Well, if there’s anything that this interview of Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Monday’s Daily Show proves, it’s that Jon Stewart is no Bill Maher. As you’ll see from the 20-minute interview (click on the screenshot below to see the video), Stewart basically does everything he can to argue that Islam is no different in principle from any other religion, that all religions did bad stuff in the past before they were “reformed,” and, indeed, that religion isn’t the cause of violence or bad stuff at all.

Have a listen:

Doesn’t Stewart sound like Ben Affleck when the latter defended Islam on Bill Maher’s show?

First of all, Stewart’s claim that all religions are the same, since all of them went through a period like Muslims are experiencing now, is just wrong. Jains didn’t, Jews didn’t, Quakers didn’t, the Amish didn’t, and Unitarian Universalists didn’t. The fact is that some religions inspire more violence than others. Period.

In addition, Christianity, contra Stewart, wasn’t “reformed” during the Reformation: it was changed. People were still killed for apostasy, and there were extremely intolerant forms of Protestantism. The real “reformation” happened when the Enlightenment infused religion with secular values. As Hirsi Ali points out, those values are easily accessible now to Muslims through the power of communication and the Internet.

And though Stewart seems to think that we simply need to sit back and wait a few hundred years till Islam is reformed, we don’t have time for that. We live in a world of nuclear weapons and unparalleled means of destruction, not excluding flying airplanes into buildings.

Stewart also errs, I think, in claiming that Islam gets a bad rap because its message has been taken over by a group of “radicals.” That’s not the sole problem: the problem is also that those radicals have a lot of sympathy from more moderate Muslims, as many surveys show (e.g., this one). Further, Muslims have adopted the canny and effective tactic of being offended—or pretending to be offended—when their faith is criticized, thus enlisting sympathy from Westerners who try to give the “underdog” a break (as if ISIS was an underdog!).

Finally, at 19:00, Stewart makes the unsupported claim that religion has nothing to do with this violence: that people would just find some other excuse to kill and terrorize even in a faithless world. I reject that claim because so much of the violence we see has an explicitly religious basis, such as the enmity between Sunnis and Shiites. Since both groups have the same ethnic and cultural background, and the only reason they have to kill each other is because they differ on who the true heads of Islam should be. Would the Holocaust have happened in a world without faith, a world where you couldn’t hate Jews as “Christ killers” because neither Jews nor Christians existed? I think not. You can think of many other examples.

I’ve focused on Stewart because I was so disappointed in his performance here: not only in his apologetic about religion, but in his failure to lead an informative discussion and to let Hirsi Ali express her thoughts without Stewart relentlessly driving the conversation back into politically correct territory.

Hirsi Ali in fact was there to talk about her new book (see below), which is doing quite well, ranking #33 on Amazon today. It’s apparently a road map to reform Islam; as the Amazon notes say:

Today, she argues, the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims can be divided into a minority of extremists, a majority of observant but peaceable Muslims and a few dissidents who risk their lives by questioning their own religion. But there is only one Islam and, as Hirsi Ali shows, there is no denying that some of its key teachings—not least the duty to wage holy war—are incompatible with the values of a free society.

For centuries it has seemed as if Islam is immune to change. But Hirsi Ali has come to believe that a Muslim Reformation—a revision of Islamic doctrine aimed at reconciling the religion with modernity—is now at hand, and may even have begun. The Arab Spring may now seem like a political failure. But its challenge to traditional authority revealed a new readiness—not least by Muslim women—to think freely and to speak out.

Courageously challenging the jihadists, she identifies five key amendments to Islamic doctrine that Muslims have to make to bring their religion out of the seventh century and into the twenty-first.

Hirsi Ali enumerates those five “amendments” at 9:36 in the video, and says that if Islam is to reform, that must come from the bottom up rather from the top down—from the clerics and imams.  I think she’s right, but progress seems slow, for social pressure to conform is strong, and in today’s world, the Qur’an is taken far more literally than is the Bible.

I’m not sure why so many atheists dislike Hirsi Ali, who I see as a thoughtful and immensely brave woman. They don’t like the place she worked because it was a conservative think tank (the only place that would hire her, and she’s no longer there anyway); they don’t like the controversial views of her husband (why is that even relevant?); they don’t like the strong statements she’s made about Islam (those who criticize her secretly sympathize with Muslims much more than they do with other believers). I think the interview will give you an idea of the woman’s mettle.

Here’s her new book, which came out yesterday; click on the cover to go to the Amazon page. I’ll be reading it for sure.

h/t: Merilee