'It Is As If Liberal Brains Cannot Hold Two Thoughts At The Same Time'

In Islam and the Future of Tolerance, American philosopher-neuroscientist Sam Harris debates Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist who now runs Quilliam, a London-based counter-extremism think tank. They discuss Islamism, the possibility of reform within Islam and how political correctness only ends up strengthening extremism.

The following excerpts capture the crux of the debate:

Harris: I would generally agree—although there certainly seem to be many cases in which people have no intelligible grievance apart from a theological one and become “radicalized” by the idea of sacrificing everything for their faith. I’m thinking of the Westerners who have joined groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, for instance. Sometimes, religious ideology appears to be not merely necessary but sufficient to motivate a person to do this. You might say that an identity crisis was also involved—but everyone has an identity crisis at some point. In fact, one could say that the whole of life is one long identity crisis. The truth is that some people appear to be almost entirely motivated by their religious beliefs. Absent those beliefs, their behaviour would make absolutely no sense; with them, it becomes perfectly understandable, even rational.

As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we’ve been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars – deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields — who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take Islamists and jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations.

When one asks what the motivations of Islamists and jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion. Needless to say, the West is to blame for all the mayhem we see in Muslim societies. After all, how would we feel if outside powers and their mapmakers had divided our lands and stolen our oil? These beleaguered people just want what everyone else wants out of life. They want economic and political security. They want good schools for their kids. They want to be free to flourish in ways that would be fully compatible with a global civil society. Liberals imagine that jihadists and Islamists are acting as anyone else would given a similar history of unhappy encounters with the West. And they totally discount the role that religious beliefs play in inspiring a group like the Islamic State—to the point where it would be impossible for a jihadist to prove that he was doing anything for religious reasons.

Apparently, it’s not enough for an educated person with economic opportunities to devote himself to the most extreme and austere version of Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess his certainty about martyrdom on video before blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstrations of religious fanaticism are somehow considered rhetorically insufficient to prove that he really believed what he said he believed. Of course, if he said he did these things because he was filled with despair and felt nothing but revulsion for humanity, or because he was determined to sacrifice himself to rid his nation of tyranny, such a psychological or political motive would be accepted at face value. This double standard is guaranteed to exonerate religion every time. The game is rigged.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the same liberal apologists I am. Some are journalists, some are academics, a few are Muslims—but the general picture is of a white, liberal non-Muslim who equates any criticism of Islamic doctrines with bigotry, “Islamophobia”, or even “racism”. These people are very prominent in the US, and their influence is as intellectually embarrassing as it is morally problematic. Although they don’t make precisely the same noises on every question, they deny any connection between heartfelt religious beliefs and Muslim violence. Whole newspapers and websites can now be counted on to function as de facto organs of Islamist apology—The Guardian, Salon, The Nation, Alternet, and so forth. This has made it very difficult to have public conversation of the sort we are having.

The Betrayal of Liberalism

Nawaz:  Yes, we have such debates in the UK as well. Everything I’m going to say from here on I say as a liberal—in fact, I say while being a Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate in London. A great liberal betrayal is afoot. Unfortunately, many “fellow-travelers” of Islamism are on the liberal side of this debate. I call them “regressive leftists”; they are in fact reverse racists. They have a poverty of expectation for minority groups, believing them to be homogenous and inherently opposed to human rights values. They are culturally reductive in how they see “Eastern”—and in my case, Islamic—culture, and they are culturally deterministic in attempting to freeze their ideal of it in order to satisfy their orientalist fetish. While they rightly question every aspect of their “own” Western culture in the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims who attempt to do so within Islam, and they choose to side instead with every regressive reactionary in the name of “cultural authenticity” and anticolonialism.

They claim that their reason for refusing to criticize any policy, foreign or domestic—other than those of what they consider “their own” government—is that they are not responsible for other governments’ actions. However, they leap whenever any (not merely their own) liberal democratic government commits a policy error, while generally ignoring almost every fascist, theocratic, or Muslim-led dictatorial regime and group in the world. It is as if their brains cannot hold two thoughts at the same time. Besides, since when has such isolationism been a trait of liberal internationalists? It is a right-wing trait.

They hold what they think of as “native” communities—and I use that word deliberately—to lesser standards than the ones they claim apply to all “their” people, who happen to be mainly white, and that’s why I call it reverse racism. In holding “native” communities to lesser—or more culturally “authentic”—standards, they automatically disempower those communities. They stifle their ambitions. They cut them out of the system entirely, because there’s no aspiration left. These communities end up in self-segregated “Muslim areas” where the only thing their members aspire to is being tin-pot community leaders, like ghetto chieftains. The “fellow-travelers” fetishize these “Muslim” ghettos in the name of “cultural authenticity” and identity politics, and the ghetto chieftains are often the leading errand boys for them. Identity politics and the pseudo-liberal search for cultural authenticity result in nothing but a downward spiral of competing medieval religious or cultural assertions, fights over who are the “real” Muslims, ever increasing misogyny, homophobia, sectarianism, and extremism.

This is not liberal. Among the left, this is a remnant of the socialist approach that prioritizes group identity over individual autonomy. Among the right, it is ironically a throwback from the British colonial “divide and rule” approach. Classical liberalism focuses on individual autonomy. I refer here to liberalism as it is understood in the philosophical sense, not as it’s understood in the United States to refer to the Democratic Party—that’s a party-political usage. The great liberal betrayal of this generation is that in the name of liberalism, communal rights have been prioritized over individual autonomy within minority groups. And minorities within minorities really do suffer because of this betrayal. The people I really worry about when we have this conversation are feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, ex-Muslims—all the vulnerable and bullied individuals who are not just stigmatized but in many cases violently assaulted or killed merely for being against the norm.

This is why I don’t like the “fellow-travellers” who would hold hands with extreme Islamists and walk along the path with them to entirely illiberal ends, believing they’re doing Muslims a favor, when in fact they’re surrendering all those Muslims who seek reform—to their deaths, in many instances—by quietly acquiescing to regimes and principles that would aspire to have them killed.

But there’s another side to this, of which we must be careful. More so in Europe than in America, we have a serious problem with the rise of the right wing. In Greece, for example, the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn has had political influence. In Britain we have had troubles with certain street movements. I was involved in helping Tommy Robinson leave the English Defence League because he saw that it was being infiltrated by neo-Nazis, and he didn’t want anything to do with that. After he left the EDL, a new, smaller organization emerged, whose members started raiding mosques and handing out Bibles in broad daylight while dressed in military gear—which, as you can imagine, caused a lot of community tension. East Germany is facing acute problems with neo-Nazism.

So along with the “fellow-travelers”—and I’ve explained why I disagree with them—you have these bigots. Now, the bigots, whether they are of the Islamist variety or the anti-Muslim variety, essentially agree on a few matters. One is their belief that Islam itself—not Islamism—is a supremacist ideology that is here to take over the world; another is that, therefore, Muslims and non-Muslims can never live equally and peacefully together, but must separate into religiously defined entities.

Of course, you can see how that suits Islamists, but it also suits Golden Dawn and other groups that would be happy to expel all Muslims from Europe, even those who were born and raised there. These two groups share a vision, except that for one, it manifests—in its most extreme form—in the terrorist Anders Breivik, and for the other, in the 7/7 jihadist terrorists in London. I was not surprised to learn that Breivik quoted al-Qaeda extensively in his terrorist manifesto. One of these extremes is opposed to a “Muslim takeover”, and the other is in favor of it, but they both subscribe to that divisive, sectarian apocalyptic vision. To counter such extremism, our challenge is to expose and undermine the “fellow-travelers”, which I try to do on a regular basis, while at the same time opposing the bigots.

Excerpted from Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue by Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2015 by Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz. Used by permission. All rights reserved.