Ladies and gentlemen, Los Angeles. Good evening and welcome to Liberty Centre.
My name is Eugene Rogan and on behalf of the fellows of the Liberty Centre,
it's my great pleasure to launch this first seminar of our Friday seminar series.
It's not an entirely innocent initiative to explore the state of the field in contemporary Islamic studies.
Indeed, our Speaker today didn't even realise what the back agenda had been until he appeared today and I feel today.
But the fact is, we're going to be launching a search to refill the chair in contemporary Islamic studies.
And we thought it's a subject we haven't really had the opportunity to explore in
great depth recently and what a good opportunity to get to know the field better.
So we're hoping to get a number of practitioners from the field of contemporary Islamic studies to come and help us realise where
the field is going in a way that will lead us to successful recruitment and the best possible appointment to join this community.
So we have eight speakers lined up.
I will skip this week's speaker and lead the honour of introducing him to our chair for tonight, Professor Longino.
But we will be covering the whole range of the field next week.
We have Professor Asma as far as dean from Indiana, Indiana University in Bloomington.
We will have a week three fund lecture from Seattle School ID, Week four, Professor Katrina de la Cura for the NSC in week five.
Professor US Volcanic is from Utrecht in the Netherlands.
Week six Professor Rachel Scott, who will be coming to us from Virginia Tech.
Week seven, Dr. LV and Vehicle was coming from the University of Edinburgh and Week eight
Professor Sahara Siddiqui coming from Georgetown University's campus in Qatar.
We feel that each of these scholars is really opening new avenues of exploring our field in ways which will provide for fantastic seminars.
And so I count on seeing you week in, week out for the seminar as it unfolds.
But I'd like to get right down to the business of this week's seminar, and I'd like to invite my colleague, Professor Nabeel to introduce US Speaker.
So welcome and please come back. So it is now my turn to to to welcome you.
My name is Eugene. Just told you and I am delighted to welcome today Professor Mohammed Halim.
Professor Halil is a Professor of Religious Studies and Adjunct Professor of
Law and Director of the Muslim Studies Program at Michigan State University.
He specialises in Islamic thought. He has edited various volumes, such as between heaven and [INAUDIBLE], Islam,
Salvation and the Fate of others, and also, more recently, Muslims and US politics.
Today, a defining moment. And he's also the editor of and the lead investigator of the Muslims of the Midwest Digital Archive.
However, as many of you will know,
Professor Khalili is author of Islam and the Fate of Others The Salvation Question that was published by Oxford University Press in 2001,
and also of jihad, radicalism and The New, which was published by the University Press of the other place in 2017.
And as you will have noticed, the title of that book is not completely unrelated to the topic of his lecture today.
So, Professor Hamid, looking forward to you and your partner.
Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Professor. You for that generous introduction.
It's a pleasure to be with you all. Many thanks to Professor Eugene Rogan and the fellows of the Middle East Centre for inviting me.
Professor Rogan has been a very gracious host.
And I also I'd like to thank Stacey Churcher and Caroline Davis for arranging this lovely visit and you all for being here on a Friday, 5 p.m.
In the midst of a lively televised exchange between journalist Fareed Zakaria or Zakaria, as it's commonly pronounced, and neuroscientist Sam Harris.
On the topic of Jehad Zakaria declared, The problem is you and Osama bin Laden agree.
After all, you're saying his interpretation of Islam is correct.
Well, Harris responded. His interpretation.
This is the problem. His interpretation of Islam is very straightforward and honest.
And you really have to split hairs and do some interpretive acrobatics to make it look non-canonical.
This exchange took place a little more than 13 years after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
In the years following the 911 tragedy, various individuals known as New Atheists have produced influential anti theistic and anti religious works.
And perhaps, needless to say, the new atheists represent only themselves and not atheists more generally.
In fact, some of their most vocal critics are other atheists.
In any case, much of the focus of New Atheist works has been on Islam.
Some new atheist writers were themselves profoundly transformed by 911.
In the case of the prominent X Muslim writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for instance, her doubts about Islam were supplanted by non-belief when she found it,
as she puts it, impossible to discount bin Laden's claims that the murderous destruction of innocent lives is consistent with the program.
As for Harris, he reportedly began writing his landmark book, The End of Faith, on September 12, 2001.
In this New York Times bestseller,
Harris writes that the future of Islam most troubling to non-Muslims is the very principle bin Laden invoked to justify 911 jihad.
And as the English evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins would have it, it was belief in the literal truth,
the literal truth of the Koran that led 19 well-educated middle class men to kill thousands of people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
And by the way, I have to tell you, I just feel a great sense of trepidation of talking about Dawkins on his home turf.
In this presentation, I intend to scrutinise some especially influential New Atheists claims regarding violence in Islam.
Now some might ask why talk about the New Atheists?
Isn't this giving them undue attention? Well, I've chosen to focus on the new atheists,
largely because of their unique and ostensibly significant influence on Western and to some extent non-Western intellectual discourse.
Having taught in the humanities at two public research universities in the American Midwest,
I have found that many of my own colleagues and students have been and continue to be more profoundly influenced by the writings of new atheists than,
say, polemical works by far right and religiously affiliated critics of Islam, whose impact is more obvious in other contexts.
As such, I don't think it makes much sense to ignore the New Atheists.
I discuss some of their claims and arguments in my book Jihad, Radicalism and the New Atheism.
And please excuse the shameless plug and I'm sorry that it was published by the other members.
Now, I must say this was a dark project, quite unlike my first book on Salvation and Divine Mercy, which was published.
Nevertheless, this was a project I felt compelled to undertake.
Today, I'd like to focus on the new atheist claim that Muslim terrorism can be best explained by faithfulness to Islamic scripture.
And of course, this theme is not unique to the New Atheists. And in the brief time I have,
I'd like to pay special attention to the ever influential writings of Sam Harris so critical of all monotheistic traditions.
Harris has much to say about what he calls the problem with Islam.
The title of one of the chapters of The End of Faith. Indeed, from the very beginning of this book, Harris casts a light on this particular problem.
Harris opens the end of faith in dramatic fashion, depicting a scene in which a suicide bomber detonates himself in a crowded bus.
Harris tells us that the bombers parents are sad when they hear the news,
but also feel tremendous pride because they know that he has gone to heaven and has sent his victims to [INAUDIBLE] for eternity.
It is a double victory, assuming we know nothing else about the bomber,
such as his past economic status, intelligence, educational background or profession.
Harris rhetorically asks, Why is it so easy, so trivially easy?
You could almost bet your life on an easy to guess the young man's religion.
HARRIS His point here is clear religious beliefs in this case, Islamic ones, can be dangerous.
But I'll come back to this point. Inspired as he was by 911 to compose the end of faith.
Harris has much to say about the problem of Muslim suicide terrorism.
As he presents it, it is Islamic ideology that best explains this phenomenon.
After all, Harris notes, Muslim terrorists define themselves in religious terms.
Of course, the same is true for many of their Muslim opponents.
A much larger group. For Harris, however,
the exception often proves the rule and his efforts to cast Islamic doctrines of jihad and martyrdom as a sufficient explanation for Muslim terrorism.
He highlights the case of a so-called failed Palestinian suicide bomber named as a dead Zeidan.
The letter, Harris writes, described being pushed to attack Israelis by the love of martyrdom.
He's done added, I didn't want revenge for anything.
I just wanted to be a martyr.
Mr. Then the would be martyr conceded that his Jewish captors were better than many,
many Arabs with regard to the suffering that his death would have inflicted upon his family.
He reminded his interviewer that a martyr gets to pick 70 people to join him in paradise.
He would have been sure to invite his family along that Paris far.
They then story was revealing and representative of a broader phenomenon of faith.
Leading directly to destruction is suggested by the fact that this quoted passage appears in the introductory chapter of The End of Faith.
Paris does not tell us anything else about death.
But there is, in fact, more to his story. When discussing and quoting Sudan parasites, a June eight, 22 New York Times article,
a close reading of this article reveals another side to the would be suicide bomber, too.
What was he then? To quote the article. Excuse me.
Zaidoun, a fifth grade dropout who could read but not write, became a carpenter, then a pedlar of newspapers and other products in Israel.
When the latest conflict began in September 2000, he said he saw work fruitlessly in Jenin,
settling for a couple of hours, spent each day carrying boxes of vegetables in the market there.
The rest of the day, he spent sleeping or hanging around a pool hall smoking.
Then he happened to watch a religious lesson on television that convinced him he was wasting his time in what he called his life's turning point.
He quit billiards and began going to the mosque regularly.
Eventually, he stopped smoking. He insisted that he was drawn to martyrdom.
By what? By what he read in books, not by anything he heard from his imam.
After Israel first raided Jenin refugee camp at the beginning of March,
Mr. Zeidan said he began to think seriously about becoming a suicide bomber with regard to his planned attack.
He insisted that he had sought to kill only soldiers, whom he described as overwhelming adversaries.
The author of this article, James Bennett, informs us that his two plus hour a conversation with Zaidoun,
then 18 years old, took place in an Israeli hospital shortly after the failed attack.
Was it then was expecting to be prosecuted? Guarded by two Israeli police officers manacled by a wrist and an ankle to his bed.
He said bitterly that he knew that he would be jailed for life and remembered only as a terrorist.
I feel sorry because it was a mistake, he said.
But as a human being, I should live like others the way that there is, the way there's an Israeli state.
There are people living in this state, enjoying life, having someone protect them.
I don't live in this situation. I don't feel I'm secure.
Soldiers can enter Jenin at any time, he said, and he constantly feared being arrested.
As long as life continues like this, he said.
You will have people who think like me. He insisted that he wanted peace, but he saw little chance for it.
Now, assuming he dead, genuinely sought martyrdom,
it is difficult to overlook the obvious political dimensions of his actions, his challenging life experiences,
his limited education, and the circumstances of his conversation with Bennett,
the author of the article with Israeli Officers Nearby and a Trial Looming.
Incidentally, Bennett, the author of the article himself, calls into question the trustworthiness.
They then, he writes, insisted today that he has not detonated his bomb, but instead had been shot twice in the stomach by soldiers.
That account was not supported by his wounds, according to the hospital.
Remember all Harris tells us about the dad's motivation to attack Israelis, and that is that he was driven by a love of martyrdom.
Furthermore, Harris never conveys the dense criticisms of the Israeli army.
Instead, Harris simply tells us that if he then conceded that his Jewish captors were better than many, many Arabs.
This is a remarkable example of cherry picking. And we see something similar in Harris's treatment of Islamic scripture,
as he cites various translated Koranic passages without giving due consideration to their respective contexts,
the surrounding passages and other more precise translations.
And here, I think, an effective antidote is your speaker next week.
Professor Asmus already in and specifically her book, Striving in the Path of God.
Here, Professor of Saladin,
examines various Koranic passages on jihad and warfare and reveals the various ways that Muslim commentators have interpreted such passages.
When talking about Jehad, Harris's sources are limited as he relies heavily on the late Bernard Lewis.
I'll say more about Professor Lewis in just a moment.
Muslim scholarly sources are noticeably absent from his bibliography, and this might explain the following passage from the end of faith.
Harris writes Surely there are Muslim jurists who might say that suicide bombing is contrary to the tenets of Islam.
Where are those jurists, by the way? And the suicide bombers are therefore not martyrs, but fresh denizens of [INAUDIBLE].
Such a minority opinion, if it exists, cannot change the fact that suicide bombings have been rationalised by much of the Muslim world.
Of course, the reality is that when Harris was writing this multitudes not all, of course,
but multitudes of prominent clerics and scholars, had publicly and explicitly condemned suicide missions and terrorism or more broadly.
At one point, Harris remarks, one can only marvel that suicide bombing is now more widespread and is focussed firmly on Muslim terrorism.
Harris neglects the broader Muslim landscape. He was apparently unaware, for instance,
that suicide attacks of any kind were historically uncommon in the Sunni tradition claimed by Sunni terrorists.
Interestingly, the very authority Harris relies on when discussing jihad, Professor Bernard Lewis,
who was hardly an apologist for Islam, had this to say in a 2009 co-authored work.
The emergence of the by now widespread terrorism practice of suicide bombing is a development of the 20th
century and has no antecedents in Islamic history and no justification in terms of Islamic theology,
law or tradition. It is a pity that those who practice this form of terrorism are not better acquainted with
their own religion and with the culture that grew up under the auspices of that religion.
Recall that Harris opens the end of faith by depicting a suicide bomber and then asking the reader why it is so easy to guess his religion.
But Harris never grapples with the fact that before the early 1980s, there was no such thing as a muslim suicide bomber.
And even after that, even after the early 1980s,
the tactic of suicide bombing was never once employed in a conflict as intense as the Soviet Afghan war,
a war, incidentally, that involved so-called mujahideen and foreign fighters like bin Laden.
Nevertheless, as Harris would have it, Muslims have not found anything of substance to say against suicide terrorism,
including the actions of the September 11 hijackers.
This, of course, is an unfortunate myth. The reality is that the targeting of innocents to say nothing of the kamikaze method of attack was
a recurring theme in the September 21 condemnations issued by countless scholars and clerics.
But not only does Harris in the end of faith, seem aloof to the major currents of Islamic thought,
he also fails to maintain a consistent line of reasoning.
Consider his statements on pacifism twice in the end of faith, Harris contrasts Islam with the pacifist Jain religion.
First, he states that there's a reason we must now confront Muslim rather than Jane terrorists in every corner of the world.
And that's and that reason is simply the nature of the Islamic tradition, according to Harris.
Now, I should note that the entire Jane population would amount to no more than one half
of 1% of the worldwide Muslim population and is mostly concentrated in one country,
India. In any case. Second, Harris asserts that in contrast with Islamic fundamentalism,
a rise of Jane fundamentalism would endanger no one because observant Jains will generally not kill anything, including insects.
And so one gets the impression that pacifism endangers no one.
Okay. And yet, just a few pages earlier, and in the context of defending the use of military technology,
Harris describes pacifism as a deeply immoral position that comes to us, swaddled in the dogma of highest moralism.
It allows a variety of monsters currently loose in the world to threaten the rest of us.
Then, shortly after defending the limited use of torture when dealing with terrorists,
he elaborates on the false choice of pacifism and explains why we must accept the fact that violence or its threat is often an ethical necessity.
Thus, Harris's conception of legitimate violence actually overlaps to a large extent with that of many Muslims.
Actually, it seems to exceed the views of many other Muslims.
But let's get back to Harris's main argument as he sees it.
What makes Muslim extremists extreme is their devotion to the literal word of the poor and the Hadith.
Violent radicals we are led to believe are monsters precisely because of their close adherence to the letter of Scripture.
This is a point Harris makes in various writings, including The End of Faith.
In his 2015 co-authored book Islam and the Future of Tolerance, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Richard Dawkins make similar claims in their respective works.
In her 2015 book, Heretic Ali remarks that since 911, she has been making a simple argument in response to Muslim terrorism.
It is foolish to insist, as our leaders habitually do,
that the violent acts of radical Islamists can be divorced from the religious ideals that inspire them.
Thus, those who maintain that Muslim terrorism is actually a problem of poverty,
insufficient education or any other social precondition are offering, as she puts it, facile explanations.
This is because Islamic violence is rooted in the foundational texts of Islam itself.
Dawkins makes similar claims in his 2006 New York Times bestseller, The God Delusion.
But in blaming Islam's foundational texts for contemporary terrorism while downplaying other factors Harris,
Ali and Dawkins present explanations that are just as facile as those of the apologists they criticise.
In evaluating the claim that Muslim terrorism can be best explained by scriptural literalism.
Let us consider two case studies. The first is the justifications for terrorism presented in a 2017 ISIS publication.
The second is bin Laden's justifications for the killing of innocent civilians on 911.
Now, there's a lot to say about ISIS or ISIL or their.
But at the interest of time, I'd like to focus on a single article that appeared in January 2017 in an issue of the online magazine Lumiere.
ISIS magazine.
The article entitled Collateral Carnage presents a justification for terrorism against its enemies and the killing of Innocent Civilians.
According to this anonymous article, although Muslims may not exclusively target non-threatening non-Muslim women and children,
such innocents may be generally attacked nonetheless if they are not distinctly isolated or easily distinguishable from enemy non-Muslim men.
And according to this particular article, all such men would be considered combatants.
This, by the way, contradicts the May 2017 issue of Rumi, which notes that some categories of men are not to be treated as combatants.
So we actually have a contradiction. Within just a few months.
And this is but one illustration to me of how inconsistent these ICC documents are in any case,
to justify the collateral killing of innocent women and children.
The Aisha, the ISI's author, points to two reported prophetic precedents.
One is the prophet permitting the use of Manganos.
The author uses the broader term catapults, which the author claims were common in siege warfare even during the life of the Prophet.
They were common. The Rumi author's assumption is that the Prophet used a weapon of mass destruction that led to the deaths of innocents.
But a careful examination of the various authoritative Hadith collections and biographies of the Prophet seem to undermine this key assumption.
Some biographies do not bother to mention the use of Manganos at all.
Others mention it in passing,
and the detailed account we have paints a picture quite different from those seeking to legitimise massive collateral killings.
In the rare detailed account we have.
We read that the Prophet's Persian Companions and Men and Ferdowsi, who often has a perhaps is very conveniently there to offer military suggestions,
suggested the use of a on to breach the walls of the fortress of the Bellicose Thief tribe.
Accordingly, the Muslims constructed imaginal, but they never actually put it to use as the individuals who were attempting to operate
it were killed when the forces of the thief attacked them with hot iron and arrows.
The Muslim armies have subsequently continued to lay siege to the fortress without the use of manganese.
Thus, according to this account, the Prophet only tried to use Imagine a once in a brief,
unsuccessful attempt to breach walls that were guarded by combatants.
This is very different from how it's presented in the ISI's article.
The Oasis author praises the way When you read the ISIS article,
you get the impression of things being shot over the wall and killing whoever happened to be there.
The ISIS author seems to be unaware of such details.
Another invoked president comes from a Hadith recorded by Bukhari and Muslim,
in which the Prophet is queried as to whether it would be permissible to attack an enemy force at night when it's dark.
And he responds in the affirmative, indicating that any non-combatants harmed collaterally are of the combatants.
We can call this the they are of them Hadith.
With this in mind, the ISIS author goes even further and asserts the best practice known as the Hadith just said it's permissible.
The Oasis author says the best practice.
When conducting raids is to start during the night or at the break of dawn before the sun rises while the enemy is asleep.
At such a time, it is very likely to enter buildings where no light shines and an adult male is not easily distinguishable from women and children.
The author attempts to buttress this claim that it is best to attack in the dark while the enemy is sleeping.
By pointing to the example of God for the poor and states that God destroyed many towns at night or while people were sleeping in the afternoon.
This represents a remarkable conflation of the human with the divine.
As for the normative example of the prophet,
the ISIS author makes no reference to and demonstrates no awareness of the well known Hadith recorded by Bukhari.
That indicates that the Prophet actually never started an attack at night.
As such, the ISIS author can hardly be described as a literalist, especially when one considers that one of the most widely accepted.
Hadiths explicitly states that it is impermissible to kill women and children.
And of course, there are other hadiths concerning various categories of non-combatants men.
As for bin Laden. Recall that in the exchange between Fareed Zakaria and Sam Harris,
the latter has continued to point to bin Laden as a modern Muslim and one whose interpretation is honest and straightforward.
But consider some of the interpretive acrobatics bin Laden performed in his generally unsuccessful attempt to convince Muslim clerics and Islamists,
including many who already held anti-American sentiments, that the killing of civilians on 911 could be justified.
Recognising the prophet's explicit prohibition against the killing of non-combatants, most notably women and children,
bin Laden argued that applied Nikita's tactics against the US were necessary and serve the common good.
Notwithstanding indications to the contrary.
And although the 911 attacks were directed mostly at civilians, many busy at work, he asserted that he was not targeting innocents,
but rather the symbol of a threatening enemy and that collateral casualties were therefore acceptable,
an assertion widely regarded as disingenuous for good measure.
However, he also attempted to make an obviously modern argument that American adult civilians
could be treated as combatants because both the taxes they paid as required
by law and the decisions made by their government officials were neither
unanimously elected nor unanimously supported helped shape U.S. foreign policy.
And finally, notwithstanding his superficial claim that he was not targeting innocents,
he endeavoured to advance and defend an apparent expansive conception of retaliation
in order to justify the intentional killing of American non-combatants.
Now, I'd like to spend some time on this last point.
In October 2001, bin Laden was interviewed by the well-known Al-Jazeera reporter to sit on an interview that was not aired until January 22.
In this conversation, which is said to be the most revealing exchange with bin Laden on record.
Bin Laden responded to the claim that the 911 hijackers had killed innocents.
He remarked, It is very strange for Americans and other educated people to talk about the killing of innocent civilians.
I mean, who said that our children and civilians are not innocents and they're shedding
the setting of their blood is permissible whenever we kill their civilians.
The whole world yells at us from east to west,
and America starts putting pressure on its allies and puppets who said that our blood isn't blood and that their blood is blood?
What about the people that have been killed in our lands for decades?
He would go on to declare that his people that his people killed the civilians among the disbelievers in response to their killing of Muslims.
Here, the interviewer, Looney interjected. So you say that this is an eye for an eye.
They kill our innocence. So we kill their innocence. So we kill their innocence.
Goodlatte replied, This is valid both religiously and logically,
but some of the people who talk about this issue discuss it from a religious point of view.
He asked, what is their proof? He's here talking about the religious scholars who have condemned 911.
And he asked, what is their proof? Bin Laden answered.
They say that the killing of innocents is wrong and invalid.
And for proof, they say that the prophet forbid the killing of children and women.
And that is true. It is valid and has been laid down by the Prophet in an authentic tradition.
Alluding here interjects This is precisely what I'm talking about.
This is exactly what I'm asking you about. Bin Laden continues, but this forbidding of killing children and innocence is not set in stone.
And there are other writings that uphold it. Bin Laden proceeded to quote the perennial injunction.
If you believers respond to an attack, make your response proportionate to a 16 first 126.
This verse appears in a passage that, according to most of the well-known commentaries on the Koran, actually encourages restraint.
In any case. Bin Laden continued the scholars and people of knowledge among them.
So have FDR in the same year and in the play, you and I, so can and many others.
And then Pataudi may God bless him in his poetry and commentary.
Say that if the disbelievers were to kill our children and women, then we should not feel ashamed to do the same to them,
mainly to deter them from trying to kill our children and women again.
Now, notice how bin Laden invoked these four scholars to justify his expansive conception of justifiable retribution.
The reality, however, is that while various scholars legitimised in cases of necessity or dharuhera collateral damage
and the use of certain destructive methods in response to an enemy's use of such methods,
they generally did not condone the intentional killing of innocents as a means of retaliation.
In fact, the Koranic commentator bin Laden invoked to justify this practice and put it,
if you remember here, he says that virtually may God bless them.
It is foreign country, actually, and it ought to be in his Koran commentary explicitly rejects what bin Laden ascribes to him explicitly.
He states that even if enemy forces killed our women and children and made us grieve on account of this,
then it is still not permissible for us to kill them intentionally in a similar manner to cause them to grieve and be sad.
This statement comes from a report of his commentary on the Koranic directive.
Do not let hatred of others lead you away from justice, but adhere to justice, for that is closer to awareness of God.
So here are five verse eight. By the way, I have to tell you, when I encountered this, I was in shock.
Usually you don't find something this clear cut, somebody invoking a scholar and the scholar says the exact opposite.
The available writings of the other scholars invoked by bin Laden reveal no obvious departure from a thought to be on this matter.
Now there's a lot more, one could say about bin Laden's variously, ostensibly contradictory justifications for the 911 attacks.
Suffice it to say that he was by no means a true literalist when it comes to the rules of war.
Of course, the same could be said about Muslims in general and Muslims in general.
They're not all literalists.
And yet it is critical to recognise that the attempts of al Qaeda and ISIS to justify terrorism on Islamic grounds typically
require the abandonment of both strict literalism and the historically prevailing interpretations of Islamic thought.
The interpretations of such violent radicals are hardly straightforward.
They are their own thing. Yet we cannot simply leave it at that.
We must ask what motivated the 911 hijackers to kill thousands of civilians and themselves?
How can we explain the various acts of self-sacrificial terrorism committed by ISIS members and others?
Various prominent new atheist authors explain such phenomena by pointing to Islam not idiosyncratic interpretations of the religion.
But the core of the religion itself. And downplaying other factors.
While the worldwide Muslim scholarly and clerical condemnations of Muslim terrorism show that Al Qaida never did with Al Qaida,
ISIS and other violent radicals are on the fringes of the jihad tradition.
Harris, as I shall explain,
places them firmly in the centre and I on Hirsi Ali suggest that such radicals are not in fact a lunatic fringe of extremists,
as Richard Dawkins sees it. The matter is fairly simple.
Suicide bombers do what they do because they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools,
that duty to God exceeds all other priorities and that martyrdom in His service will be rewarded in the gardens of Paradise.
Now compare such assessments with the more incisive analysis offered by Jessica Stern.
Based on her research, Professor Stern finds that terrorists are typically motivated by multiple
factors and that terrorist movements often arise in reaction to an injustice,
real or imagined, and they that they feel must be corrected.
Terrorism, she adds, spreads in part through bad ideas.
The most dangerous and seductive, bad ideas spreading around the globe today is a distorted and destructive interpretation of Islam,
which asserts that killing innocents is a way to worship God.
Part of the solution must come from within Islam and from Islamic scholars who can refute this ideology with arguments based on theology and ethics.
But bad ideas are only part of the problem.
Terrorists prey on vulnerable populations, people who feel humiliated or victimised or who find their identities by joining extremist movements.
So Stern goes on to offer suggestions for how to strengthen vulnerable populations.
Now, there can be little doubt that some form of religious faith is indeed a critical motivating factor for many not all, but many Muslim terrorists.
But their religion is distinct in important ways from the broader and historical Islamic tradition.
I can understand why, as a journalist, Graham Wood of The Atlantic would characterise ISIS members as being Islamic.
They identify as such, they invoke Islamic tradition. What is problematic, however, is Wood's added emphasis.
Various men. Now I'd like to close by returning to Sam Harris.
Less than a month before his aforementioned interview with Fareed Zakaria.
Harris had appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher. How many of you remember this?
Oh, it's just a few of. In the midst of a heated exchange with actor Ben Affleck on the subject of Islam.
Harris, having stated that he was actually well educated on the topic, proclaimed,
We have to be able to criticise bad ideas and Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas.
He proceeded to claim, By the way, this is the moment I decided to write this book.
He proceeded to claim that suicide bombers occupy the centre of Muslim communities.
He added, We were misled to think that the fundamentalists are the fringe.
To which host Bill Maher chimed in. That's the key point.
The Islam that Harris portrays in his writings doesn't indeed appear to be a motherlode of bad ideas.
But it is an Islam that the vast majority of Muslims, whether scholars or laypeople, would likely not recognise.
A motherlode of bad analysis. It is even more extreme in some ways than bin Laden's Islam.
This is because Harris draws a nearly straight line from the Islamic tradition to 911.
He erroneously downplays the significance of non-religious factors when when assessing
the al Qaeda leader asserting that bin Laden's grievances were purely theological.
Bin Laden's Islam, however, was not that simple.
His views on jihad were formed through convoluted reasoning and guided by a warped perception of geopolitical reality.
Notwithstanding their profound differences, the same is generally true for ISIS.
As such, Zakaria missed the mark when he told Harris, The problem is you and Osama bin Laden agree.
After all, you're saying his interpretation of Islam is correct, in point of fact.
HARRIS His interpretation of Islam is so abhorrent, so extreme that it cannot even be ascribed to Osama bin Laden.
And on December no, I thank you for listening. Thank you.