A latter-day Hitchens decries the “No true Muslim” fallacy

February 9, 2015 • 1:30 pm

I swear—Salon is driving me nuts. I swore off reading it after it went the route of routinely attacking (and mischaracterizing) the arguments of “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. But then someone comes along and writes a cogent Salon piece exposing the delusions and harms of religion and stating forthrightly that there’s no reason to believe in God.  So I’m forced to read Salon again.

I would have thought that a website might espouse a unified point of view. Sure, it should give contrasting viewpoints, but one looks for some overall theme to a paper or website, at least in its editorial content. We all know that the New York Times is leftish, though it does publish conservative columnists like Ross Douthat. But Salon seems to have no viewpoint: it publishes wildly disparate pieces. I doubt it does so to promote a “balanced” view—more likely it’s done to attract as many clicks as possible. For every person who wants to read a piece attacking Islam, there are several more who want to read a piece praising Reza Aslan. All bases covered.

But I digress, for I want to call your attention to a new piece by Jeffrey Tayler, who is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. He’s written some good pieces espousing nonbelief before, and I’ve highlighted them on this site (you can find one example here). His piece published yesterday, “It’s time to fight religion: Toxic drivel, useful media idiots, and the real story about faith and violence,” is sufficiently strident to have been written by Hitchens, and makes many of the same points that Hitch did when he began attacking faith. But amidst the cowardice of those who won’t show the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, of those loathsome apologists who say that terrorists and their movements like ISIS aren’t “true Islam,” and even of those atheists who give Islam a pass because, after all, most of its adherents are people of color, we have the strong voice of Tayler exposing the nonsense of the “no true Muslim” fallacy.

Just a few excerpts. First Taylor gives the roll call of cowards and apologists (my emphasis):

Serial Islam-apologist Reza Aslan appeared on Charlie Rose‘s show and admitted that the Quran has “of course” served as a “source of violence” for terrorists, but then resorted to his usual tiresome Derrida-esque double-talk when it came to discussing his religion’s material role in the killings. “We bring our own values and norms to our scriptures; we don’t extract them from our scriptures.”

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, an unwitting recidivist “useful idiot” for Islamism, cautioned us to avoid “religious profiling” and contended that “The great divide is not between faiths. Rather it is between terrorists and moderates, between those who are tolerant and those who ‘otherize.’” He is apparently unaware of Islamic traditions dividing the world into Dar al-Islam (the Abode of Islam, or Muslim regions) and Dar al-Harb (the Abode of War, where Muslims must strive against, and even do battle with, infidels, in order to convert them.

. . . Susan Milligan, writing in U.S. News and World Report, opined that news outlets should feel no pressure to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, since “This isn’t about religion or respect, and it insults every peace-loving practicing Muslim to suggest otherwise.” Wow. Has she converted to Islam? What gives her the right to speak for “every peace-loving practicing Muslim?”

There are other examples, but foulest of all were the excretions emanating from James Zogby, president and founder of the Arab American Institute. I’ll cite in full the opening paragraph of his Huffington Post op-ed:

“The perpetrators of the horror at Charlie Hebdo were not devout Muslims outraged by insults directed at their faith. They were not motivated by religious piety, nor did they seek to strike a blow at ‘freedom of expression.’ Rather they were crude political actors who planned an act of terror — seeking to create the greatest possible impact. They were murderers, plain and simple.”

Every sentence here, with the partial exception of the last, is so transparently counterfactual that no refutation is warranted.

Indeed. I get almost physically ill when I see someone like Aslan or Karen Armstrong appear onscreen, for they’ve built their careers on deception, deliberate or not. I know that what comes out of their mouths will be one distortion after another. It’s the same way I felt about Nixon during Watergate.

Tayler’s article is long, and ultimately calls for us to recognize religiously-motivated terrorism as what it is, for that’s the first step in figuring out how to deal with it. The U.S., as witnessed by Obama’s congenital allergy to using the words “terrorism” and “Islam” in the same sentence (except to say stuff like “ISIS is not true Islam”), is party to this fallacy, for the national policy appears to hinge on the unevidenced belief that if we say that Islamic terrorism is motivated by Islam, we may lose our buddies in the Middle East and a lot of oil as well. We’ve become the mahout of The Elephant in the Room.

Tayler is having none of it, and passages of his superb essay are strongly redolent of the late Hitchens. Here are but two:

We are accustomed to reflexively deferring to “men of the cloth,” be they rabbis and priests or pastors and imams. In this we err, and err gravely. Those whose profession it is to spread misogynistic morals, debilitating sexual guilt, a hocus-pocus cosmogony, and tales of an enticing afterlife for which far too many are willing to die or kill, deserve the exact same “respect” we accord to shamans and sorcerers, alchemists and quacksalvers. Out of misguided notions of “tolerance,” we avert our critical gaze from the blatant absurdities — parting seas, spontaneously igniting shrubbery, foodstuffs raining from the sky, virgin parturitions, garrulous slithering reptiles, airborne ungulates — proliferating throughout their “holy books.” We suffer, in the age of space travel, quantum theory and DNA decoding, the ridiculous superstitious notion of “holy books.” And we countenance the nonsense term “Islamophobia,” banishing those who forthrightly voice their disagreements with the seventh-century faith to the land of bigots and racists; indeed, the portmanteau vogue word’s second component connotes something just short of mental illness.

Remember Hitchens talking about all the stuff you could get away with in the U.S. if you’d just put on a dog collar and get yourself called “Reverend”?  Well, we—or rather Americans as a group—can’t hear this kind of stuff often enough. We should all refuse to recognize any special expertise of clerics in anything other than what other clerics say or the tenets of their faith.

Finally, Tayler makes a point that, while obvious enough, is one I hadn’t realized before (my emphasis):

Worse still is the offense that denying faith’s role in atrocities inflicts on commonsense. No one doubts people when they say their religion inspires them to attend mosque or church, make charitable donations, volunteer in hospitals or serve in orphanages. We should take them at their word when they name it, as did the Charlie Hebdo assassins, as  the mainspring for their lethal acts of violence. We should not toss aside Ockham’s razor and concoct additional factors that supposedly commandeered their behavior. The Charlie Hebdo killers may have come from poor Parisian banlieues, they may have experienced racial discrimination, and they may have even been stung by disdain from “the dominant secular French culture,” yet they murdered not shouting about any of these things, but about “avenging the Prophet Muhammad.” They murdered for Islam.

(Be sure to have a look at the link given by Tayler that cites many passages from the Qur’an and Hadith that urge violent jihad.)

I’m familiar with a related argument: if you give God credit for saving lives during tornadoes and similar disasters (the “miracles” often cited by survivors), why not blame Him for the people who died? That same argument can be applied to religion as a whole: if you praise faith for motivating people to do good things (and I believe it sometimes does), then how can you refuse to blame it for motivating people to do bad things? Hitchens may well have made that point, but it’s time for us to grasp it and stick it into the butts of those who, like Aslan, Armstrong, and Greenwald, tell us that religion can do great and good things but can do no wrong.

h/t: Gregory

60 thoughts on “A latter-day Hitchens decries the “No true Muslim” fallacy”

  3. Yes. If you refuse to give credit to religion for believers’ bad behavior then logically you can’t do other than deny it credit for believers’ good behavior. But to people like Aslan logic is a sometimes useful tool to be cast aside when it is not useful. In this case it is to be shunned as effectively as can be contrived because if the logic were evident to his target audience then claiming religion can not be a cause of bad behavior would be claiming that religion has no affect at all. In that case, why bother with it at all?

    Aslan, and those like him, makes my teeth ache.

    1. What, exactly, are you suggesting that Jerry (and the rest of us?) click on or not click on?

      1. Sorry, but I don’t get it. Going to change the world with a few clicks? How about getting 50% of the people in this country to actually vote. Also to know what they are voting for.

  5. Didn’t Hitchens write for the Atlantic? Perhaps he and Jeffrey Tayler knew each other. Thanks for this. JT is new on me.

    I am still waiting to read, ‘As a socialist, I think there is a fundamental problem with the beliefs and practices of Islam…’ Socialism is getting into a right mess in its self-censorship on Islam – not one of the (general) ‘new atheist’ critiques of Islam is incompatible with socialism. It’s about time that influential western socialists got off their knees. x

      1. I just did what I should have done 2 days ago and wikied Hitchens: yeah he did write for The Atlantic. But Tayler seems to have spent a load of time in Moscow. Hence his coming in under the radar: he’s been on the other side of the world for years. x

        1. You’re so right!

          And once I looked at some of the titles of his Atlantic pieces, I recognized them, too!

          My memory’s not what it used to be.

      2. If I correctly recall, his last piece, about G.K. Chesterton, was published in The Atlantic in March,2012.

        1. I’m sure you’re right. I’m ashamed to admit that I was much more interested in the wide-ranging subjects he wrote about at Vanity Fair than the literary criticism in the Atlantic–blush.

  7. No one doubts people when they say their religion inspires them to [do good things] …

    I’m not sure “noone” doubts this is technically accurate. Reza Aslan says: “We bring our own values and norms to our scriptures; we don’t extract them from our scriptures.”

    So I think by “noone doubts,” Mr. Tayler means “reporters don’t question whether,” or “the religious expect us to take their word.”

    This is a good piece, minor quibble with one word aside!

  8. No one doubts people when they say their religion inspires them to attend mosque or church, make charitable donations, volunteer in hospitals or serve in orphanages.

    No, I think we do invoke other causes for the humanitarian impulses. I don’t doubt that Christianity is responsible for Christian churches and things like counting rosary beads or refusing to work on the Sabbath — but charity? I’ll only grant that someone’s religion was the main inspiration for volunteering in a hospital if they swear up and down that they don’t give a crap about helping others — they only want to please God. In which case, they’d have to be just as certain that they’d willingly bomb a hospital if they were really, really sure THAT would please God even better.

    That’s a high bar. It’s also a low one, since charity done for such reasons sounds more like performance art than genuine compassion.

    The problem with insisting that murdering blasphemers is NOT inspired by religion is that, like church attendance or rosary beads, blasphemy is pretty clearly connected directly to religion.

      1. I don’t know. By “genuine compassion” I meant a direct empathetic concern for a fellow human being or group of human beings, as opposed to considering it a task done for some other reason.

        How do we know it’s “genuine?” I don’t think we really can; most of our own motives are complicated and quite often hidden from ourselves. My thought experiment was deliberately trying to parse humanitarian impulses away from divine ones in a hypothetical situation with much more clarity than any in real life. Some motives are more compassionate and less selfish than others. We all tend to value the first more — within reasonable limits.

        Whether it’s the “best” motor for action probably depends on what you mean by “best.” Frankly, I sincerely doubt that it’s the most effective. A country or society which for whatever reason legally requires its citizens to perform a high amount of charity work would have better numbers than one in which it was optional.

    2. “No, I think we do invoke other causes for the humanitarian impulses.”

      Well, maybe “we” in the sense of the crowd at WEIT do, but I’d say that a majority of the religious themselves credit their faith. Which are whom Taylor is referring to, of course.

  9. A superb essay indeed. I too have noticed that Salon has been publishing anti-religion articles lately.

  10. Reza Aslan appeared as a panelist on the NPR quiz show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me this last week. His islamapologism was not the topic of conversation.

      1. I stopped listening when they asked the panel a news question about Syria and his response was “If only we had someone with expertise on the Middle East…” Ugh.

  12. Excellent piece by both Taylor and Jerry. I am constantly irritated by those who say DAESH isn’t motivated by Islam. There was a Frenchman who’d been held DAESH on Amanpour the other day. She teased it as being important information – this guy will tell us Islam isn’t what DAESH is about. And that is what he said, immediately after he said his captors tried to convert him and were constantly quoting the Qur’an to him. They’re so wedded to their view that religion is only about doing good, they’re blind to reality. If someone wants to establish a Muslim caliphate ruled by Sharia, that’s Islam. It’s not what all Muslims want, but that doesn’t change the facts. Just like WBC are Christian.

  13. Excellent excerpts! I’ll have to read the whole thing. I also like to point out that the so-called positive things that faith might persuade an individual to do are actually amoral acts if they are commanded or coerced by threat of eternal damnation.

  14. Thanks for sharing. Very reminiscent of Hitchens. By Reza Aslan’s own account, the holy books are purely talismanic. People bring their own values… but from where? From God? Why do people’s values differ across time and culture? And here we have an exacerbated version of the dialogue between Socrates and Euthyphro. How can piety be that which is dear to the gods if the gods have so many conflicting desires? How can people claim to draw inspiration from God if they have NO CONSISTENCY (across times and cultures).

    1. Aslan’s claim also deeply undercuts the notion that one need religion to be (or do) good. So many Christians claim that an absolute, god-given morality is necessary to have morality at all, but it appears Aslan denies this. If so, why bother with religion? What exactly is it for, if not to provide The Truth about how a god wants us to live?

      1. Indeed. If people bring their own values, what is the point of the book. Why don’t they just start a revision process. Oh, because they could never collectively agree on anything.

  15. “We should not toss aside Ockham’s razor and concoct additional factors that supposedly commandeered their behavior.”

    But there are socioeconomic factors at play. If religious inspiration were the only one, then how does one explain the different standards of morality from people claiming the same religious inspiration? Some Christians hold to a much higher standard of morality than can be found in the Bible while others, adhere to a standard closer to that of the Bible. Yet all claim Christian inspiration.

    What believers in religions choose to practice or ignore regarding their holy books is a function of culture and economics.

    If is simplistic to say that Islamic terrorists are terrorists because of their Islamic religion and nothing more. They are terrorist due to various causes including Islam.

  16. Salon has a strong liberal slant, but you’re right about their stance, or more accurately their lack of a stance, on faithism. It may be motivated by a desire for click bait or it may be a sincere uncertainty about where they stand, or both. It doesn’t bother me a bit. I don’t demand ideological purity from my information sources. In fact, I dislike it.

  17. Ahhhh, it soothes my atheist soul. Hearing articulate attacks on religion like this excellent piece is a palliative to the Hitchens-shaped hole in my brain left after he nobly departed our company. Majid Nawaz has helped as has Douglas Murray. But Tayler’s essay tastes like Johnnie Walker Black in print.

  18. Thanks very much for calling attention to the article. If it is as good as your review makes it out to be, I’m /*really*/ going to enjoy reading it . . .

    Ta

  19. I’m fine with Obama soft pedaling Islam because it probably helps prevent innocent Muslims in the U.S. from being attacked. He’s not doing philosophy, he’s trying to ameliorate the mob.

    1. I’m fine with Obama soft pedaling Islam because it probably helps prevent innocent Muslims in the U.S. from being attacked.

      That’s what motivates most liberal Islamic apologists. The problem is it’s counter to defining the problem, and finding a real solution to it. It’s also doing a disservice to Muslims worldwide who account for 90%+ of the fatalities that result from Islamic terrorism.

    2. “Once faith stands accused, the guns come out and the bombs go off, and death and mayhem ensue. Best to steer clear of all this.”

      Whatever one thinks Obama should say or do, I think this is a very real concern. There is a large swath of Christian America who would be just fine with a hot global war against Islam, and we know many in Islam who would be happy to pick the fight too. Personally, I’d just as soon not see that in my lifetime. It wouldn’t be pretty since, odds are, it would quickly turn into a Christian/Jews vs Muslims war rather than a Enlightenment Values vs Islam war. This scenario is exactly the wet dream of many apocalyptically minded Christians: Global destruction centered on the Holy Land, and then Jesus returns! Praise the Lord!

      I think leaders are sitting on a powder keg, and that gives me very mixed feelings about what I’d like to see out of our leaders. If the U.S. were actually a highly secular nation it might be different, but given the very real religious passion of a large chunk of Americans it does not strike me as self evident that a President should should play up the inherent evil in Islam. Perhaps a lame duck President, such as we have, could attack all religion and urge us to abandon our superstitions and stop being children, and maybe that would be a message that could point out the evils of Islam without sparking a holy war. OTOH, what is the over and under that it’d just unite everyone against the unbelievers and, once they put us down, they could get on with the holy war?

      I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but from what I’ve experienced of people’s religious passions, I wouldn’t take the danger lightly.

  20. No one talks about the dark side of Scientology in the way that the Kristof et al talk about ISIS.

    Does Islam get more of a pass due to its ethnic makeup and/or liberal guilt over colonialism and fear of appearing racist??

    At least !*some*! religious folk recognize that phenomena like ISIS are in fact due to “bad religion”. (Both conservative Christian Russ Douthat and liberal [and gay] Christian Mel White have published books by that title.)

    An article I submitted in ’09 to a liberal religious publication mildly critical (up to a point) of gnu atheism was rejected in part due to my insistence on saying 9/11 was due to Islam. I would not let them edit it out.

  21. The reverence shown toward men and women of the cloth is something we need to question and ultimately grow out of. It drives me crazy that these people get immediate respect and are seen as morally superior simply for their profession,me hike the rest of us must prove our moral worthiness.

      1. And you have great respect for him simply because he’s a member of the clergy? No? That’s my point.

      2. I, catholic skeptic, had to check up on this guy on Wikipedia:

        “In July 2013, documents made public during bankruptcy proceedings showed that Dolan had sought permission to move $57 million in church funds to protect the assets from victims of clerical abuse… Dolan had previously denied that he tried to conceal assets from child sex abuse victims claiming compensation calling the accusations “old and discredited” and “malarkey.” United States law forbids debtors transferring money in ways that protect some creditors against others. The Vatican approved the request in five weeks.”
        Sorry, no respect from me.

      3. I live in Milwaukee where your especially admirable Cardinal Tim Doyle was responsible for shuffling $57 million from the Archdiocese into a protected graveyard maintenance fund for the purpose of preventing victims of priestly rape having access to it in court judgements.

        How anyone could respect this man is beyond me.

        His comment about death with “dignity” is grotesque and reflects nothing Catholic fascination with suffering. It is a position that is devoid of empathy and compassion and typical of religious double double-speak.

      1. Yeah it is unlike. My iPad enjoys its own life online and likes to substitute words.

    3. “Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent.” Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

  24. Reza Aslan says: “We bring our own values and norms to our scriptures; we don’t extract them from our scriptures.”

    Would Reza explain why Muslims are using the Quran for oath-swearing, in court [Sharia or otherwise] or in political office?

  25. I have developed a strong allergy to the term “islamophobia”. Even more so when it’s used by supposed “progressives”.

    I find it mind boggling that even in the Atheist ranks, some people will still defend that concept, even though they are the first ones to bash other religions. Sure, with other religions, the chance of getting killed for criticizing them is very low.

    Which leads me to think that atheists mocking all religions BUT islam are nothing short of cowards at best, blinded by political correctness at worse, which to me is equivalent to dogma.

  26. I have always wondered what commentators mean to say when they write that ISIS isn’t islamic. Do they mean that ISIS is an atheist organisation? Or even worse: “They may call themselves islamic, but they’re not really islamic.” So ISIS is atheist, but they themselves don’t know it? Subconcious atheism?

  27. This post gave me chills. I’ve been reminiscing a lot over the past few days on Mr. Hitchens by way of YouTube. I had come to know of him so late in his life that I missed out on too much of what he did, but thank god (kidding!) for YouTube, where I can watch many of his debates and appearances. The man was certainly special. Reading Jeffrey Tayler today for the first time was quite refreshing, and as Jerry points out, not dissimilar to The Hitch. I enjoyed it very much.

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