Making Sense with Sam Harris - #81 — Leaving Islam

Episode Date: June 9, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Sarah Haider about her organization Ex-Muslims of North America, how the political Left is confused about Islam, "rape culture" under Islam, honesty without bigotry, stealth theocracy, immigration, the prospects of reforming Islam, and other 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 a conversation with Sarah Hader, who is the co-founder of the Ex-Muslims of North America. Many of you know Sarah from Twitter. There have been many requests to get her on the podcast. Very happy to finally have her on. But we spoke after the Manchester

bombing, but as it turns out, just before the London atrocity. And I suppose nothing really changes with each new event, but it is a very strange feeling to more or less expect some new eruption of jihadist insanity sometime soon. So it's just to say it's impossible to keep up with what's happening. But unfortunately, I fear this conversation will seem timely for the rest of our lives. Sarah and I talk about what it means to leave Islam, Sarah and I talk about what it means to leave Islam, about the unique issues that surround being an ex-Muslim as opposed to being an ex-Christian or an what would otherwise be the safest places on earth, in the safest period human beings have ever enjoyed, but nevertheless being imperiled by the sectarian hatreds of one community. There's a lot of talk about Islamophobia in the news.

There's a lot of talk about Islamophobia in the news. There's very little talk about the danger and difficulty of being an ex-Muslim in the West. That's why Sarah's organization and her voice are so important. So without further delay, I bring you Sarah Hader. Enjoy. I am here with Sarah Hader. Sarah, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. I have been a fan of yours for, it has to be at least a year, two years. When did you give that talk at the secular conference? It was at the American Humanist Association.

It was in 2015. I've started to realize that when I estimate the amount of time that has passed, I always should double it. So I said a year, and then I went to two years because I knew I had to be wrong. This is what happens when you age. That talk was fantastic. And that was, was that the first talk like that that you had given? Or had you been sort of on the circuit for a while and I just hadn't noticed? I spoke here and there about my organization, Ex-Muslims of North America, and just apostasy issues. That was the first time, however, that I was really talking about the issues with liberals and Islam and how it kind of coincides in this very strange way. Obviously, many people love that talk, and you have many fans among my listeners on this podcast,

and many have requested that you get on. So I'm very happy to have you here. Speak for a moment about your background and just how you came to be one of the founders of Ex-Muslims of North America. Sure. So I grew up in what I would consider to be a pretty liberal Muslim family. I didn't know at the time that my upbringing was so liberal relative to other Muslims. I only found out as I began to meet other ex-Muslims about what their reality was to know how good I had it. But I grew up in a relatively liberal Muslim family, which means that they allowed me to move away for college. They allowed me to sort of be a little bit more independent than Muslims generally are. Where were you? Where were you growing up?

I grew up in Texas. I was born in Pakistan, and I moved here, I think I was seven or eight when we immigrated to the United States. I remember the process of coming here. I remember the shock of coming to this country. I actually remember the first time I saw a woman in public whose legs were exposed. It was a flight attendant when we stopped in Europe on our way to America. And I remember the shock.

I remember not really understanding what I was looking at and not really understanding that this was going to be a norm in America. Interesting. So you came from Pakistan when you were, you said, eight? Yes. And why did your family leave? Was there any, because it sounds like you had a family that was more liberal than most. Was that at all part of the reason why they left? Or was it just a job change?

Or what was it? Well, I think we would be called economic migrants. And I think it was just this general desire for a better life. However, my father does tell me that he specifically wanted a better life for his daughters. He had two daughters at the time, and he wanted us to have more opportunities, and he knew he would get that here. So when did you realize that you were a bit of an outlier in terms of your family environment with respect to religion? I started, well, I think most atheists would say this, and that's how I do identify as an atheist, that we were always sort of questioning, there were always sort of problems with religion,

and I had them from an early age, but there was always ways for me to justify religious traditions that I may have found problematic. Until I got to be a little bit older, I was in my mid-teens when I really started looking at the religion in a really critical way. I started actually reading for myself the Quran and finding that there were problematic, problematic verses and things that didn't really make a lot of sense to me. And the more that I looked into it, the less that it made sense. And I actually encountered quite a few militant atheists. And this is why, even to this day, I don't, I don't think that militant atheism is such a horrible thing, because it does push people like me to look into their faith, if only for the

reasons that, you know, that we want to, that we want to defend it. And that is what happened to me that I knew some atheists, and they were, you know, giving me some, some questions and probing questions. And I wanted to be able to defend my,. So that was one of the reasons that I looked into it with such urgency, because I wanted to be able to defend it. And I found that there really wasn't much there for me to defend. And so, you know, I left the faith. Were these ex-Muslims or were these Westerners? These were Westerners. These were people who came from a Christian background and then left their faith

and then started pointing out the problems within Islam to me. And of course I was offended. So this is something that people talk about a lot, that Muslims are offended when you talk about their faith in a critical way. And that's to be expected. And I was offended.

I remember being offended. But that offense, it doesn't really mean anything. And in the longer arc of what we're talking about, which is truth. And of course, people will be offended if you talk about something that they hold so dear. But it did push me to look into religion. Well, the offense is really a symptom of not having an argument. I don't get offended

if someone claims that my deeply cherished mathematical beliefs or historical beliefs are false because either they have an argument or they don't, and just offense never enters into it. The fact that we're in the territory where someone only has their offense to wield shows that there's a problem intellectually. That's probably a part of it. At that time, when I was first being confronted with the problematic verse of the Quran, I didn't know it was possible. That seems ridiculous, and as I'm saying it, it sounds ridiculous, but I remember at that time not knowing. You just didn't know what was in the Quran at that point when you first had these conversations? Right. I didn't know exactly what was in it, and I didn't know

that it was even possible to look at it in anything but as, you know, this extremely virtuous text. I didn't know that there was an interpretation like that out there. So when I first encountered it, it was quite shocking to me. So do you actually ascribe your becoming an atheist to these conversations? Can you point to the conversation that was a tipping point, or is the process more amorphous than that? It was death by a thousand cuts. This was definitely the encounter of pushback by what I would consider militant atheists was a part of it. And this is why I defend militant atheism today, because I know that it had something to do with why I left.

But it wasn't the only reason. There were a hundred different reasons that the religion was making less and less sense for me. And I was starting to figure that out on my own and push back from people that were non-Muslims did influence me into looking at it in a deeper way with more urgency than I would have otherwise. But I was finding that there were a lot of problems on my own. There were historical problems. There were contradictions within the Quran itself. So there were a variety of issues with the faith. So what is the organization you founded, Ex-Muslims of North America? What do you guys do? And it's hard to imagine many people listening to this podcast would be confused about this, but still there must be some.

But certainly many people, even most people in a wider society, might not understand why there's a special need for an organization like this? What is so hard about being an ex-Muslim? I think, well, like you said, it's not really well understood the extent to which there is Muslim conservatism and the way that Muslim communities in the West practice their faith and practice their traditions. I know that at the time that I was sort of starting on getting involved in this sort of activism, that I thought that my experience with Islam was normal. I thought that I was a representative of a moderate Muslim. And then when I started to meet other ex-Muslims, I found that this was not the case at all,

then when I started to meet other ex-Muslims, I found that this was not the case at all, that I was extremely lucky with my experience with my parents, the fact that I had been, that I had left the faith, and, you know, I hadn't been threatened by them, I hadn't been abused in any serious way, and I hadn't realized that I was kind of an outlier with that experience. And as I began to meet other ex-Muslims, I started to see that there was a huge need for people to just meet others like themselves. And for me, it was kind of a curiosity, just wanting to meet other ex-Muslims. But I knew that for others, that was not the case. So myself and Mohammed Sayyed, we were holding meetups for ex-Muslims very covertly. There was a lot of security protocols involved.

But we were holding these just private gatherings of ex-Muslims. And we started to find that there were people coming from, I mean, it was outrageous, from eight hours away. They would be coming eight hours one way to attend, you know, an hour and a half long meeting just to be there and to experience the feeling of being with people that are like yourself, who don't demonize you for thinking the way that you do. And so when we started to see that, how big of a, how major of a thing it was for other ex-Muslims, we knew that this was something that needed to be, this needed to be a real thing. We needed to organize, we needed to create an organization

around it, we needed to foster communities like the one that we had started to build in D.C. all across the United States and Canada, and teach them what we had learned about community building, about security, about privacy. And I don't think, like you said, many Western, even atheists, wouldn't really understand the extent to which ex-Muslims are ostracized and even persecuted within their communities even in the West. To the extent to which there's anyone who can relate to this, I find that people who come from Mormon backgrounds or just extreme Christian sects and Hasidic Jews can kind of understand where we're coming from and can kind of understand the extremes to which their community can go to defend their faith. So I don't think this

is something that is understood by the broader community of even atheists. And so XMNA exists so that we can form these communities. And I think the thing that we do that is most different than any other kind of atheist community is that we provide ways for them to be anonymous. All of our meets and our events are completely secret, and they're only available to people who are already part of the Ex-Muslims of North America communities. And in order to join the community, you have to go through kind of a screening of sorts. That's what we call it. It's not a science. It's kind of an art.

we do the best we can to ensure that the people that are joining are those who understand the rules and regulations that we have, and also will keep the privacy and security of others in mind, and to screen as best as we can for people who may be malicious actors who are coming in for other reasons. The emphasis on security issues is a sign of how different the situation is for Muslims. And, you know, I have a weird vantage point or a unique vantage point on this, perhaps, because I see so much of what it is to become an atheist from all these different sources, being an ex-Mormon, an ex-Muslim, an ex-member of a cult, an ex-Scientologist. I see the exits. And what is unique about Islam is this implicit or very often explicit threat of violence. And so the security concerns that you're describing strike me as fairly unique to Islam. strike me as fairly unique to Islam. And that's just still, again, it amazes me that this is an issue that people are unaware of or that obscurantists can successfully cover over

when this gets debated in public. But it is a controversial point about which it seems to me there can be really no debate at this point. The laws around apostasy, the fact that leaving the faith is considered worthy of death, certainly if you speak against it, you can find that in the Old Testament too. You're not tending to see Jews or Christians, however extreme, even reference that edict. It's just there are theological reasons why that's the case, there are historical reasons, but I'm not hearing from ultra-Orthodox Jews. I hear from them, and I hear just how difficult it is to be exiled from their community and to lose their marriages and lose their kids and all the rest, but I don't hear that they're worried that their members of their family will come and kill them. And I routinely hear that from ex-Muslims. Right. So there's a pretty common thing I hear from ex-Muslims is when they're describing their

family, they'll say, well, you know, my parents are pretty liberal. I'm not worried about them killing me. And in any other context, that would be an outrageous thing to say, that they're pretty liberal. And in order to justify this feeling, you know, you feel like they're not going to kill you. But that in itself, I think, it should be telling that our organization needs to exist the way that it does, that we do need to follow all these bizarre security and privacy protocols. We really shouldn't have to, but we do, and we do for a reason. And it's interesting to me that I find it to be ignored largely by the mainstream media media that this is something that ex-Muslims feel like they need to do, they need to hide. Many apostates are not open about their

lack of faith. I see, you know, I know many ex-Muslims privately, you know, I would say that myself and maybe, you know, Mohammed Sayyed, the president of XMNA, I would say that between the two of us, we probably know more ex-Muslims than anybody else in the world. And I see sometimes, you know, I'll see in the media, various people that are participating in charities or in public service organizations, and they are represented, you know, they're represented as Muslims, you know, this Muslim person is doing, person is doing XYZ charitable endeavor and it's very wonderful. And I will know privately that these are ex-Muslims, but they're not able to be open about their lack of faith

because of the blowback that they will get in their community. So if you're, for example, you're working on a charity serving people in poor women in Pakistan, you're not going to be open about your lack of faith. Because if you are open about your lack of faith, you're not going to be able to reach that community at all. You're not going to be able to have any contact with them. So in order for you to continue doing the work that you're doing, you're going to have to lie about your faith.

So a lot of ex-Muslims do do exactly this. And to the extent that we're talking about religious freedom, I know we talk quite a bit in the mainstream media, especially liberal media, leftist media, there's a lot of conversation about civil liberties of ex-Muslims and religious freedoms. And we talk about them in context of certain traditions like the hijab. To the extent that the most fundamental freedom within the context of a belief system isn't guaranteed, that is to say the freedom to leave, the freedom to not believe at all, to the extent that that isn't guaranteed, in my opinion, we can't have a conversation about freedom within that religion at all. Everything is to some extent

coerced because the most basic freedom, the freedom to leave, is never guaranteed. And the security concerns are really pernicious because even if nothing ever happens, right, even if you never become a victim of any kind of violence, the plausible concern about violence is ever-present, and it adds friction to everything you do. Now, I encounter this in my personal life because of the issues I touch, but it has to be considerably worse for you and for anyone who's doing something similar. I'm very close to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I know what her life is like. I'm close to Majid Nawaz. I'm sure we'll talk about what he's doing and how it may be different from what you're doing. But still, anyone who's working in this space inherits this

massive burden of worrying about what will happen when they become too visible. And it's as simple as not being able to hold a conference, right, or not being able to have physical offices. If you're going to have an atheist conference, generic atheist conference, or a meetup for ex-Mormons, you never have to think that someone might want to show up and not only annihilate you, but annihilate himself just for the pleasure of killing everyone in attendance. And this is an all-too-plausible concern given the world we're living in now. Is there anything more to say about how you handle the security issue that could be useful for ex-Muslims who may want to join your organization to hear, to put their mind at ease about how you handle

this? Or is there any more to say about what it's like to be trying to get a movement off the ground under the burden of these kinds of unique concerns? What I can say generally is that I don't think it's clear from the outside of the day-to-day struggle that this presents with us running an ex-Muslim organization. For example, we get nervous when we do simple things like go to the printer or go to the bank. And we have reason to be nervous. And there's a sort of paranoia that, you know, overshadows our, you know, basic day-to-day operations. And it presents a difficulty in that it's difficult to do our work enough as it is. And then on top of that, if you have to worry about being

discriminated against or possibly being harmed in a severe kind of way by your banker, it makes the work that much harder to do. But from here on out, I'd rather not go into the details of how we protect us. Yeah, yeah. You did an interview with Jeffrey Taylor, which was a great read. And you said one thing there that I wanted to read into this conversation. You said, if Muslims feel they're being badly treated here in the United States, they can go to Muslim majority countries. But where can a person like me go? I'm in the safest place I can possibly be, and yet I'm too afraid to tell people where I live. It's tragic for me that there's even a need for our organization. And that really does expose just how unique a position it is to be an ex-Muslim. You are in the safest place in the world to be if you're a Muslim,

even, really. I mean, we can talk about the problem of anti-Muslim bigotry, but I think it is safe to say that most Muslims are safer in the U.S. than they are in most Muslim-majority countries, given how unstable and sectarian those tend to be. But for an ex-Muslim in the U.S., or in really anywhere in the West, I guess it gets worse once you go to Western Europe. There is this real concern about not being protected by any community. Right. And just to mirror your language, it's true that, I believe it's true that most Muslims are safer in the West than they would be in a Muslim country. More Muslims are safer in the U.S.

than our ex-Muslims. Ex-Muslims are less safe in the U.S. Ex-Muslims are less safe in Western countries than your average Muslim. And I think that's a perfectly fair thing to say, and it should be extremely concerning. Yeah, and obviously you inherit all of the problems of, quote, Yeah, and obviously you inherit all of the problems of, quote, Islamophobia, insofar as that is a problem. Having your name looking like someone who was born in Pakistan, you encounter the same bias or bigotry that any Muslim could be worried about going through an airport or in any other situation where that would become relevant. And yet you have this added concern, which I would argue is a far more pressing one, which is you have some percentage of the Muslim

community that thinks what you're doing warrants a violent response. And you never know how big that percentage is or how much you're on their radar. And it bears repeating, this is unique to Islam. As badly behaved as Scientologists are when you take a good swing at that hornet's nest, they don't come and kill you. You know, they can make your life miserable. They can sue you. They can show up at your office with a crazed look in their eyes and video cameras pointed at you 18 hours a day. These are bizarre people who are in an especially bizarre cult, but they don't commit murders and they don't commit suicidal acts of terrorism. And so this is, again, anyone who wants to defend Islam against the unique scrutiny that it merits at this moment has to deal with this fact that, as I said before, you have a play like the Book of Mormon that becomes a Broadway hit, and the Mormons take out an advertisement in Playbill, in reprisal, right? Their reaction is really adorable. There's not the slightest concern that Trey Parker and Matt Stone will spend the rest of their lives

being hunted by religious maniacs. And yet, no one can even imagine staging such a play about Islam at this moment. And the reasons for that are patently obvious and yet everywhere denied by people who complain about, quote, Islamophobia. Right. I mean, I think if Islam could get to where Mormonism is today, that we would be in a much, much better place. And I think that in itself should be telling of how bad things really are. And it's shocking to me that still, you know, still, we've been talking about this for a long time. You've been talking about this for a long time. Ayaan K.O.C.

Ali has been talking about this for a long time, that we now we need to be, we finally need to be honest about what's going on. And I don't see much progress in that direction. Well, let's talk about the progress or lack thereof. So one sign of painful lack of progress of late for me has been the way that Linda Sarsour has been championed by liberals and feminists as some kind of icon of women's rights, when she, to my eye, is just a straight-up theocrat and bully. How are liberals and feminists getting confused about this?

Well, I think the hijab is a good way to illustrate the extent to which liberals are confused about this issue. Because as you pointed out, it's ridiculous to see the poster, the, I think, Shepard Fairey poster of a woman in a hijab as part of the Women's March. And, you know, I understand why people on the left, why progressives have this tendency. I understand what they are trying to do, which is to stand for the freedom of religion for Muslims. And this is a laudable endeavor. This is something that I support. This is a tendency that I really love about the left. I like that they instinctively want to protect the little guy.

Having said that, not everything done in the name of good intentions is necessarily good, and not everything done in the name of good intentions will help the people that you want to help. And in many cases, it might harm the very principles or the very people that you want to help. And I think this is, especially the hijab in context of women's rights is a case where we can see this in a very clear way. And so I supported the Women's March. You know, I supported generally speaking, women's rights are really close to my heart. And it's really important to me that that feminism is something that becomes universal, that becomes global. So I support, I support, generally speaking, these kinds of these kinds

of initiatives. But I was really disheartened to see that Linda Sarsour was included, and that the hijab was suddenly it's it's become this totem you know it's become this this symbol of of religious freedom and it's kind of it's it's pretty perverse um it's pretty perverse uh given the context of what what the hijab actually is um and given the religious justification for the hijab which is which is just distinctly anti-freedom. You know, it's very coercive. It's coercive in large parts of the world. It's coercive in Western communities today. And yes, Muslim women should have the right

to wear the hijab. Yes, they should have the freedom to follow their religion as they see fit. But we shouldn't herald as some sort some sort of, as some sort of symbol for women's rights as a whole, because that's not what it is. And the symbolism behind the hijab matters. And that's what's shocking to me is that, yes, we'll, we'll talk about the fact that, that Muslim women choose to wear it and they should have a choice to, to wear it.

And they should have a choice to be as religious as they want to be. But what does it mean to wear a hijab? Why do Muslim women feel that they need to wear a hijab? You'll hear, I think it was Dalia Mogahed that was on The Daily Show a couple of years, maybe just a year back, I'm not sure exactly when, but she was talking about the hijab and she referred to it as a means to privatize her sexuality, which is a very interesting way of putting it. Particularly because as I'm listening to it, a means to, you know, privatize her sexuality, which is a very interesting way of putting it, particularly because, you know, as I'm listening to it, I can, I remember thinking, oh, wow, that's, that's clever. It's a clever way to phrase the hijab, privatizing my sexuality, because that's something that

she's phrased it in a way where it would be easy to accept by people who are from progressive circles, by educated people. She phrased it in a way that it would just, you know, they would just swallow it whole and accept it. And I think they want to accept it. However, we need to go back to what the religious justification for it is and what it implies,

even if we want to use her phrasing, let's look at it as a way of privatizing your sexuality. If you consider wearing the hijab, covering up as modesty, as a way of privatizing your sexuality. If you consider wearing the hijab, covering up as modesty as a way of privatizing sexuality, you justify the viewpoint that women who don't do this are necessarily people who are publicizing their sexuality. And that if it means something, if you're signaling something by privatizing your sexuality, then you are also signaling something by publicizing it. And I think that that needs to be discussed. That needs to be discussed widely.

And it's shocking to me that Muslim narratives of what the hijab means are just accepted wholesale. They're just accepted. And not a lot of criticism is given some honest consideration. I think it's good to focus on the hijab because I think many people are confused about just what they should think about it. I think I'm pretty clear about the hijab. I'm a little confused, frankly, about the niqab and the burqa, I think. So just walk me through this.

So this is what I think about the hijab. I think that, as you said, that the first thing to be honest about is that most women who wear the hijab the world over are not doing it voluntarily. And even if you could stand them up and ask them, and they would say, yes, they want to live this way, it can't be construed as a voluntary choice given the cultural context in which they're living, given the penalties for not wearing it, given how everyone in their life would think about them if they chose not to wear it. This is a choice against a background of almost total coercion. And then you have the rare case in the West of someone who, her sophomore year at Brandeis, can decide, well, you know, maybe I want to wear the hijab.

And it's a truly free choice. Now, I agree with you that any woman should be free to make that choice. They should just be honest about how different a choice that is than the pseudo-choice that's being made every day by a woman or a girl in Saudi Arabia or any other theocracy. So people should be free to dress in that way. And we should also be honest that this is an ideological display, right? So when someone wears the hijab, they're telling me something about what they believe to be true, and there's no burden on me not to pay attention to that. I can notice that their external choice as an indicator of their internal worldview,

right? And worldviews matter, right? What people believe and declare is important to them matters. So it's a conversation. You are starting a conversation with the world when you decide to put on a hijab. And one of the things you're saying, you know, privatizing your sexuality is one way of putting it, but you seem to also be conceding, you seem to also be conceding, as is explicitly stated within the doctrine of Islam, that the onus is upon the woman to conceal herself as a way of protecting men from their lust. It's not that the onus is not on the men not to be boorish monsters who are just groping any woman in sight who's not sufficiently covered. the onus is on women to be sufficiently modest. Even if you are making a free choice in the West

and Dahlia Mogahed is your guru, you're still, this is an anti-feminist concept of where the blame for social awkwardness and lust gets placed. Every choice, even if there is a choice that is freely made by a woman, it doesn't necessarily make it a feminist choice. And in the context of the hijab, even if Dalia or Linda Sersour have freely made the choices that they've made, that doesn't make them feminist choices.

They can be anti-feminist. They can be anti-women. They can be anti-women's rights. And that needs to be discussed and that needs to be talked about. To add on to what you were saying, when there's this burden of sexual purity that's placed on women,

it really is something that I would call a rape culture of sorts, where women that are subject to sexual assault bear the blame if they are women who, you know, don't cover themselves in an Islamically prescribed way. And this is something that is pervasive in the Muslim world, the idea that a woman who shows her body, who is, you know, woman who shows her body, who is, you know, even walks in a certain way or speaks in a certain way, they are to blame for male assaults against them. And you can see reflections of this in the ways that Muslim men treat non-Muslim women. I mean, I know there's the sexual assaults that happened in Germany on New Year's Eve, it wasn't something that was

very surprising to me and to many people from the Muslim world. It's not entirely surprising because there is a dehumanization of women who don't cover themselves in the way that Islamic women are supposed to cover themselves. It seems to be a signal, a free pass to do with those women as you will, because they do not have the same kind of dignities that women who are covered up have. So let's move on to even more aggressive covering. So the niqab, wherein only the eyes are exposed, and less people are familiar with that, I think, than the burqa, which is what you tend to see in Afghanistan, where everything is covered, and you just have this kind of mesh for the woman to see out of.

There, I feel like my sympathies change a little bit, because there's something so, in the current climate, it's so provocative, but also, I think, unsafe and uncommunicative about covering the face. You don't know who anyone is. You don't get any of the social cues that are actually important for understanding whether you're safe around a person. The person who's having this imposed on them is being deprived of almost everything that's good in the world in terms of interacting with other human beings. everything that's good in the world in terms of interacting with other human beings. What's your feeling about whether or not something like, take the French approach to banning the niqab in public, how do you feel about that? Because again, following what we just said about the hijab, my bias is certainly to let people dress however they want, but there is something really terrible

about covering the face in public, and I don't actually know what we should do about it. Well, I agree that it's unsettling in the way that just the face veil is unsettling in the way that a head covering is not, but I don't think that we should change our approach to it. I think any time that a facial covering of any kind, a mask, be that be a party mask or a ski mask, wouldn't be allowed, neither should a face veil, religious face covering be allowed. But aside from that, yes, it is disturbing.

religious face covering be allowed. But aside from that, yes, it is disturbing. Yes, it does speak to this distance that Muslim women are sometimes forced to have with the world around them. But that doesn't mean that taking an action like banning it would be helpful. In my opinion, it isn't. I think what we do need to grapple with is that many Muslim women buy into the ideology that is given to them. Many don't, but many do. That's why you have lindis resorts. That's why you have Dali Mogaheads, is that there are women who buy it, and they actually believe that they are being empowered by Islamic traditions. And so there are women who willingly put it on, or think that they're willingly putting it on, and they feel empowered by it because they are fed a certain kind of worldview. And forcing them to take it off would not, you know, would not win us any favors from those women. And if anything, it might, you know, it might turn them into people that would want to wear

the hijab, that would want to wear religious garb as a political protest. And increasingly, I see the hijab and just various kinds of religious garb as a form of political protest. And I don't think we should encourage it being turned into something like that, because it becomes more powerful in that way. And the religious, the harm that the religion itself perpetuates because of the hijab gets brushed to the side. That's interesting, because I think the rationale for the French policy, or at least the one rationale that makes sense to me, is that if you ban these things in public, what you're doing is you're creating a space where

all the people who are being coerced into wearing these religious symbols are free, because of the protection of the state not to wear them. They're no longer obliged to do what their family insists that they do because it's illegal to do it. And so you've created this context in which girls and women can be free in a way that they wouldn't be if you just let everyone decide what they should wear. But it sounds like you think that on balance, you'll actually just alienate more people than you will liberate by doing that. So to follow up on what you said, which was that perhaps it would free the women that are truly coerced. Let's say a certain percentage of women are coerced to wear a

certain kind of religious garb in public. In the context of, for example, what the French were doing, I spoke out against, I don't know, the burkini, I think it was called, the Islamic swimwear that some French towns were trying to ban. And I spoke out against that ban. That seemed like good sun shielding practices from my point of view. This is the other thing you brought up is that there are other ways to cover your face that we can't make illegal. So if you're going to make Halloween masks and ski masks illegal because they're so similar to niqabs, if you have someone who's super sun sensitive, who essentially is showing up in the equivalent of a bikini, you can't suddenly make that illegal. So it's a very weird thing to try to legislate.

Right. And you don't necessarily protect the women who are being coerced into wearing these things. In the context of a bikini, there are certain Muslim women who, let's assume, are coerced into wearing religious gear. And because they're able to wear a burkini, they have a little bit of freedom. They're allowed to go to the beach and they're allowed to experience, you know, feel the sand on their feet and feel the water and get to participate in this public activity in a way that they probably would not be able to participate in if the burkini was banned. So in the context of the most coerced women, I don't know if we're necessarily going to protect them because I don't know if the reaction

of the most extreme religious families would be to say, well, if the state has banned a burkini, that means that you're allowed to wear a bikini or shorts or whatever it is to the beach. I fear that the reaction might be more often than that to say, well, you're not allowed to is to the beach, I fear that the reaction might be more often than that to say, well, you're not allowed to go to the beach and maybe we're taking you back home. It's a difficult one. And I don't know if the legislation is too blunt a tool for this, but I can imagine, for instance, if I'm sitting on an airplane and somebody gets on with a ski mask or a Halloween mask and refuses to take it off, or I see someone passing through security at the airport with a ski mask or Halloween mask on, I would expect that person to be stopped and to not be able to fly unless they took it off.

You know, and then you could imagine that there's an obvious exception if they have a reason, if they have some medical reason why they have to wear a mask, or, you know, they have a burn on their face, or something that explains it, well, then fine. But I think there are many public spaces where someone is in charge of legislating certain norms, even if there are not laws against these things. And yes, it's like you can't show up to a restaurant, you know, without wearing pants, right? Probably there is some kind of law against it, but it's at the discretion of anyone who has control of a public space to deny access to people who are violating certain norms. And I think we just have to be honest about what it means to be wearing a niqab or a burqa at this moment in human history in the West,

in an airport. You are advertising a worldview, which is the worldview we care about from the point of view of being people who want to prevent suicide bombings on airplanes, to take the narrow case. So obviously you're going to draw more scrutiny. Obviously we can't see what's underneath this covering unless we put you in an x-ray scanner rather than a metal detector. It poses a security concern both physically and ideologically. I mean, again, you've announced your worldview in a way that you otherwise wouldn't if you weren't wearing this thing. It is analogous to, you know, if we had problems with a cult of neo-Nazis that was killing people or threatening to kill people in virtually every city on earth, it wouldn't matter if someone

showed up at the airport with swastikas tattooed on his face or proudly wearing symbols of the SS on his jacket. I mean, this person is saying, pay attention to me, I'm a security problem, or at least a potential one. It never strikes me as trivial that someone is wearing a niqab, or that, in particular, the man who is chaperoning her is the sort of man who wants his wife or sister to wear a niqab. Right, but I don't know if it's... I think we can make certain... I think you're right to say that we can assume certain things,

but I don't know if we can assume them universally. In the context specifically of a woman in an Ikab, we can't assume that she's being coerced. We can't assume that she's not being coerced. We don't actually know where her true beliefs lie because of the specific context of this religion. And I don't know if it's helpful to make those assumptions. I agree, you can't. But the balance has to swing one way or the other. And I think the French assumption that you'll be helping people, I mean, the beach is an interesting case because I can easily see it going the way you fear, that these are women who just will not

be let out of the house, given that there's no option for them to be fully covered at the beach. But when you think of something like a school, right, or a place of employment, it just feels like a ban on covering the face in those contexts. Again, it's like, whether this is the law or whether it's just every place of business is free to have their own policy, I don't know. But it's just, I can't imagine hiring someone for some kind of public-facing job where they insist on their right to wear a niqab, right? Like a bank teller, you're a bank teller and you're wearing a niqab, or you're a nurse in a hospital, but you're going to wear a niqab as you visit patients. I think you have to be free not to hire those people who insist that they wear a niqab in those contexts.

Well, I think to the extent that it gets in the way of your job duties. And you can make an argument that it would do that in the context of a nurse. I remember reading something about, it's tangentially related, but I remember reading something about a female eye doctor in ISIS controlled territory who was no longer allowed to practice unless she had on a covering. And she complained that she wasn't able to see and she needed to do these complex procedures with other people's eyes, women's eyes, and she wasn't able to see herself properly enough to be able to operate in the way that she needed to operate. So obviously it gets in the way of job duties.

Even you can make the argument, I think, that there are certain social obligations, sort of social aspects of a job that require someone to show their face. But it's different because different jobs would require that and some jobs would require that and some jobs would not. that in some jobs would not. And on the whole, I know that from a perspective of an activist, the more constraints we place on religious freedom, in Muslim religious freedom,

the harder it gets for someone like me to argue in favor of Western values and for Enlightenment values. It's difficult for me to say that, you know, in the West, they allow freedom,

in the West, women can dress according to their conscience. 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.