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 we'll 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 samherris.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. If you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am back with Rory Stewart. Rory, thanks for doing this. Sam Harris, thank you for having me back. I'll turn over to你 today to the screen next week to show you all the more crossovers discussed many things related to the failures of nation building about what 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, you know, 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 the bad Muslims.
I mean, I just did a interview with an American podcast, I called Sam Harris, who was hammering me for nearly an hour saying, yes, but shortly 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? Well, 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 makes sense of it kind of selfish. It was thousands of miles away and affected and killed so many thousands of Americans. But for me, it was a day I always remember.
When 9-11 took place one at Tuesday, I think coming back from school and school bus home, you know, Rady was on, he kind of hear what was going on in the driver's town this is a shower because he was trying to listen to what was going on, went home and saw the scenes as you guys would have seen a 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 be able to talk about the things that teenage boys talk about mainly my case Celtic, and football club I loved. And they were bombarding me, not with any maliciousness. So bombarding me with questions that I had no idea the answer to. You know, why did Muslims hate America, do you know who was behind it, what was it all about? So now I want to have a clue. Right.
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, I've never even passed before then, there is definitely still a deep-broted systemic and endemic Islamophobia in this country. And Scotland is absolutely not immune to that. You were speaking with Humza Yusuf, 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.
So anyway, that's how I propose to start. So feel free to chime in and then we'll get rolling. Sure. Let me 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 can, 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 call 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 listener 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 where of you are. So you slug 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 we were, I was still in this conversation, which you're quite right.
We had not begun with the first half hours of being 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 spend about 20 minutes on this. And then I guess the third thing that I need to apologize for you for is that I don't think in any way you have some animus against Muslims. What I was uncomfortable about is slightly more complicated thing to explain.
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 precious to against Muslims. Well, yeah. So I appreciate the apology and that's a good example of a good one just apologizing in a such a straightforward way.
I just, 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 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 to say. And that's just, I just know that's not true of me and or surprise that you could seem to imagine that it might be. But I'm much more... Can I, can I, someone 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. I don't think I thought that you were... But you were...
But that's what I am. That I am. So that's all... That's a problem. 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 and my podcast is that I 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 perpetuity saying, yeah, you're right.
There's a lot of, you know, 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 Muslim friends and I should have been braver and less apologetic and 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 wait appropriately.
And for instance, I'll just stipulate that you have much, much more experience than I do of being much less living to say not to say nothing of living in Muslim majority countries which I have never done. Right?
I've traveled to some degree in them but, you know, so you have, I can only imagine you have scores of, if not hundreds of Muslim friends and, you know, that I can't say that of myself and so there's a wealth of experience, everything from your speaking various native languages to where you're having spent time living in the homes of Muslims. I mean, there's just no comparison, right? Your TE Lawrence, you know, compared to me.
And yet I still would argue that there are certain things here that you're very likely wrong about and so there's the, it's worth, you know, threading this needle. And can I also say, sorry, I'm going to be mean here. I'm very, very happy to do this and let's do some of this but I'd also love to move on to some other subjects. There's some, 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 didn't think either of us are a deep Arabic scholars. So I think there may be, 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 mean, I just, I think that's untrue. I mean, I think, and we'll get there. But let me just make two claims, which I think could sharpen up our whatever disagreement we were 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, you know, 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. You know, as 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 think if you set it up in that way, you're setting it up in a difficult light. Well, I think that phrase is a pretty unfortunate phrase. Who produced that phrase? I don't know. I'm suspicious of that. It's often attributed to Christopher Hitchens, but it was not him, but it has a very hitch-like condition. But and Barb, but my point is that there's no question that the term is confusing 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 just come in on this? I can see the distinction, but is it not possible that those two things are more closely connected than 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, or 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. Right? 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. Right? So, that's a bit different. I think the Islamophobia is making a different kind of claims, isn't it? It's not really. I mean, you're talking there about some from racists, aren't you?
I think Islamophobia, in my experience, is often used as a kind of synonym for racism. I mean, maybe in the U.S. 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 expression on the individual that holds that belief. For example, if you... 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 Nazism. I'm not prejudiced against people who hold that belief. I mean, Nazismophobia, presumably by its definition, is a fear of Islam. It's not a... Or a phobia towards Islam. You're one with the two words as Islam, not towards a particular group of people. I mean, it's something that could be applied to a white Muslim.
Okay. Could be applied to a Bosnian. So, exactly. 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 believe us 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 synastronical 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. 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 some are...
And then to say nothing of ex-Muslims, 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. 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.
You know, my grandfather was 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.
So that it's all about castigating people as racist and bigots whenever they criticize Islam as a set of ideas. Right. Now, to take to move to your point of, let's purify our conception of the term. It obviously just relates to a religion instead 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? You know, because if you really think these beliefs are dangerous.
And let me take it to its extreme. I mean, 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, Nazis are uniquely evil ideology, but I have nothing against Nazis themselves. Except, right there, you know, if you look at, you really have to do a little work to make the analogy run through.
If you imagine people who have been brainwashed from the moment they could understand language into Nazism, right? So 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, you know, what are four inches shorter than their South Korean brothers and sisters and they think they're a master race. I mean, it's just, it's 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, one is you, 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 Islam's.
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. I'm 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 wanted to do here. Right.
So let me just make my second claim that I wanted to make it the outset just to frame the conversation because I think it will land us in the territory where we really, where our differences are obvious.
And 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 Islam of Obia means really does relate to the ideas and not to superficial characteristics like people's skin color and culture and etc. Which is fine again, but that you know, when you come to America, I will I'll show you around.
The second claim is that while every religion has its fanatics, right, and there are, you know, 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 this, where other religions have done this.
But generally speaking, there's only one religion that has made it unsafe for people to criticize it or indeed for its own members to leave it. And in my experience only, and I've been criticizing, I've been, I really have lived on the front lines of this for now 20 years as a, 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 spend 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 Islam's.
I, 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 the same other. I mean, as I said, I lived in Indonesia and Indonesia as 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, but that is you're a former Muslim, you're now disavow the faith and now you, you know, you start having your apostasy podcast and you'll be safe in one of those societies. So this is where I come back to the many different Islam's. 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 are 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 Muslims friends would not in any way support the notion of executing people for apostasy. So I think this is the question, questions to degree. I mean, you may be right that there are more 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 their same beliefs. Well, no, no, this really is a red herring worry.
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 then 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.
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. That's true of every faith. So there's every variant of this. 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, but let me come in on that. Well, you keep interrupting me and I can't... I just gotta let me land the point. I'm gonna give you more to react to. Or you keep derailing me before I give you... Four different claims. Let me write it down there.
I'll write down that first claim that there's no religion that doesn't, that responds in that way to apostasy. Okay. Okay. I'll need that. Yeah. And again, you just need to only spend time with ex-Muslims to know how poorly advertised this experience is, but how widespread it is. And I would also additionally argue it's not an accident again. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samherris.org.
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