In the Sunday New York Times book-review section, Irshad Manji, writer, moderate Muslim—moderate enough to have received many death threats—and teacher at New York University, has reviewed the new book by Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz (Islam and the Future of Tolerance), which I’ve read, as well as Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religous Violence, a new book by Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks (which I’ve not read). It’s a strange review, which, while laudatory about Sack’s book, and moderately laudatory about Harris’s and Nawaz’s says some strange things about atheism and “liberals”. I’ll give just a few quotes from Manji:
Nawaz’s story bolsters the point about liberal denial. He became an international recruiter for Islamists while enrolled at the prestigious University of London, from which he took a break. This undermines the common liberal assumption that violence appeals only to the destitute.
Really? Is that a common liberal assumption? Is it more common among liberals than among conservatives? Manji continues (my emphasis):
Harris is right that liberals must end their silence about the religious motives behind much Islamist terror. At the same time, he ought to call out another double standard that feeds the liberal reflex to excuse Islamists: Atheists do not make nearly enough noise about hatred toward Muslims. Irrationality is irrationality, and rational people should expose it constantly. But there is the rub: Humans are not exactly rational beings. The caricature of faith to which some atheists resort is proof positive. Besides, their ridicule spawns a grievance that further lures young Muslims to become Islamists. An unintended, unhelpful consequence.
I’m not sure how much noise we’re supposed to make about “hatred toward Muslims,” given that many atheists do decry “Islamophobia.” But Manji’s claim that the so-called strawmanning of religion by atheists actually promotes extremist Islam is simply bogus. Where is her evidence? Do members of ISIS really read Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens? And isn’t the “caricature of faith” that we supposedly make actually true in some cases, particularly when faith motivates violence and hatred? With this statement, I think, Manji has lost considerable credibility, for she’s simply made stuff up that fits her narrative.
She manages to get in another slap against atheism:
Nawaz describes secularism as “the prerequisite” for a better future. He means an American separation of church and state. However, America is not the world, and secularism in another culture can easily become an exclusionary dogma. Witness France. Even secularism’s better angels have trouble defeating the tribal mind-set. Last year, I attended a Sam Harris event where a crush of fans trailed him, mob-like, around the venue. Oy.
Yes, some of the French bigotry against Muslims, or immigrants in general, is reprehensible: witness the popularity of Marine Le Pen. But seriously, equating Sam Harris’s “fans” as a form of tribalism equivalent to that of the religious? That’s imply silly. Again, Manji undercuts her argument with such silly observations.
I won’t go on, as you can read the piece for yourself, and see Manji’s unstinting admiration of Sacks and her mixed feelings about Nawaz and Harris. Here’s just one more unthoughtful observation:
Sacks concludes that decency toward the misfit, even to the infidel, takes precedence over loyalty to your own.
This should hearten Sam Harris, who despises the tendency of Muslims (and others) to stick up for fellow believers, especially when they act like “psychopaths.” Still, I have to wonder if Harris and his disciples will put stock in any reinterpretation, no matter how learned. After all, Harris opines that to reform religion is to read scripture in “the most acrobatic” terms. Sacks turns the tables on such skepticism, observing that “fundamentalists and today’s atheists” both ignore “the single most important fact about a sacred text, namely that its meaning is not self-evident.”
No, the single most important fact about a sacred text is that we can’t decide what it means, and so it’s infinitely malleable to the uses of both liberals and fundamentalists. Or maybe the single most important fact about a sacred text is that is wasn’t written by or inspired by a deity, and therefore has no more value than any other work of fiction. Regardless, it’s clear that some people’s interpretation of sacred text promotes violence and oppression, that in works like the Qur’an it’s not much of a stretch to interpret it that way, and that Rabbi Sacks, to promote his message of tolerance, has to do considerable violence to the Old Testament. And what gives him the power to decide what the real meaning of scripture is? Can he tell us what the story of Job is all about, or the tale of Jonah and the Giant Fish?
That’s surely not true if the latter leads to people feeling offended, even if no personal offense was intended. Is criticizing Islam, for instance, a form of free speech? For surely that is construed by some Muslim students as incivility and disrespect. Too, a perfectly reasonable debate about the appropriateness of Halloween costumes is seen by minority groups as making them feel “psychologically unsafe,” or even as a form of genocide!
