Making Sense with Sam Harris - #82 — The End of the World According to ISIS

Episode Date: June 15, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Graeme Wood about his experience reporting on ISIS, the myth of online recruitment, the theology of ISIS, the quality of their propaganda, the most important American recruit to the organization, the roles of Jesus and the Anti-Christ in Islamic prophecy, free speech and the ongoing threat of jihadism, 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 enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking with Graham Wood. Graham is a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine. He has written for The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and many other publications. He was the 2014 to 2015 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

And he teaches in the political science department at Yale University. And he's the author of the book, The Way of the Strangers, Encounters with the Islamic State. And we get deep into his book and into the worldview of ISIS. We use ISIS and the Islamic State interchangeably. And we talk about his experience reporting on ISIS, the myth of online recruitment, how to challenge the theology of ISIS. We talk about the quality of ISIS's propaganda. And Graham reveals the identity of the most important American recruit to the Islamic State. And we spent a long time talking about the surprising significance of Jesus and the Antichrist under Islam. So there's a lot here, and Graham is an amazing authority on these topics,

and it was a great pleasure to finally get him on the podcast. So, without further delay, I bring you Graham Wood. I am here with Graham Wood. Graham, thanks for coming on the podcast. Good to be here. You have written this wonderful book, The Way of the Strangers, which is all about the Islamic state, its rise, and you get right up to the point where its fall seems plausible. Things have moved on a little bit since you published the book, but it's just a really entertaining and deep introduction to this phenomenon of just global jihadism more generally than ISIS.

But you get into the details in a very accessible way. And the book is structured around some very engaging profiles of people and also fairly amusing profiles of people who you have spent some time with. So my first question for you is just as a journalist, did you feel that you were taking much personal risk reporting this book? I always worried a little bit about what might happen because especially meeting someone for the first time, you never know what he or she is going to do or what friends that person's going to bring along.

But ironically, reporting on the Islamic State has been one of the safer assignments I've had. Being in war zones where you don't know where the bullets are going to be coming from, you don't know who you're talking to, is often a very dangerous thing. But talking to ISIS supporters is often an experience of subjecting yourself to proselytization that they are really eager to deliver. So it would be weird for them to attack me if I came to them and said honestly and verifiably, look, I want to know about ISIS. They are on this planet to oblige.

And so they, in general, are pretty happy to talk. That comes through in the reporting. You have these really adorable encounters with people who just have endless disposable time to indoctrinate you. And then you describe their apparent loss of enthusiasm once it's clear that you are not a good mark for this. But they clearly want to get their message out. And I guess we should say that you are reporting these stories not from ISIS-held territory. Well, it can't be taken for granted that someone won't do something horrible to you in Australia or in Egypt or in Turkey or in the United States, for that matter. And most of the people I spoke to did say, I should go to Syria. They said,

you know, we understand you'd be afraid to go there, that you think you might get enslaved or beheaded. But if you went there with permission, unlike how James Foley went, you'd be okay. So the most dangerous encounters that I had were probably in places that we don't otherwise think of as terribly dangerous, like maybe Norway or Australia or the United States, where you're going to a cafe in a part of town that you don't know. And you never know if there's going to be a van that pulls up next to you and pulls you away. That was always a danger. But in the end, I was mostly just in danger of being overfed by these people. That's an interesting point, this idea that if you went to Syria or Iraq and spoke to ISIS directly, you'd be safe if you did it through the appropriate channels. I was amused and

slightly alarmed to see that John Walker Lind from his prison cell was somebody who was advocating you do that. He seems completely unrehabilitated, Lind. To remind people, John Walker Lind was the often referred to as the American Taliban. He was this young man from Marin County, as everyone should know, a bastion of privilege, who decided to go fight with the Taliban very early on, before September 11th. And in the aftermath of September 11th, he was caught fighting for them, was quickly prosecuted, and has disappeared into the bowels of our prison system. It sounds like he's still there, quite full of faith and happy to advise you to go talk to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi if you can manage it.

Yeah, the way that I interacted with John Walker Lind was as follows. He's been in prison since 2001. I wrote to him and said, look, there seems to be this phenomenon called the Islamic State, and a lot of people who in some ways are kind of like you have gone over there. So given that you're still on American soil, and given that you're reading this letter that I've sent you in prison, apparently you can be reached. So do you have anything to tell me about what you think is motivating people and what the Islamic State's all about? And the letters that he wrote back were friendly, maybe a little bit officious, but were're saying, in essence, that the Islamic State would respect its covenants, he believed, if I went to them and said, look, I'm a journalist. I'm curious

about what you're doing. Can I go over there and have a kind of guided tour of the caliphate? And yeah, I told him, that's not going to happen. I'm not going to go over there and just take their word for it that they're not going to behead me. He said, well, you know, it's really the only way to find out. And trust me, they seem like men of their word. So it appears that these 16-odd years that he's spent in prison has not disabused him of the jihadism that he had pursued with the Taliban. Instead, if anything, he's gone from being a Taliban supporter to perhaps an Islamic State one. Now, have there been journalists who have followed that path? I know there's the one German journalist, I think, who crossed into ISIS territory and met some people,

although I can't remember if he did that with any permission. Has this theory of Lin's been demonstrated? Yes, and it's been so far verified in 100% of the cases, which is one case. The guy is Jürgen Todenhofer, who's an elderly German magistrate, kind of an amiable weirdo, who's an elderly German magistrate, kind of an amiable weirdo, very interesting political figure who's interviewed Bashar al-Assad and who wrote to a bunch of German jihadis who were in ISIS territory and said, I'd love to go over there. Can I come? They brought him over, showed him the city of Mosul under ISIS control. He took a bunch of video. And from the sounds of it, I spoke to him about this once. Up until

the very last moment that he crossed the Turkish border to safety, he wondered whether they might kill him. And even while he was over there, they said, look, we will respect the permission that we gave you from the office of the caliph himself to come over here and keep you safe. But we promise you eventually we're coming to Germany, and your name will be on our list. Right, right. That's always charming in a host. I will keep you safe here, but I'm coming to kill you where you live. Yeah, it's hospitality of a sort.

So just to rewind here, just to give people a little context, because I will have introduced you in my intro to this episode, but you initially got to this episode. But you initially got into this research. You wrote a cover article for The Atlantic magazine about ISIS a couple of years ago. And that, at the time, I believe was the most read article in the history of the magazine. It may still be, although I imagine you've had a little competition in the last couple of years with the rise of Trump. And now you have gone on to write this book. You and I actually did, before I had a podcast, you and I did a long interview where I interviewed you for my blog. That covers territory that I don't think we'll really cover again in this conversation, so people

can go seek that out on my blog if they're interested. Let's just start with the emergence of ISIS, and then I think we're going to get into current events pretty quickly here. But the birth of this group is fairly astonishing. You report on how ISIS conquered Mosul with a force of something like 500 or 1,000 men and put the entire Iraqi army to flight. It was almost a proof of their divine aid in some way. I mean, it was just like this miraculous display of cowardice on the part of an army that we had trained.

How do you explain that first moment? It wasn't actually that surprising to me. I was in Mosul in early 2013, end of 2012. I believe I was the last American reporter to be in Mosul. And my experience of the city even then, and remember, this is like a year and a half before ISIS took control of the city, was that everybody was afraid of what they were then calling al-Qaeda. They were saying that shopkeepers would be extorted. And if I, as an obvious foreigner, was spotted on the street, there's a really good chance I would get kidnapped. So even back then,

there was the sense that there was no law except al-Qaeda's, except ISIS's. And there was definitely no respect for the Iraqi army. So when ISIS came to town and actually took over the city with, you know, four or 500 guys, a bunch of pickups, machine guns, and so forth, it was like, yeah, this was a city that was anarchic before, and they were almost just making it official. But didn't thousands of troops just flee outright when these 500 men showed up? Yeah, and the troops who were there when I was there in 2013, they were garrisoned in just a couple spots in the city. They were considered tools of a Shia sectarian government, Mosul's mostly a Sunni city. And so it wasn't as if they were doing foot patrols, winning hearts and minds.

They were considered just those people in a barracks over there who we never see and we would never trust with our safety. So just imagine a bunch of Sunnis come to town. They say, we represent your interests, you, the Sunnis of Mosul. And those soldiers over there, we will let them run away, most of them, and we'll control your city. How would you like that? And a lot of people in Mosul just said, well, that might be better than the status quo. So I think that explains how they were able to take over so much so fast. Now, how many people at this point have emigrated to join ISIS? Is the figure still around 40,000? Yeah, 40,000 is about right. They, in the middle of last year, told people not to come anymore. So

you can expect that the numbers haven't risen too much. And a lot of those 40,000 are already dead. But yeah, from overseas, from countries that are not Iraq and Syria, usually the number quoted is 40 to 45. Now, one of the things you do in your book, which many people decline to do, is you get into the heads of these guys in a way that allows you to see the world from their point of view. And when you do that, the behavior of these people becomes fairly logical. The mysteries begin to evaporate once you begin to take people at their word, when they tell you over and over again what they care about, what motivates them. And it's amazing to me. I mean, this is something that has now astonished me for going on 16 years since September 11th. People just find this virtually impossible to do. Scholars of religion or

seeming scholars of religion decline to do this. Political scientists routinely prove themselves unable to do this. And you have a quote here, I think it was fairly early in the book, that I loved, which is, when someone says something too evil to believe, one response is not to doubt their sincerity, but to expand one's capacity to imagine what otherwise decent people can desire. That, I concluded, is the proper response to the Islamic State. And your encounters with these people just become this exercise in accepting their account of themselves. You pressure test it in a variety of ways because no account is free of internal contradictions. excavation of a worldview, which you tackle, again, through many of these profiles you do with jihadists of various commitment. You know, you gave a list of a few disciplines that have

been neglectful in their duty to explain some of these things, religious studies, political scientists, and so forth. And in some ways, I've taken to heart messages that they've given about Muslims in other contexts that they seem not to have applied themselves in this one, which is that we in the West, non-Muslims, secular academics, we have taken it upon ourselves to speak on behalf of people from far-off lands, for brown people, for Muslims. And so part of what I was doing was just heeding the call to instead listen to them, let them speak for themselves. It's not as if I, by examining their socioeconomic status

or the political circumstances of where they come from, can expect to just understand what they believe about the world, I will be able to understand some things, but why not talk to them? Why not let them speak for themselves? So what I ended up doing was, I think, an exercise that was as much anthropological as journalistic. It was trying to describe a culture, a mindset, a view of the world, and to describe it in a way that the people who were speaking would recognize as accurate or at least interesting. One thing that is, I think, surprising or will be surprising to many of our listeners is that this myth of purely online

recruitment is in fact a myth. There's this picture that has emerged, which is that people get recruited entirely on the basis of online contacts, and they have no affiliates in the real world that could explain how their sympathy got bent toward jihadism. I'm sure there must be some pure cases of that where it really is an internet phenomenon. But for the most part, that is a myth. Yeah, for the most part, that is nonsense. The idea that people will just go on Twitter and be told ISIS is the way to go, read these websites, read Dabic magazine, and get a ticket to Turkey and you're on your way. That is not how it goes in, as far as I can tell, almost any cases of men. I'll get to women in a second. Usually for people who go over there,

they know somebody who's already gone. Obviously, there was a first mover, someone who went over and told his buddies, hey, it's really nice over here. There's a house that I got as soon as I arrived and that kind of thing. But in general, there's someone who you've met outside the mosque or in a cafe or on a sports team, There's someone who you've met outside the mosque or in a cafe or on a sports team, and that person has done something important in showing you that a human being can go over there. It's not gods who have gone over, but people like you and me, and that changes everything and everything flows from that. Now, in the case of women, a little bit different. You could look at the women who were recruited to al-Qaeda, and first of all, there aren't very many of them.

Al-Qaeda was like a military organization. It was very male, and it mostly thought of women as encumbrances because they wouldn't be fighting. Whereas with ISIS, they're trying to create a society, and so they need men, they need women, they need children. And so they've had to reach out in different ways. And for that, online recruitment has been really, really valuable. They've been able to talk to people who otherwise would be in very conservative milieus, where it's not like they could go talk to some stranger, leave the house whenever they wanted. And so online, you can find people who are purely online recruited and who eventually

made it to Syria if they're women. So focusing on the men for a second, the impulse for a woman to join the Islamic State, I must say, remains a bit inscrutable to me. But for the men, it really doesn't. And at one point, you talk about what jihadists in general do, and ISIS has taken this to the point of perfection, is that they, and this is a quote from you, they weaponize a fanatical sense of shame by declaring that jihad is the only absolution. Talk about this notion of shame for a moment, because it probably doesn't have a reference point in the ears of many of our listeners. When I was being recruited to an ISIS-like organization, this was before the time of ISIS, I was in Cairo speaking with a guy I could only describe as a master recruiter. And one of the first things that he would try to emphasize to me was that I had done horrible things in my past. He would ask me, wouldn't ask me to confess

details of, say, my sexual history or whether I'd used drugs or alcohol or my failings, but he would point out, God has requested that you not do these things, and there will be punishment for you in the hereafter for the things that you've done. So he was really trying to emphasize this sense of deep, deep sin, which I think is familiar to almost anyone who has gone over to Isis. Isis says exactly the same thing, that God is watching you. He is nearer to you than your own jugular vein, is one of the most famous lines from the scriptures that ISIS

likes to invoke. And so when they say to someone, especially someone who has an especially sinful past as a rent boy or drug addict or what have you, then part of their appeal is that they can absolve you from the sins of your past. If you die in battle, you don't have to pay the bill when it comes to Judgment Day because you're a martyr and you get fast-tracked straight to paradise, whereas people who die comfortably in their beds, they do have to go through an absolution process, a purification, a kind of burning limbo before they enter the gates of paradise. Yeah, don't their ribs get crushed together and cracked at the moment of the

day of judgment? The recruiters love to talk about the lurid punishments. And yeah, there's something called the punishment of the graves. This is not just, by the way, an ISIS thing. This is part of a fairly orthodox reading of the idea of the hereafter in Islam, that when you die, you get trash compacted within your grave, and you scream as your ribs crack and eventually touch each other. And the only ones who can hear this screaming are animals and genies.

So there's all sorts of bad things that happen to you after you die, unless you are one of two categories, a martyr, someone who dies in the course of jihad or in a few other categories of death, and a prophet, which none of us are. So if you have a sense that you've got a steep, steep bill to pay in the hereafter before you go through the pearly gates, then you have all the more incentive to die faster and more gloriously to avoid paying that bill. It's a Dine and Dash theory of the hereafter. I feel like I'm paying that bill on the jujitsu mats. No one hears my screams, not even the genies, when I get crushed.

But you can always tap out. You can't tap out when the creator of the universe is doing it to you. One hears. No, not when he's got you in a rear naked choke. You can't do anything about that. This is something you keep confronting throughout the book. You continually bump into the problem of arguing against the Islamic State's theology. And unfortunately, it's a non-trivial problem. It's a problem that, as I said, many scholars and many mainstream Muslims shirk. I guess the pun on the Arabic term for polytheism should be intended there. So many so-called moderate Muslims and their apologists just lie about the doctrines from which the Islamic state

is drawing its inspiration. At one point, you quote the head of CARE, the Council of American Islamic Relations, claiming that there are no end-time prophecies in Islam. I hear people like Reza Aslan say that the Quran abolishes slavery, right? There's no support for slavery in Islam. Countless people have said that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. President Obama quite famously said this over and over again. One reason why I think Hillary Clinton lost is that she seemed inclined to follow that quite delusional line. And rather than talk about the actual link between specific doctrines with respect to martyrdom and jihad and apostasy and blasphemy and all the rest, and this death cult behavior, people reflexively talk about U.S. foreign policy and the Ba'ath Party and bad people who would do bad things anyway, right? This is just religions being used as a pretext.

They claim that ISIS has no theological justification for its actions. At one point, you quote somebody, I think it was a Guardian writer who even argued that ISIS drew its actual inspiration from the French Revolution and from the scientific enlightenment. You have people like Tariq Ramadan saying that ISIS is not a religious phenomenon, it's purely political. I mean, there's just this tsunami of obscurantism that rises up every time a person attempts to talk about the theological roots of this phenomenon. So how have you encountered that obscurantism and were you taken in by that initially and then gradually deprogrammed through your encounter with sincere believers? What was that like for you in terms of disabusing yourself

of that myth? I had the fortune or maybe misfortune of encountering ISIS-like beliefs or jihadist beliefs abnormally early in my life. I was about, let's see, 20, I was 22 years old when I first met someone who was a follower of bin Laden. I was at a conference in Peshawar, Pakistan. I was just a backpacker passing through, but there was a conference going on, so I was curious what was there. And it was basically a bunch of jihadists who were getting together, and they were in fact addressed remotely by bin Laden himself. So I got to talk to people, and from that early stage, I already had a sense that there was more to jihadism than just political grievance or any of the other things that you listed. And there was certainly, among the people who were part of that group, an absolute devotion to Islamic scriptures and to interpretations of those scriptures that have been around for a long time and are not made up out of thin air in the 20th century or 21st century.

So that came first for me, and some of the apologetic efforts hit my ears well after I knew what the responses were from the jihadist side. For me, the response was so ubiquitous. Every side was saying, especially in this country, that ISIS was not a religious phenomenon, that ISIS was best understood in ways that had little to do with the history of Islam, except for some extreme Islamophobes, of course. So that sentiment was so constant that for me, what was much more interesting was to find the Muslims who were actually opposed to ISIS and who, unlike the ones who would say, hey, slavery has been abolished in Islam permanently and forever,

or that ISIS has no knowledge of its scriptures, was to find the ones who didn't have that level of ignorance or willingness to lie about the history of the religion. And there turned out to be a lot of them who had arguments against ISIS that came from an Islamic perspective, sometimes a very conservative, possibly even jihadist Islamic perspective, and to ask them where they got those ideas as well. Much has been made of the fact that some recruits to the Islamic State were found to buy books with titles like Islam for Dummies, as though this proves that religion played no real role in their behavior because they obviously didn't understand their religion

all that well, or that in some ways their claims of a religious motive must be insincere if they're buying books like that. And again, this is precisely the sort of point that I've heard someone like Reza Aslan make on television, right? I notice you dispatch that idea at some point in the book. Dispatch it here, because that has always struck me as a fairly crazy and, in many cases, insincere point. a fairly crazy and in many cases insincere point. Yeah, there were a couple guys from Birmingham, England, who were trying to get to ISIS territory and had in their amazon.co.uk shopping carts the Quran for dummies and Islam for dummies. And ever since then, you hear this invoked as evidence that these people know nothing about Islam, have no interest in Islam, and it's obviously just not so. The idea that, first of all, that someone who is reading books about Islam has no interest in Islam is self-evidently a non-sequitur. self-evidently a non-sequitur. But beyond that, you have to understand that the amount of time that someone has spent as a devoted jihadist or pious Muslim is not correlated with the intensity

of their feeling of devotion or piety. I think a lot of people think that how do you judge whether someone is a believing Muslim? Well, you look at time in grade. How long has this person been identifying as a Muslim? And the answer for many ISIS supporters is true. It's rather short. But how intensely do they believe this? Quite a lot. So you find people like Mehdi Hassan, now of Al Jazeera, who will at any chance invoke this example. We should say now of The Intercept, right? Isn't he writing for The Intercept? Yeah, I think he's Al Jazeera and The Intercept now. And anytime you talk about this, you're likely to hear someone, not always Mehdi, say, look, this is an example of how foolish these people are. And I'm not saying they're not foolish. I would just point out that educating yourself, reading books about Islam, is the sign of someone who actually cares a lot about this stuff.

Now, the other point that people will make about someone who's reading the Quran for dummies, is that this person is not a learned Muslim. He's not a sheikh or an al-Azhar trained theologian. And I would not deny that. What I think people miss from this, though, in their zeal for denigrating the followers of ISIS, is that in any human population, you would find some people who are novitiates and some people who are a small fraction of people who are learned scholars of the faith. You know, you could go, as Rukmini Kalamaki once said to me, if you went to a small town in Italy and you approached people coming out of mass on a Sunday and you asked them

about obscure doctrines within Catholicism or canon law, the average person would have no idea what you were talking about. Would you then conclude that that person's not Catholic or has no interest in Catholicism? No, the person just came out of mass and probably identifies very closely with Catholicism, just happens not to be someone who is tremendously learned. And that's the case, of course, with the majority of Islamic State recruits as well. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very important point, this time and grade illusion that I think you've aptly named, because the point gets made another way quite frequently, too, which people will say that the person has no background in a madrasa, for instance, right?

This is someone who had a fairly secular background and then all of a sudden has changed his worldview as though no sudden change could be sufficient to count as a real religious conviction. But, of course, people have awakenings to one or another religion all the time. And when you trace people's connection to the rest of the community, what you find rather often is not necessarily jihadism, but you find a religious context which is fairly conservative by any comparison with even with Christian fundamentalism in the West. And as you find throughout the religious landscape, you find that religious ideas are systematically protected from criticism. So the belief in paradise is endemic to planet Earth in one or another form, and it's certainly incredibly well-subscribed throughout the Muslim world among Muslims who

have varying degrees of commitment and knowledge about the faith. And so people who can seem quite secular still live, in many cases, their entire lives in a context where a belief in paradise and the legitimacy of martyrdom and the divine origin of the Quran, all the building blocks of this worldview are in place, whether they've taken a real interest in it or not up until that point. I can give you an example of how some of these ideas go from being dormant to being active. A lot has been said about the apocalyptic side of ISIS. ISIS officially believes that the end of the world is coming, and it's coming at ISIS's instigation at their hand. And it's not going to be pretty, and it's going to cause the Antichrist to come back, and great battles, and so forth. These are not things that are generally spoken of in mosques. If you go

to your local mosque, you're very unlikely to find an imam screaming about the end of the world, just like if you go to your local church. This is probably not going to be the favorite topic of a sermon at any megachurch, although there will be a kind of understanding that these ideas are out there. And in the case of Muslims, as one scholar told me, this is the kind of thing that is told to Muslim kids when they go to bed at night. It's stories to make them be good kids, to obey their mom and dad, to think about good and evil and try to develop a moral sense. They're not stories that are necessarily going to be weaponized into ISIS. They're just part of the folklore of a culture. Now, ISIS, it finds people who have been told these stories, and these are largely benign stories, I think,

and then it comes to them and says, all right, all those stories you've heard that were not emphasized by your religious authorities, they're real. They're happening right now. religious authorities, they're real. They're happening right now. And since people have been hearing them over and over again, it's a fairly simple action to wake them up to the idea that these great battles are happening right now, and you better get there soon, otherwise you'll be thought of in the hereafter as someone who ran away. Yeah, well, I want to talk about the end times prophecies in some detail, because they really are the goofiest stories ever told. And the fact that anyone believes them literally is fairly astonishing. But before we get there, so you said that in the course of reporting this book,

you encountered people who were not mere obscurantists with respect to ISIS, but still disagreed with them. So you found scholars who rather than play hide the ball with the articles of faith, they dealt with the theology of ISIS in a more honest way. I mean, they would acknowledge, for instance, that the prophet had sex slaves, right? Rather than condemn slavery or even sexual slavery, the prophet practiced it, right? This is unambiguous in his biography, and it's not an accident, therefore, that ISIS thinks they can do this, and therefore the challenge is for honest critics of this sort of faith to find a theological basis from which to criticize it. How did those efforts appear to you? Did you find people who

were offering a counterpoint to the theology of ISIS that you felt could sway potential jihadists? There are a few different categories, especially from believing Muslims, of believing Muslims who were opposed to ISIS. There would be some whose main effort was to make Muslims look good. I would put as an example, CARE would probably be one organization that was involved in that and trying to say, look, we are not ISIS. And it's true. They are not ISIS. They're not supportive of ISIS. They are also, though, They are not ISIS. They're not supportive of ISIS. They are also, though, very willing to say things that are false about Islam and about the history of the claim that ISIS doesn't believe what it believes, doesn't say what it says. That's maybe a slightly easier to deal with category. And then you'd find others whose knowledge of their own tradition is extensive enough that

they couldn't possibly simply deny the reality of slavery in Islam or amputation of hands of thieves or beheading sorcerers and apostates. And that last category was what I found to be the, it was first of all, a diverse category. There were many different Muslim scholars, Muslims within it. But it was also the most interesting because, as you say, they were not playing hide the ball. They were instead engaging in a very complicated and sincerely felt battle within the faith. And they would, to take the issue of slavery specifically, one of those earlier categories, they might have said slavery has been abolished in Islam. That is true if you think Islam is the governments of Muslim-majority countries.

They have pretty much all abolished slavery. It is not true of the tradition of Islam, which has, for most of its existence, recognized the legitimacy of slavery and codified the institution. So you'd find one of the most distinguished living Muslim jurists, Taki Usmani, a Pakistani, who said of this argument that slavery has been simply abolished by the consensus of all Muslims to be, he said, so ridiculous it would make a grieving mother laugh. That's the person I wanted to talk to. It was someone who's aware of the place in the tradition and yet was able to give me an explanation of why ISIS's version of this was not okay.

Before we go further in that direction, I just want to comment on this impulse that so many Muslims and their apologists feel to, above all, make sure that Islam doesn't look bad or that Muslims don't look bad in the aftermath of a terrorist attack of the sort we've recently experienced. This is so wrongheaded. I mean, there are few things make the community of Muslims look worse than their reliably lying about the faith. They're lying about the existence of dangerous doctrines which are so easy to find, right? And so whatever the motive for these lies, it can't help but appear sinister. And this ritual is now so widely repeated that it's just, it's become a caricature of itself. You know, in the aftermath of an event like Manchester or London, which just happened,

you have Muslims jumping on the airwaves, either representatives of care or people who claim to be secular. And in fact, in many cases, certainly are secular. You've got people like the comic Dean Obadala, you know, who's got a post on CNN, and they jump on television. And they essentially say, what do you want from us? We condemn terrorism. Look, I condemn terrorism. I'm condemning terrorism. I don't support ISIS. Why is the burden on Muslims to condemn terrorism every time something like this happens? This is, I've hit this before, but I just, I view this as like a public service announcement.

The issue is not that Muslims don't condemn terrorism. Condemning terrorism is a trivially easy thing to do. And it goes without saying that most Muslims don't support the activities of a man who shows up at an Ariana Grande concert and massacres children, right? That need not be said. But what is altogether lacking is an honest acknowledgement that this violence is arising out of sincere belief in the truth of specific religious doctrines. And that is the problem. Muslims don't have to condemn terrorism. They have to condemn the doctrines of martyrdom and jihad, which is a much heavier lift, right, theologically and socially.

And they need to condemn all of the triumphal bullshit about Islam eventually conquering the world. That is ISIS's message. And that's what has to be confronted head on by honest, secular, liberal, or otherwise conservative and nonetheless tolerant Muslims. And that is something, I mean, I feel like I can count on one hand, maybe two hands at most, the people who honestly do that reliably. And someone like Majid Nawaz, who gets on CNN and just, you can, every time there's a new terrorist event and we see the same shills for delusion jump on television, it really is just crazy. I'm largely in agreement with what you just said. I will say I do get the question all the time. 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

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