've experienced? And is it something that's getting better, getting worse? How does our society deal with it? I think it's getting worse. Maybe it comes in cycles. But I remember for me, 9-11 was such a seminal moment for me and that

might sound a bit kind of selfish given thousands of miles away and affected and killed so many thousands of americans but for me it was a day i'll always remember when 9-11 took place on a tuesday i think and coming back from school and school bus home you know radio was on you can kind of hear what was going on and the driver was telling us to shut up because he was trying to listen to to what was going on went home and was telling us to shut up because he was trying to listen to what was going on. Went home and saw all the scenes as you guys would have seen the terrible tragic terror attack that took place

and then the next day I remember going to school and sitting in form class and the same two guys I used to sit beside every single morning and we'd talk about the things that teenage boys talk about mainly in my case Celtic, a football club I loved and they were bombarding me, not with any maliciousness bombarding me with questions I had no idea the answer to

why do Muslims hate America do you know who was behind it, what was it all about I'm sitting there going I don't have a clue and so for me and then of course all the Islamophobia that followed post 9-11, but I have to say my position as First Minister

and even perhaps before then, there is definitely still a deep-rooted systemic and endemic Islamophobia in this country, and Scotland is absolutely not immune to that. You were speaking with Humza Yousaf, who's a Scottish politician who happens to be Muslim, and I would invite people to listen to our previous conversation to form their own impression of it. But as I told you by email, I was quite surprised that you came away feeling that I had hounded you for an hour on the connection between Islam and terrorism. I think we spoke about jihadism for about 20 minutes in the context of a

nearly 90-minute conversation. So anyway, people can listen to it and form their own impression. But leaving that aside, I was surprised that you seemed to form the opinion that I was bigoted against Muslims as people. I mean, there's really no way for me to understand what you were saying to Humza that doesn't entail my being a regrettable example of what he called Islamophobia. So I just wanted to discuss this, not principally to defend myself, but to clarify the underlying issues, because I think the worst implication of what you were saying has nothing to do with me or with your impression of me. From my point of view, the worst implication is that you think or seem to think that any special focus on Islam as a system of ideas and any special

concern about how these ideas produce violence and intolerance is in itself a sign of bigotry, right? And that's something I'd like to talk about and see if there's anything we disagree about on these fundamental issues, completely independent of what you thought about our last conversation or what you or anyone else thinks about me. Anyway, that's how I propose to start, so feel free to chime in and then we'll get rolling. begin by apologizing and apologizing, I think, for three things. I think the first fundamental thing is whatever I felt about our conversation, it was not appropriate for me to express my discomfort in that way in public. And I heard in your voice and in your response in your emails that it would have felt very hurtful to you. And so I think I began by realizing that that was a very wrong thing to do. And I shouldn't have done that. And I can

absolutely understand why hearing that cold to you would have seemed very bewildering and shocking. I think the second thing is, you're absolutely right. I remembered it as being a very long conversation. And I think one of the reasons for it is that I, and maybe we can talk a little bit more about this. I mean, it'd be nice to give your listeners something that maybe they don't get, which is the context of recording podcasts and what a very eccentric environment a podcast is, because they listen to these kind of smooth voices down there, down the airs, and they have no real idea of what's going on. So my day that day, it's not a, it's excuse, but it's a partial explanation. I'd had a long day.

It was late in the evening. For some reason, you, I think, like many other people recording high quality podcasts, like to do it in studios. And studios always seem to be a very long way away from wherever you are. So you slog out to a studio, you get there, you sit in a pretty hot room. And I was hoping very much to get on to talk about international development, which was really the thing. And I noticed that I think 55 minutes in, I was still in this conversation, which you're quite right, we had not begun with. The first half hours had been spent getting there through other things. So it was unfair of me to say that we'd spent almost an hour on this. And you're quite right, we had not begun with. The first half hours had been spent getting there through other things. So it was unfair of me to say that we'd spent almost an

hour on this. And you're absolutely right, we'd spent about 20 minutes on this. And then I guess the third thing that I need to apologize for is that I don't think in any way you have some animus against Muslims. What I was uncomfortable about is a slightly more complicated thing to explain, and maybe we can get into that. But I wanted to begin with the apologies. You're absolutely right to be shocked. You're right that I was exaggerating when I said that we talked about this for almost an hour. And you're right to be upset at the suggestion that I think that you are somehow prejudiced against Muslims. Muslims. Well, yeah, so I appreciate the apology, and that's a good example of a good one, just apologizing in such a straightforward way. Just to be clear, my reaction wasn't so much of being personally offended, because the truth is, I know I'm not a bigot, and I know that this terrain is pretty confusing. I know that it's very easy, and in fact, I'm going to argue, pretty confusing. I know that it's very easy. And in fact, I'm going to argue when we touch the concept of Islamophobia, I'm going to argue that this landscape has been engineered to be confusing

by apologists for Islam. I mean, there's a conscious effort to obfuscate criticism of ideas with animus toward people, brown-skinned people coming from other countries, say. And I just know that's not true of me, and I'm surprised that you could seem to imagine that it might be. But I'm much more- Can I say something on that? I don't think that's really what I thought. I think it felt to me as though you were very uncomfortable with Islam. to me as though you were very uncomfortable with Islam. I don't think I thought that you were uncomfortable. But that I am. So I think as with all these things, there's an element of misunderstanding and there's probably an element of some disagreement which is hidden under politeness. And I think the other reason that I probably

was obsessing about it in that way and talking about it in that way in my podcast is that I'd felt uncomfortable with myself. I felt I hadn't done a good enough job standing up for Islam. I hadn't done a good enough job standing up for my experience of living in the Islamic world. And I felt that I had become a sort of apologist, that I found it very tiring. And I felt that I was in this position of perpetually saying, yeah, you're right. There's a lot of very bad jihadis,

but then there are other people that are bad. And I'd give another historical example, and then we'd loop back again. And maybe what I wanted to say is, listen, this just doesn't sit with my experience of having spent many years of my life living in Muslim-majority countries. It just doesn't sit with my experience of having spent many years of my life living in Muslim-majority countries. It just doesn't sit with my experience of Muslim friends, and I should have been braver and less apologetic in talking to you.

Oh, great. Well, so yeah, let's just get into the issues here because, again, this is genuinely confusing. And I think it's really interesting because I think you're a perfect person for me to be talking to about this because I think we probably disagree and we disagree for reasons that will be a little hard for people to weight appropriately. I mean, for instance, I'll just stipulate that you have much, much more experience than I do of being, much less living, to say nothing of living in Muslim-majority countries, which I've never done, right? I've traveled to some degree in them. So you have, I can only imagine you have scores of, if not hundreds of, Muslim friends. And I can't say that of myself. And so there's a wealth of experience, everything from your speaking various native languages

to your having spent time living in the homes of Muslims. I mean, there's just no comparison, right? You're T.E. Lawrence compared to me. And yet, I still would argue that there are certain things here that you're very likely wrong about. And so it's worth threading this needle. I'm very, very happy to do this. Let's do some of this. But I'd also love to move on to some other subjects. I'd love to talk to you about your life, about your meditation, about other things. And I think one of the things that I worry about, just as a kind of preface to this, is that neither you nor I are Muslims. And although we've both read the Quran,

I don't think either of us are deep Arabic scholars. So I think there may be other things that we could also talk about as well as this. Well, yeah, if we have time, but I do think there's going to be enough here to fill this session. I can only imagine, but I'm happy to talk about anything, obviously. And I think we should talk about this very claim as though the truth of Islam that I'm worried about, as well as the other happier truths about it that you are more in touch with, that require the kind of expertise that you just claimed neither of us have to find. I think that's untrue. I think we'll get there.

But let me just make two claims, I think could sharpen up our whatever disagreement we we're going to discover here and just to have you react to them because I think it's this will be a good lens through which to look at it the first claim I'd like to make is that it's perfectly possible and I would say necessary to speak about the ideological roots of Islamism and jihadism, and even about the unique need for reform within mainstream Islam itself, without lapsing into bigotry against Muslims as people, right? And without disregarding the suffering of refugees or failing to criticize the indiscretions of Western foreign policy or Israeli leadership or anything else that might be worth criticizing. We can do all of that without being bigots. And as I began

to say when we started, the concept of Islamophobia has been designed to obfuscate this. Someone once said on the internet that Islamophobia is a word invented by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons. And I honestly think that's not far from the truth. I mean, I think if you set it up in that way, you're setting it up in a difficult light. Well, let me tell you, I think that phrase is a pretty unfortunate phrase. Who produced that phrase? I don't know. I'm suspicious of that individual. people. And I think that's intentional. Leave the intention aside. Its function, in my experience, is to conflate any criticism of Islam, which is a doctrine of religious beliefs, with bigotry against Muslims as people. And in fact, it often equates…

Can I just comment on this? I can see the distinction, but is it not possible that those two things are more closely connected in practice than you want to acknowledge? I mean, if you concluded that Islam was a uniquely, I don't know, a uniquely unpleasant or violent or dangerous religion, and you went around emphasizing that, does that not cast some light on Muslims? Well, let me show you how it doesn't, right? So, in my case, obviously, bigotry is a real thing out in this world. There are real bigots, there are racists, there are xenophobes, there are people who don't like Arabs. Obviously, I'd be insane to doubt any of that, and many of those people live in my own country. So there are white supremacist, racist assholes who don't want any more immigrants, who don't look like them or talk like them or eat the same foods.

think the Islamophobia is making a different kind of claim, isn't it? It's not really. I mean, you're talking there about some form of racism, aren't you? Islamophobia, in my experience, is often used as a kind of synonym for racism. Maybe in the US debate. I think in the UK debate, what we tend to mean is that it's very difficult to suggest that something that somebody believes is inherently wrong, evil, violent, and not end up casting some moral aspersion on the individual that holds that belief. You know, for example, it would be difficult. Let's say, I can't quite imagine, for example, saying, I think that Nazism is an unbelievably evil ideology, but I'm not prejudiced against Nazis. I'm not prejudiced against people who hold that belief. Islamophobia, presumably by its definition, is a fear of Islam. It's not a or a phobia towards Islam, not towards a particular group of people.

I mean, it's something that could be applied to a white Muslim, could be applied to a Bosnian, could be... So my understanding of it is it's having a phobia towards Islam as a religion, and what that constitutes in terms of the attitudes you take to believers in that religion. So that's why I'm using this believers in that religion. So that's why I'm using this analogy that if I thought that Islam was an inherently evil religion, akin to my view on Nazi belief, I would have a very profound negative moral judgment of anybody who believed in it. I wouldn't be able to separate a claim that the religion was uniquely sinister and evil

with being able to suggest that I had a warm relationship towards people who held views that I found that profoundly reprehensible. Well, except, realistically, there's a continuum of belief within the set of all Muslims, right? And you're talking about 2 billion people or maybe 2.2 billion people now. And there's just a wide range of commitments. And then to say nothing of ex-Muslims, right? People who were born Muslim, raised Muslim, and then left the faith and have all the ethnic and racial characteristics that they had before they left the faith, right? So there's no, I mean, that's a very clear way of seeing that. But we're talking here of believers. We're talking here of people who are Muslims, not people who were born Muslim. Right. I Jewish, but I wouldn't self-identify as

being Jewish because I don't participate in those rituals. I don't have those beliefs. Okay. Well, so let me just say that your associations with the term Islamophobia, certainly from an American perspective, are highly non-standard. I mean, the way Islamophobia is used in an American context and by an organization like CARE, the Council of American Islamic Relations, is very much a conflation with racism and xenophobia, right? So that it's all about castigating people as racists and bigots whenever they criticize Islam as a set of ideas, right? Now, to move to your point of, okay, let's say, let's purify our conception of the term. It obviously just relates to a religion and a set of religious beliefs and those who adhere to it to whatever degree.

How can you criticize these beliefs as energetically as I do without actually being bigoted against the people, right? Because if you really think these beliefs as energetically as I do without actually being bigoted against the people, right? Because if you really think these beliefs are dangerous… And let me take it to its extreme. You kind of get my point, I guess, about Nazis, that you couldn't imagine a situation in which we agree that that's a uniquely evil ideology, and therefore you couldn't really imagine saying, I think Nazism is a uniquely evil ideology, but I have they were Nazis as kids, and now I'm talking to the 18-year-old version of themselves. I have a fair amount of

compassion for anyone who, you know, it's like, it's analogous to, you know, what's happening in North Korea, right? Like the North Koreans are painfully immured in a cult wherein they just don't have adequate information, right? They have been effectively brainwashed. I mean, they're four inches shorter than their South Korean brothers and sisters, and they think they're a master race. I mean, it's an insane psychological experiment that they're party to, right? So they believe a wide range of odious things one can only imagine, and yet I don't really hold them responsible for it. And I view many, many Muslims, and I would view many, many Nazis in the analogous situation along those lines.

I mean, it's just that people have had bad ideas drummed into them from the moment they could think. And now we're in this position of talking to them and hoping to persuade them of better ideas. So I guess one issue which is maybe central to this is the question of whether there is an Islam or whether there are what I tend to believe, which is many different Islams. So I don't see a religion as a unitary thing, which you or I can securely define, or where you and I get to regulate who is or is not a true Muslim. In fact, the people who do that, of course, you know, both you and

I would be troubled by for different reasons. Sorry, we would both be troubled for the same reasons, but by people who went around saying, you're not a real Muslim. My sense of religion is that it's much more of a complex set of social, cultural practices and values. And it's much better understood through participating in those societies and observing the way in which people relate to each other in the world. And looked at from that point of view, I agree with you. There are people who identify as Muslims and who have a form of Islam, which is ignorant, cruel, bigoted, and monstrous, of which ISIS and Al-Qaeda and many of the Hamas leadership have different versions of that. But equally, there are the people that I want to speak

up for, which are the, you know, I grew up partially in Malaysia, I lived in Indonesia, I lived in Bosnia, I lived in Afghanistan, I lived in Iraq, and I was surrounded by people who were devout, practicing Muslims, praying five times a day, who were amongst the most generous, kindest, most compassionate, thoughtful, honorable people I've ever lived among. And I think the point is that there may be something wrong in trying to say there is this thing called Islam, and these are real Muslims and these people aren't, rather than accepting that there are multiple types of Muslim. Well, I accept that. And yet that claim doesn't really do the work I think you want it to do here, right?

So let me just make my second claim that I wanted to make at the outset just to frame the conversation, because I think it will land us in the territory where our differences are obvious. So the first claim was that you can criticize Islam without being bigoted against Muslims as people, and you seem to accept that quite happily because your construal of what Islamophobia means really does relate to the ideas and not to superficial characteristics like people's skin color and culture and et cetera, which is fine, again, but that, you know, when you come to America, I'll show you around. The second claim is that while every religion has its fanatics, right, and there are, right, and there are fanatics among Jews and

Hindus and every other religion, as you know, there's only one religion on earth that now routinely seeks to impose its religious taboos on everyone else with threats of violence, right? There's only one religion that has made it unsafe routinely. Again, you can find corner conditions where other religions have done this. But generally speaking, there's only one religion the front lines of this for now 20 years as a fairly famous atheist. In my experience, only Muslims routinely fear for their lives when they decide to leave their religion, right? And this is true even in the West. And if you doubt this, you just, you know, for all the Muslims you have spent time with, you need to spend some more time with ex-Muslims, even in your own society, even in the UK, because this is absolutely routine to have a rational fear that you will be murdered by your own community.

So Sam, let me come back to this, because I think, again, this is a question of us agreeing on a lot, but not entirely. And again, I'd return to this idea that there are many different Islams. I don't accept it as a general description of the religion, that the religion as a whole is a religion which is inherently imposing itself on other people and trying to murder apostates and this, that, and the other. I mean, as I said, I lived in Indonesia, and Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country in the world. And that is not a reasonable description of the way in which Islam operates in that country, or indeed in Malaysia. So it seems to me... You think you can be an apostate in Malaysia and Indonesia? be an apostate in Malaysia and Indonesia? That is, you're a former Muslim, you now disavow the faith, and now you start having your apostasy podcast, and you will be safe in one of those societies? So this is where I come back to the many different Islams. Within those societies,

there will be Muslims with very extreme violent views on apostasy. And in Afghanistan, for example, there was overwhelming support for a suggestion that the government was going to kill an apostate, right? That was a society with these sorts of views. So I'm not denying that those societies exist, or that there are many Muslims, including Muslims I know, and who were friends with in Afghanistan, who had these terrifying views on things like apostasy. I absolutely accept that. Equally, I'm, you know, I've just been living in Jordan for the last year and a half. And I am pretty confident that most of my Jordanian Muslim friends would not in any way support the notion of executing people for apostasy. So I think these are questions to a degree. I mean, you may be right

that Islam may be in a more vigorous state than Christianity or Judaism. You may also be right that the proportion of people within the religion with more extreme and violent views may be slightly higher. What I'm holding against is an idea that there is this thing called Islam, where the fact that an Islamist or a jihadist can read a particular set of lines in a text means that every Muslim necessarily must hold those same beliefs. Well, no, this really is a red herring, Rory. Obviously, there are many, many millions of Muslims who don't even read the Quran or the Hadith or, having read them, don't take them much more seriously than a reformed Jew or a very progressive Christian takes their holy books. I would argue there's much less of that

kind of liberalism and secularism in the Muslim world and in Muslim communities in the West, but there's still some of it, certainly. And in addition to that, there are many people who just want to get along in the modern world, and wherever their religion makes that difficult, they let their religion slide, right? And that's true of every faith, right? And so there's every variant of this. But what there isn't is a... I mean, there's two claims I would make here that sharpen up the difference between Islam and every other faith at this moment that I think it's important to acknowledge. One is, as I just said, there really is no other faith where it is routine for its members to worry about what's going to happen to them if they leave it. I mean, not just— Okay, well, let me come in on that.

Rory, you keep interrupting me, and I can't... Rory, you've just got to let me land the point. I'm going to give you more to react to. Rory, you keep derailing me before I give you... But often there are three or four different claims. Let me write it down now. I'll write down that first claim, that there's no religion that responds in that way to apostasy.

Okay, on you go. Yeah, and again, you need only spend time with ex-Muslims to know how poorly advertised this experience is, but how widespread it is. And I would additionally argue it's not an accident. 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. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program.

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