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Dec. 13, 2021 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:27:04
Islam and the Possibility of Peace | Mohammed Hijab | EP 209
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I understand that, and I'm not even saying that there's something exceptional in that regard about Islam, although the rate at which it happened was quite remarkable.
But it still presents us with a problem, doesn't it?
I mean, everyone.
It presents everyone with a problem.
And the problem is, well, for example, the problem is reconciling the idea of turning the other cheek with the idea of a just war, a defensive war, or an expansive war, for that matter.
And, of course, that issue is relevant to Islam, because Islam exploded Outward, and produced the biggest empire the world had ever seen in the space of a few short centuries.
So then you ask, well, what is the spirit that animated that?
And is that attributable to the Islamic doctrines themselves?
I don't know the answer to that.
No, let me tell you the answer to that, okay?
And this is what I want to tell you conclusively, and this will help build bridges, honestly.
Because we can maintain the warlord thesis, we can maintain the expansionist thesis.
But here's what I'll tell you.
Islam has a capability to be expansive and it also has a capability of making peace treaties.
And it does and it should do whatever's in its best interest, just like every country should do whatever's in its best interest.
Hello, everyone. everyone.
I'm pleased today to have as my guest discussant, Muhammad Hijab.
And this discussion has been postponed a number of times because of illness, and I'm very glad that we're able to do it today.
And I thank him for his patience in continuing to pursue this and being willing to talk to me, despite, I think, being delayed three times, which is one more time than is unforgivable.
But in any case, Muhammad Hijab is an author, a He's a student of comparative religion and a philosopher of religion.
He's the co-founder of Sapiens Institute and is a researcher and instructor for that organization.
He has a BA in politics and a master's degree in history.
He's acquired a second master's in Islamic studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies.
Hijab has also completed a third master's degree in applied theology from the University of Oxford, where he focused on the philosophy of religion in applied settings.
He's now doing his PhD in the philosophy of religion on the contingency argument for God's existence.
And many people...
I was looking a while back...
For people to talk about Islam with, and many people recommended that I talk to Mohammed Hijab.
And so I talked to Mustafa Akil a couple of weeks ago.
He's known more, I would say, on the liberal front.
And so I'm very pleased to be able to talk to Mohammed Hijab today.
Thank you very much for joining me today.
It's very good of you to put up with the delays.
No, no, no, no.
Thank you for having me, honestly.
It's always a pleasure.
Well, so I'm going to ask some really basic questions, because it's very difficult to understand another culture from the outside.
And you also have, as an outsider, you have no idea how much you don't know about what you don't know, even.
You're blind to your own ignorance.
And so I'm going to start with basic questions.
I wouldn't say that I have a tangible understanding of Islam.
I mean, I have some understanding of Christianity.
I've been able to get the sense of Christianity at a reasonably deep level, I would say, at least compared to other things I know.
And I've kind of felt the same way about certain aspects of Buddhism and Taoism.
But as a religious system, a system of thought, Islam has remained relatively opaque to me, despite the fact that I've done a reasonable amount of historical reading.
And so what is it in terms of practice and belief that are absolutely core, as far as you're concerned, to practicing the Islamic faith?
Well, the first thing is I think we should start with the bare bones basics.
And the bare bones basics is first to say that we believe in God.
And the kind of God we believe in is one God worthy of worship.
In fact, the Quran makes a series of arguments Rational arguments for why we believe in the type of God that we believe in.
For example, in chapter 52 verse 35 of the Quran, it says, Were they created from nothing or by nothing?
Or were they themselves the creators of themselves?
Did they create the heavens and the earth They have no certainty.
In other words, the Quran is hinting here at the fact that it's impossible for something to come from nothing, and it's impossible also for something to give rise to itself.
And so the universe, for example, if we take this as an example, couldn't have come from nothing, and it couldn't have created itself.
It couldn't be self-generating and or self-maintaining.
And there can't be a world, in fact, the Quran would indicate.
There cannot be a world with only dependent things, things that require Other things in order to exist ad infinitum.
And so what is required outside of the series of dependent things is something which is independent, which all things depend upon, and which itself depends upon nothing.
And this is what the Qur'an refers to as as-samad, or the idea of God being self-sufficient and independent.
So the idea of God...
So it's a prime mover argument.
It's a kind of prime mover argument.
Why do you think that the same argument that you put forward in relationship to the generation of the universe can't be put forward as an objection in relationship to God?
Because you make a logical case that something can't come from nothing and something can't create itself.
But you move from a philosophical perspective.
This isn't a religious critique.
From a philosophical perspective, you just move the problem back one step.
What advantages do you think there are to moving the problem back one step?
Or am I mischaracterizing it?
Well, I'll tell you what, Dr.
Jordan Peterson, what you've said is very similar to what Richard Dawkins said in a debate with the then Archbishop of Canterbury.
And he said that, well, if you have, and he said this debate, he made this argument in Oxford, and he said that if you look at the universe, well, if you're saying that God has made the universe in this way, then your God, who's more complicated, and he would add this layer of complexity, Your God is more complicated, would require an even greater...
He would require an even greater explanation.
You're a greater God.
Yeah, yeah.
So really interestingly, Anthony Kenny, who's an agnostic himself, he's a philosopher and agnostic, he came in and he said, well, actually, take a look at this.
You've got an electric razor, which is made up of many different component parts, and you have a cutthroat razor, which is made up of one part, And he said, although the electric razor is more complicated, it serves less functions than the cutthroat razor because the cutthroat razor can cut your throat and it can also cut an apple, for example.
And so it's a fallacy to assume that just because something is complicated or that something has many features and attributes, that that thing itself It requires an explanation.
And in fact, if we had an infinite regress of such explanations, then obviously that would lead to a kind of absurdity.
So even, you know, well-meaning atheists and agnostics in the field realize the redundancy and the philosophy and the argument that is put forward by the likes of Richard Dawkins, who said that kind of thing.
And I would also add to that one point.
The argument from composition, which is usually a corollary to the contingency argument usually, is made in the following way, that everything that is made of parts is contingent, that the universe or say a multiverse is made of parts, therefore a universe or the universe and or the multiverse is contingent.
The parts that we're talking about, meteorologically, are things that can be attached and detached.
So that doesn't apply to God.
Classical theism doesn't say that God is made of parts the same way as human beings are, or as universes are, or multiverses are.
And in fact, the Quran hints at this itself.
It says...
That the one who created you and composed you and configured you in any form that he wished, he put you together.
And so the fact that you have such configuration in the universe indicates that the fact that you have an external sorting agent That has particularized the universe in a certain way and that has composed the universe in a certain way.
So the argument really is that things which are made of attachable and detachable parts, that those things are contingent.
That doesn't apply to God on any theistic paradigm.
Now what we would say though, sorry to kind of drag this on a little bit, is that this would disqualify something like the Trinity from being true.
And in fact, the Quran, this is the Islamic position, is vehement in its opposition towards a triune God.
So for example, in chapter 23, verse 91, it says, That God hasn't taken a son and he doesn't have any gods with him.
If that had been the case, each God would have taken what he has created and they would have tried to dominate one another.
The idea, therefore, that there can be more than one all-powerful entity is an inconceivable and unintelligible idea from the Islamic paradigm.
So it's seen as problematic, to say the least, or conceptually impossible, to say even more, to suggest that something like a trinity can be true.
When it's talking about, for example, Mary and Jesus, it says something very simple, that both of them used to eat food.
So in other words, the impossibility of something limited like Jesus, a man, being God at the same time, being unlimited, because the definition of God is that he's unlimited.
Do you think that there's a divine spark in human beings?
No, we don't think there's any kind of divinity at all.
Islam is categorical about this, because the way we define divinity is extremely strict.
We say that the divine attributes of God are specific only to God.
So what's the characteristic element of the human relationship with God?
What's the central structure of value within a human being that makes them worthy of respect, say, in the sight of God, or worthy of value in the sight of God?
The Quran states, لَقَدْ كَرَّمْنَا بَنِي آدَمٍ We have dignified the child of Adam.
So that we do believe in something called human exceptionalism.
We do believe that human being has been specialized or specified among all other things in creation to have free will, for example, to have a personal relationship with God, to have a loving relationship with God.
People don't realize this, especially in the Christian tradition, but one of the names of God from the Islamic tradition is that he's the loving one, Al-Wadud in Arabic, in the Quran as well.
So we believe that the relationship that human beings should have with God is a loving relationship, but it's one of submission.
This is the main thing.
Islam doesn't mean peace.
Islam actually means submission.
Islam comes from the root Arabic word istislam.
And what it means is submission.
And really what the picture is in the Islamic cosmology is that everything in the universe is submitting to God.
Everything, the laws of nature have been placed there by the lawmaker, which is God.
And so...
We as human beings are volitional.
We do believe in free will, but we also believe in a theological compatibilism.
And so a kind of predetermination is actually one of our pillars of faith, to believe in that.
So in that sense, we have to voluntarily submit to God in the same way that everything else in creation is submitted to God.
And what does that submission mean?
What that means is that all the prophets and messengers came a full time.
So this is the metanarrative of Islam.
Abraham came, Moses came, Jesus came, and all of them came with exactly the same message.
And that message is to worship, to believe in one God, and to worship in only one God.
And to do that, you have to follow a guidance.
So each and every single one of those messengers, they came with, we believe in our narrative, they came with two things effectively.
They came with a message, which is to worship God, meaning to submit to his laws, and also with some kind of evidence base to suggest that they are prophets.
So some of these stories would have been known, obviously, to you.
You've done a biblical series, so I know you're very aware of those stories.
We have very similar stories, like in Moses, Abraham, Jesus, but they are slightly different.
Those stories are slightly different.
In fact, sometimes radically different, especially considering some New Testament kind of narratives.
And so what the thread that joins or the flesh that joins all of these kind of messengers and prophets is that they all came with one fundamental message, which is to believe in one God and worship one God.
We believe that the prophet...
Hang on.
I'm still not understanding this exactly.
I'm not sure what you mean by believe.
The way you laid that out was, in some sense, propositional.
You made a logical argument for the existence of God, but you take the existence of God as given, in some sense, to begin with, because of your faith, and then you provide your belief with a rational argument, but it wasn't derived from a rational argument.
When you talk about belief, do you mean belief in a set of propositions about the nature of God?
And if you do or don't, what...
What do you believe and how would you separate out that belief from what you term as worship?
Right.
So actually, there's one thing that ought to be known, that in Islamic theology, we believe in something called the fitrah, which is an innate instinct to believing in God.
And now, I'm not sure if you're aware of the work on it.
So why bother with the propositional arguments then?
To me, they just seem like a side venture, you know, to argue with scientists.
Some scholars have said that in Islam.
Sorry, I apologize.
Yeah, okay.
No, no.
Yeah.
In fact, some modern-day philosophers of religion have that kind of a stance, like Alvin Plantinga, who seems quite agnostic about the old thing.
I mean, the thing is, what we're saying is, it would be committing something like the naturalistic fallacy to suggest that just because something is the case, or there is ought fallacy maybe, just because something is the case, that it ought to be the case.
So in order to prove...
It's a demonstrative proof for those who are in what we call shack or doubt.
But the truth is, as you've mentioned, and as in the literature, for example, Justin Barrett has this in his cognitive science literature.
I'm not sure if you've come across his stuff.
But basically, what he says is that we have an innate, his words exactly, receptivity to believing in God.
In 2011, the Oxford Anthropological Society, they've done a huge study of 32,000 children.
And what they found is that children innately and intuitively, instinctively have a belief of a higher power of some sorts.
Now, they're born with that belief.
And in fact, in one of the papers in Justin Barrett's book, he literally mentions the fiqrah or the Islamic theological concept of an instinct in believing in God.
What's his last name?
Barrett.
How do you spell that?
I think double R, double T, I believe.
Justin Barrett.
Okay, that's useful.
Yeah, well, it just strikes me that, you see, the problem with debating people like Richard Dawkins about the existence of God is that he will formulate the argument in propositional terms and then force the person, so to speak, I don't imply any malice on his part, but as soon as you accept that the The battle is to be won on propositional grounds.
You've already accepted a certain definition of God.
And I think you lose the argument instantly.
I think the argument for instinct, something like that, is much more powerful.
Because one of the things I'm led to wonder when you laid out your argument is...
Well, what purpose does belief in God serve?
Or your faith in God, let's say.
And I think belief...
See, it's also really interesting to try to distinguish between belief in something and faith in something.
Imagine you have faith in the good.
And so how do you demonstrate that?
Well, you believe that good is more powerful than evil.
You believe that you should act in a manner that's appropriate to the good.
And so then you act that way.
And that's the faith.
The faith is demonstrated in the actions.
Yes.
But it's not exactly propositional.
And, you know, partly because I would say, if you look at good and evil, for example, it's not that easy to make the case that good is more dominant or more powerful than evil, all things considered in human affairs.
Now, I think it is.
But you know what I mean?
You can't make a compelling propositional case that that's absolutely true.
But you can reflect your faith in your actions.
The thing is, you mentioned Richard Dawkins.
As part of the Sapiens Institute, we wrote a small booklet called The Scientific Delusions of the New Atheists.
And we refuted him on these kind of things.
If you read The God Delusion, he literally spends five pages of hundreds talking about the cosmological argument.
And I think two, talking about the teleological argument or the fine-tuning argument.
I do think that not much work has been done by new atheists, meaning like the Four Horsemen or whatever, in trying to actually tackle these arguments.
And sometimes when they're on debates with other philosophers of religion, I don't think they, from my perspective at least, they don't actually provide a satisfactory defense.
Yeah, well the instinct argument is an interesting one because it seems to me that part of the And this is why I was pressing you to some degree on the issue of the definition of worship, is that I don't see much difference between the instinct to worship and the instinct to imitate.
I do believe that there's compelling evidence, psychological and biological, that we human beings have a remarkably strong instinct to imitate.
And the question is, well, what is it that we're oriented to imitate?
And I think we're like, if you look at the developmental psychology literature, for example, it seems quite, it seems to be the case that if a child has an intact nervous system, and they have one or two good models around them, that they'll be drawn towards those good models and imitate them and, and develop quite healthily, that they'll be drawn towards those good models and imitate them and, and develop quite
And, you know, that instinct to imitate also underlies phenomena, like the experience of awe, and the experience of charisma.
And that charisma, you know, has an effect on attentional function and on the proclivity to behave.
And so I think the propositionalized arguments deliver the religious ideas over to the propositional camp.
And that's dominated already by scientists in many ways.
It's a losing battle.
I don't think it's the right one.
So worship, you just...
So, okay, so one thing the West and Islam agree on, although I think Islam is part of the West, by the way, because we're all people of the book.
I mean, the triune God in the Christian sense is still subordinate to a higher order unity.
And so...
And so there is a powerful movement towards monotheism in Judaism and Christianity and Islam, and that seems to be a point of some agreement.
We're also, all three societies are also people who've made a decision collectively in some mysterious manner that a book should sit at the basis of culture, a specific book that's been aggregated in a strange way, in a mysterious way.
And so we also agree on that.
And so that's, you know, that's a starting place at least.
And obviously there's been a lot of interpenetration of ideas between Islam and Judaism and Christianity.
I mean, the prophets in Islam are the same prophets that go through the three major Western monotheistic religions.
And so that's a fair bit of commonality.
And so that's a good place to start building bridges.
And so, okay, so Islam is stringently monotheistic.
And then the submission idea.
What exactly?
I mean, God is ineffable in a sense.
So what does submission mean exactly?
And how is that related to worship?
And how is that related to the good, let's say, on a practical level?
So I think what you said before, there was a point you made about defining faith through action.
And I think that we would strongly agree with that.
And that's what we believe.
Our definition of faith is...
Is what you basically believe in the heart, say on the tongue, and do with your actions.
That's like a definition of faith for us, or Iman, the idea of Iman.
In terms of the good, now there are different conceptions in Islam of the good, but the main thing is we believe that God is good, quite similar to what Christians believe, and therefore he wants good for human beings, and that the injunctions of God are also good.
In terms of submission, And this is extremely important here.
Submission can only be done through revelation.
That is our position.
The position is that submission is actually impossible without a guidance.
And the guidance, we believe, obviously, is the Quran.
But we also acknowledge the Torah, the original Torah that was sent to Moses and the original Injil or the Gospel that was sent to To Jesus.
But what we have is, you can call it a doctrine of tahrif, which means corruption.
So what we believe is that what happens is with these books, you've had Basically, corruption happened to them.
So we don't know what is part of that book and what is not part of that book.
We don't know exactly what Jesus said and what isn't, because there is no clear chain of narration back to Jesus Christ.
But going back to the point of submission, submission is to follow the prophets, all of them, because a Muslim cannot be a Muslim unless they believe in, revere, love and respect.
All of the prophets, including Jesus, Moses, Abraham, and all of them, follow all of them and in their way.
And once again, we believe that they were divinely inspired.
And there is evidence that all of these prophets come with.
And I think I was on that point where I was telling you that the differentiating factor between the prophet Muhammad and the rest of the prophets is we believe, whereas all of the other prophets came for their people and their time, we believe that Muhammad came for all people and all times.
Well, that's certainly what Christians say about Christ.
Yes, but in the Bible you'll find some verses that are saying, I've only been sent for the lost sheep of Israel.
Yeah, there's some tension.
You see something like the rise of a spirit of universalism that surpasses fundamental tribalism, even of a religious sort.
And there seems to be a struggle that takes place in the Gospel, in some sense, conceptually, between this reversion to something that's more tribal and something that's genuinely universal.
But I think the universalist spirit wins out quite clearly.
Otherwise, Christianity wouldn't be an evangelizing religion.
It's designed to try to bring everyone under the fold, let's say.
It's largely because of the tension between Paul and James.
And a lot of, well, modern day Christianity is based on Pauline kind of interpretations rather than kind of...
James was very much a man of the law himself.
He was, you know, he didn't believe that the law was abrogated.
He didn't believe that.
In fact, there's huge tension, obviously, in the Bible between both those two men.
And obviously, there's historical reasons for that as well.
But what we will say is, we would say that there are clear verses in the Bible.
Like, for example, we point to Isaiah 42, 11.
Where there indicates a new prophet that's going to come.
And in fact, Isaiah 42, 11 in particular is extremely important because it even specifies the region.
It says it will be sent to the people of Kedar.
And the people of Kedar, as in Genesis, Kedar was the son of Ishmael.
And basically, from him is the lineage of Muhammad, or the Arabs, if you like.
And so, there's a whole discussion in the whole of Isaiah 42 about a new prophet going to come, and he's going to come to the people of Qaeda, and the people will be rejoicing on the mountaintops.
And in fact, the name of a mountain in Medina, which is present-day Saudi Arabia, is mentioned, which is the Mount of Salah.
And so we would say that actually Muhammad was a continuation of Jesus Christ, and that Jesus Christ as a prophet, also in the Bible, doesn't say that there's not going to be another prophet after me.
And so there's no reasonable reason for us to think at all.
I think Christ actually said that believers would be able to do the things he did and more.
So there's actually a prophecy of a multitude of prophets in some sense, which would perhaps be a consequence of taking the fundamental doctrine, the spiritual doctrine of Christianity seriously.
Yes, I mean, as we said, in many ways, we are all followers of Christ.
And that's another point of commonality.
Like, we see the Messiah Jesus Christ as a man who had done wonders and miracles and signs, as the Bible states.
We believe that he was immaculately conceived.
We believe that he cured the blind.
He raised the dead with God's permission.
We believe, like, most of the things that you'll find...
We actually believe in those things.
There's huge commonalities between Islam and Christianity from that perspective.
The major difference is we would say that it's not intelligible or conceivable or pardonable to believe any human being with a date of birth could ever be called God.
And this is where we kind of diverge from the Christian mainstream.
Yeah, so, okay, so let me tell you about some things I've been thinking about in relationship to that.
Well, You know that Nietzsche announced the death of God in the late 1800s, and you know what the consequences of that have been, at least to some degree.
And, of course, Dostoevsky was talking about exactly the same things at pretty much exactly the same time.
But the philosopher of religion, Mircea Eliade, in his historical investigations, indicated that The death of God is something that has happened to many cultures in many places over many times.
It's not a unique event in, let's say, Western history.
And his explanation for that, at least in part, was that as there is a movement towards unification under a monotheistic umbrella, let's say, which is perhaps a precondition for the union of diverse people, One of the consequences of that is that central unifying value becomes so abstracted because it has to cover such a multiplicity.
It becomes so abstracted that it becomes sufficiently...
It flies away.
He called that deus abscondes, if I remember correctly, is that the idea of the spirit just flies away because it no longer has an attachment to the world.
And one of the ways that Christianity solved that, if you think about it from a psychological perspective, was by...
It was by insisting upon the presence of God in a canonic form, in an emptied form, in a partially emptied form, in the person of Christ, in a particular place and a particular time.
And it's a variant of the prophetic idea, although taken to its absolute extreme.
The prophetic idea is that there are people who are marked out in history, marked out by God, by their relationship with what's highest in some spectacular manner, And so, I guess one of the things I would say about the Islamic resistance to the idea of the divinity of Christ is that there is an emphasis on Islam on the special status of prophets,
of certain prophets, and their particular special relationship with God, which seems to elevate them above other men in some important sense.
And drawing a line precisely between that claim and the claim of divinity incarnate is not an easy matter.
I would actually disagree with that.
I think there's a clear distinction in the Quran between the prophets and ordinary men.
This is actually one of the clearest distinctions.
Yes, but is there a clear distinction between the prophets and some spark of divinity inside those men?
Yes, so what do we define as a spark of divinity?
Well, I would say it's partly what gives people charisma, although it's not always that.
It's also partly what marked these men out as being prophets.
I mean, it's what we look at when we say, that man is great.
That's a great man.
That's a great person.
That was a great deed.
Well, yes, yes, fair enough.
But I would say also embodied virtue.
And it's embodied virtue that is in some sense reflective of the action of the highest value operating at a local scale.
Yeah, so that's exactly what we believe.
We believe in the doctrine of infallibility.
And so we believe that all prophets basically did the best thing possible for human beings.
And this is narrated about the Prophet Muhammad.
In fact, you have impeccable virtue, basically the highest level virtue.
And this is something about all the prophets.
And obviously, if that wasn't the case, There wouldn't be sufficient guides for us in terms of humanity.
So if that's what you mean by a spark of divinity, then I don't think there's a point of resistance.
Yeah, well, these things are hard to sort out, right?
The terminology.
And that's part of the complexity of these sorts of discussions.
Yeah.
For us, divinity is basically having the attributes of God.
So once again, since we know God through his attributes, From that perspective, that human beings cannot possess the fullness of the attributes of God.
If you want, I can recite.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable perspective.
I mean, you know, we're all limited, infallible creatures, and we'd be fools not to see that.
The attributes of God, how are they knowable?
Is that only through relationship with the book?
Or does that also have an experiential element as far as you're concerned?
So, what I can do, in fact, is I can recite for you a couple of verses from the Quran, because what we believe is they are known through the revelation.
And I can recite for you maybe 10-20 second verses and translate for you and show you what...
I think it will give you more of a flavor of what you believe.
Sure.
Do what you will.
So the Quran states, in the end of chapter 59,
Surah Al-Fatihah Surah Al-Fatihah
Al-Fatihah because I don't want to get this wrong, right?
These two verses, I think, are probably the two best verses that answer your question in the Qur'an.
Allah is He.
Okay, I'm going to get something maybe a bit better.
Translation.
All right.
He is Allah, that there is no God worthy of worship except for him.
The king, the holy, the one free from all defects, the giver of security, the watcher over his creatures, the mighty, the compelling, the supreme.
Glory be to him.
Glory be to God.
High is he above all that they associate as partners with him.
He is Allah, the creator, the inventor of all things, the bestower of forms.
To him belong the best names.
All that is in the heavens and the earth, glorify him, and he is the almighty, the all-wise.
So these are, I would say, the two...
Potentially the two best verses that summarize for us.
Right, so it's an attempt to use a multiplicity of virtues to define a supreme source of good.
So, okay, I have a technical question for you, a procedural question, I guess.
When we're talking...
So you sang those verses, and then...
So here's what happened.
I asked you that question.
You sang those verses, or chanted them, or a combination of those two.
Okay.
But there's a melodic element to that.
And I don't understand the language.
And then you translated them.
And so why approach the answer to my question in that manner?
Because we believe that the Quran in its original language...
Has an element in it, or has a virtue, if you like, to it, or an attribute to it, which cannot be felt or experienced phenomenologically, if you like, through just mere translation.
So what purpose does that serve in the discussion with someone like me?
What it will do, hopefully, because we believe the Quran has divine qualities itself.
The Quran itself has divine qualities.
So we believe, number one, it's a cure.
We believe it's actually a physical cure, as well as a spiritual cure.
We believe that it's a guidance.
We believe that it's something which will literally put you in a psychological state of ease.
So in a sense, what it will do, it hopefully will have an effect on you which is Physiological, maybe psychological.
In a sense, it's like giving you something to taste rather than just explaining what it tastes like.
How do you know when that's appropriate and when it's not?
I mean, you obviously don't all the time.
Well, but you don't...
Yeah, I don't mean that.
No, but so that's why I asked the question.
Obviously, you're making distinctions.
You're not doing what you just did with...
Well, it is your piece, and I want to give you the full Islamic experience, you see?
Yeah, okay, okay, fair enough.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, okay.
Part of it is to let you hear what the Quran sounds like.
So you can kind of, if you hear it, maybe you go somewhere to a Muslim country and you hear that in the background.
Or you may be even walking down, I don't know, you're from Alberta, is it?
Yes.
I'm amazed you know that.
I think you've mentioned it before.
I've been to Edmonton, actually, in Canada.
There's a Muslim community there.
Maybe you'll hear it in someone driving and, oh, I remember that.
I know what that is.
So it's just to gain maybe...
So why did that make you smile?
Because that would make me happy.
I mean, quite openly and honestly.
Because we want the best...
I mean, to be honest with you, if you want me to be totally honest, yeah?
No, that's what I'm hoping for.
You asked me before we start the show.
I mean, one of our, not objectives, but one of our hopes...
Is that people embrace Islam and become Muslims.
Islam is an evangelizing religion.
It's a religion which aims literally to enter every home.
There is actually a prophetic saying that says that Islam will enter every home.
Not necessarily meaning everyone become Muslim, but it will enter every home in some way, shape or form.
You mean like what's happening right now with this podcast?
There you have it, you see.
It's part of it.
There's a series of predictions that the Prophet makes and this is part of the evidence package, we believe.
Okay, so you also talked about the fact, you know, when we started, just before we started this, that part of the reason that you're talking with me is that you hope to build bridges.
And so this gets down to some...
And I want to return to the fundamental attributes of Islamic belief.
I don't want to let that part of the conversation lag.
But, you know, Christianity is also an evangelizing religion, and Christians hope the same thing.
So while you know what that has caused, and is still causing...
And so, you know, we have to contend with this, all of us that are alive now.
And so we have two evangelizing religions.
They're both fundamentally monotheistic.
They emerge from a tradition that's quite similar.
There's many things that they have in common, but the border between them has been rife with conflict for a very long time, and that has not ended.
And it's become more distributed and so forth.
And one of the things about Islam, I would say, that frightens the West is that, especially in the modern world, is that it appears that it's difficult for religions that aren't Islam in Islamic countries to manage to maintain themselves to any degree whatsoever.
And now, look, I understand.
I said that With a certain understanding also in mind.
When I look at this from a psychological or an anthropological perspective, I also see that as human societies have come together and organized themselves in ever-increasing sized groups, That the necessity for an emergent monotheism as a uniting factor might be crucial.
And it's clearly the case that the emergence of Islam united diverse people.
And in that union there is a kind of peace.
That's the definition of union.
And how much strife and force and conflict and catastrophe had to attend that unification...
It's a matter of debate.
We don't know how these things can be managed.
We don't know how to manage them any better.
But we're still stuck with this problem.
Now we have two fundamental monotheisms that are head-to-head.
Now I know that's an oversimplification.
And hypothetically, we're both motivated by the desire for something approximating peace.
And we want to build bridges, and that's why you and I are talking.
Yes.
But I don't know what to do with the mutual evangelism What would you say?
Impulse.
My sense is, Christians, turn to yourself.
You're a problem.
You can fix yourself.
You do that, and the other things are going to sort themselves out of their own accord.
And I do believe that.
And I actually believe that that message is, in some sense, centrally Christian.
It's like, look to yourself and be the example.
And that's the best way of, let's say, convincing other people if that's what you're interested in.
It's also the only real effective way of bringing peace.
So, well, I'm not sure.
I'm a traditionalist Muslim, which means I'm orthodox.
I'm not a liberal at all.
In fact, I oppose liberalism, to be quite honest with you, in the sense that I criticize it.
I don't think it's the truth with a capital T. So a lot of Enlightenment ideas, I oppose them openly, right?
And so I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who is a traditionalist Muslim.
And by that I mean, I stick to the Quran and the Sunnah, which is the prophetic sayings, and the jurisprudential tradition.
Which is derived from those two sources and other sources as well.
But this is a traditionalist perspective, which I think represents the majority.
Here's what I will say.
The first order of business, Jordan Peterson, Dr.
Jordan Peterson, is for us, I think, to acknowledge that both religions have a capability of peace.
Okay?
This is extremely important.
And that requires education.
So I'm just going to be honest with you.
Like, for example, the warlord comment that you made, okay?
About the prophet, I think that is part of the problem.
I have to be honest because...
Yeah, I want to get to that.
Dr.
Jordan, here's the thing.
I don't see you as some kind of enemy of Islam.
I genuinely don't.
I see that.
Yeah, and I don't want to be either.
I have lots of people in the Islamic world who are listening to what I'm doing and watching and being supportive.
This is part of it.
And here's what I'll say to you.
I can tell you that, as a matter of fact, my close friends and traditionalist Muslims listen to you.
I mean, that's for sure.
In fact, they love your stuff.
You think they'd have something better to do?
No, no, no, no, no.
Because a lot of your views kind of coalesce with the Islamic viewpoints, especially on like the nuclear family, on alcohol.
I know you've done your PhD on alcohol, actually, your thesis.
And obviously Islam is one of the only religions in the world that bans alcohol completely and drugs and stuff.
But going back to the point, like we said we want to build bridges and we said we want to understand each other.
And I think what you said is important.
We do have two evangelizing religions.
We have to look at the character and the life story of the Prophet, because with the Prophet Muhammad, Here's two things that we have to look at.
Number one, there was the Meccan period.
And I'm sure you're aware, in that period, the Prophet Muhammad was, you know, first of all, he was an orphan.
And then he got married to a woman at the age of 25.
Her name was Khadija.
She was actually his boss.
And then after that, you know, he said that he received revelation at the age of 40 in the mountain, in the cave, sorry.
And then after that, there was a time of persecution.
He went to different places.
He went to Ta'if, which is a place outside of Mecca.
He went to Al-Awsu al-Khazraj, who are two clans, two tribes.
And what it was is that he was trying to get support for his project or the monotheistic project because he was being boycotted, etc.
He eventually got it from Al-Awsu al-Khazraj.
These two tribes because they actually believed in the religion of Islam.
This is documented like without a shadow of a doubt.
This is what happened.
Is this in the Medina?
Is this the Medina period that you're speaking of?
So this is actually technically the Meccan period.
Okay, still in the Meccan period.
Yeah, so right before Medina literally was established, because Medina is, it was so called after the Prophet, because Medina just literally means the city in Arabic.
It was called Yathrib before, and then they changed it into Medina to Nabi, like the city of the Prophet.
And so that's why it was kind of called Medina after that.
In that time period, so we've got 13 years of Medina.
The vast majority, I'm not going to say it all, but the vast majority of wars that took place, in fact, all of the wars that took place before the conquest of Mecca were defensive.
So the pagan Arabs went to Medina and tried to siege it, Badr, Uhud, Ahzab, or the Khandaq, and all of these are names of wars.
In fact, according to Ibn Qayyim, one scholar, there were 19 such wars.
In 10 years.
So that's almost an average of two wars every year.
And for me, I see that actually as an evidence for profit because the Prophet was actually fighting in these wars.
He wasn't just, you know, throwing people around telling them to fight for them.
He was fighting in them and they were defensive wars.
So in that time period, what happened was...
I'll give you one example.
Okay, so let me interject something there, because that's a very hard thing for me to get straight in my mind.
Yes.
Now, I would say that and the division in Islam that occurred almost immediately upon Muhammad's death.
And which has not been rectified to this day.
Quite the contrary.
That's also, you know, that's a problem for everyone.
It's a problem for Muslims.
It's a problem for Christians.
It's a problem for everyone.
And it's a problem that could really get out of hand.
Now, it's not like I don't know that the Protestants and the Catholics were at each other's throats for, you know, hundreds of years.
But that's not the issue at the moment.
So...
Now, in Islam, there's a tremendous emphasis on Christ's doctrines as well.
And there isn't any evidence that Christ himself took part in, let's say, wars.
Okay, I disagree with that.
Okay, what do you mean?
Okay, well, if you analyze Christ as an archetype, when he comes back in his second coming, he is going to dominate the world.
And one can say, well, that's not the historical Christ.
But when we're looking at him in the way that you look at...
That's a reasonable objection.
And I understand that a judge has that martial element.
And I don't think it's reasonable to use the archetypal representation as an argument against the historical reality.
And look, I'm not saying to you That I know that what Muhammad did was wrong.
That isn't what I'm saying.
I'm saying that I don't understand how participation in those defensive wars, let's say, but then that was also followed by a tremendous explosion of Islamic expansion.
The biggest empire the world had ever seen in a very short period of time.
Right at Europe's doors.
And that was also followed by the severance of the Islamic faith into two major categories and internecine conflict there.
And so there's that stream of armed conflict activity.
I think that you're...
With respect, I don't think you're getting the history fully right here.
Because...
Well, yep, that's fine.
Go right ahead.
The war in Jamal and Safin, the wars between Shia and Sunnah, or what would then be...
It's not really between Shia and Sunnah, because quite frankly, Shiaism had not been established as a...
But the wars of the companions, how many people died in those wars?
Do we have any numbers?
For maximum we can say...
No, but it's...
Look, fair enough, man.
It's not like Christianity hasn't been rife with internecine conflict.
No, but the thing is...
But the fact is that it was almost immediately after Muhammad's death that this fracturing took place among the people that were closely allied with him.
And it was a bloody fracturing.
And it isn't obvious that it's been rectified.
How bloody was it?
How bloody does it have to be?
It doesn't take much...
Okay.
Well, Jordan, let's be honest.
Let's be fair.
Yeah, okay.
Let's be fair, right?
With the wars that took place 30 to 40 years, and it wasn't immediately after, because you said that in the video, the day he died, that's wrong.
It didn't happen the day he died.
It happened 30 to 40 years after.
It happened 30 to 40 years after.
How many members of Muhammad's immediate family survived during that 30 years?
My understanding was that most of his immediate family died in armed conflict.
Most of his immediate family died in his own lifetime.
Yes.
Well, I'm not speaking of them, but I'm speaking of what happened after he died.
Let's get these facts right.
Yeah.
Okay, look.
First fact.
Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him.
All of his children died in his life, except for one.
So most of the members of his immediate family, and his wife died, Khadija died, his uncle Abu Talib died, his other uncle Hamza died, they all died within his lifetime, either due to illness or due to some other cause, war for example.
Like one of the defensive wars, Hamza died.
And by the way, Muhammad forgave his killer, and that's something which goes against the warlord thesis, because when he then conquered Mecca, When he conquered Mecca, it was actually no fighting.
I'm not sure if you know this.
It's called Fathu Mecca.
When he went into and conquered Mecca, he didn't fight anybody.
It was no fighting.
There were a few people that were exempted, but he actually quoted what Joseph quoted to his brothers in the Quran, which is that no blame is on you today.
And this, by the way, is a bedrock example of forgiveness in Islam because these were people that were persecuting him for 13 years.
These are people that killed his uncle.
Like I said, there's one person called Wahshi who literally killed his uncle and mutilated his body.
And he said to Wahshi, I forgive you, but I can't see your face because of how...
He said, can you keep your face away from me because I can't, psychologically, I can't bring my face, but I do forgive you, he said.
So he forgave people that killed his own family members.
And this was after he himself attempted a treaty with the pagans called Hudaybiyyah.
And so they broke the treaty and that's what initiated the conquest of Mecca, which was Not a conquest that was fighting.
Now, if you compare this, because I think the comparison, if there's any comparison that can be or should be made, it's Jesus' second coming with Muhammad in the Medinian period, not in the Meccan period.
In the Meccan period, both were being persecuted, Jesus in his life and Muhammad in the Meccan period.
But Jesus, when he comes back, he will then get authority and he will be ruling with the Iron Scepter, according to the Bible.
He will be crushing his...
He will be crushing his enemies, as it says in Corinthians, under his foot, humbling his enemies under his foot, and killing them via violent stuff.
So, in fact, I will actually argue today that the New Testament representation of Jesus Christ and his second coming is way more violent than Muhammad's conquests in the Medina period.
Okay, well, look, like I said, I wasn't trying to make the case that What happened in Mecca or Medina was wrong.
So, let me explain that a little bit.
So, Christian Europe fought a defensive war against the Nazis.
It isn't obvious that that was wrong.
I wouldn't say that's defensive.
Well, okay, fine.
But I understand the concept of defensive war.
When America got involved in World War II, it was not under immediate threat by Germany, and they colonized it.
And here's the thing, it overtook Western Germany, you see.
Here's the thing, the term warlord that you use with the prophet, you've never used with Harry Truman, you've never used with Roosevelt, you've never used with Winston Churchill, all of which conquered countries, literally, in wars.
I feel like there is a bias there and you've actually never used it with anybody else aside from the Prophet Muhammad in your public output.
And I think that's unjustifiable.
I think that you have biblical prophets like Moses, you have biblical prophets like Joshua, you have Jesus and his second coming, all of which were warrior prophets.
And you've only used the term warlord with the Prophet Muhammad, and I think that is unjustified.
What makes someone a warlord?
If it's conquering lands, then Harry Truman is a warlord.
Then, you know, and so on and so forth.
Well, I guess that's a real tough question, isn't it?
What makes a warlord and what makes a just war?
It's not like any of us have the precise answers to that.
And that's partly what we're trying to hash out right here.
There are definitions of the word warlord.
The definition of the word warlord, according to Collins, is that someone acquires force by aggressivity and violence.
Well, okay, so fine.
You push back on me, so I'll push back on you to some degree.
Well, it's certainly the case that the expansion of the Islamic Empire was accomplished by a tremendous amount of warlike activity, and that wasn't defensive.
Now, look, I understand that monotheism is a difficult state to attain.
And that monotheistic societies have emerged in the midst of conflict throughout human society.
I understand that.
And I'm not even saying that there's something exceptional in that regard about Islam, although the rate at which it happened was quite remarkable.
But it still presents us with a problem, doesn't it?
I mean, everyone.
It presents everyone with a problem.
example the problem is reconciling the idea of turning the other cheek with the idea of a just war a defensive war or an expansive war for that matter and of course that issue is relevant to islam because islam exploded outward and produced the biggest empire the world had ever seen in in the in the space of a few short centuries yeah so and so that yeah so then well so then you ask well What is the spirit that animated that?
And is that attributable to the Islamic doctrines themselves?
I don't know the answer to that.
No, let me tell you the answer to that, okay?
And this is what I want to tell you conclusively.
And this will help build bridges, honestly.
Because we can maintain the warlord's thesis.
We can maintain the expansionist thesis.
But here's what I'll tell you.
Islam has a capability to be expansive and And it also has a capability of making peace treaties.
And it does, and it should do, whatever's in its best interest.
Just like every country should do whatever's in its best interest.
In the pre-modern world, we did not...
I think this is highly anachronistic.
In the pre-modern world, there was no such thing as the UN. It was a realist international relations framework whereby everybody was fighting everyone.
The Roman Empire didn't care about you, quite frankly.
It was expanding itself.
The Persian Empire was expanding itself.
And the Arabian Peninsula was in between both.
And so it could have either been swallowed by those two other empires, or it could decide, in fact, we will impose our government on them before they impose it on us.
And it decided the former rather than the latter.
It decided to expand.
And in fact, the Prophet, in his weakest of times, he predicted that that would happen.
You know, there was one war in particular where they were starving and it's called Khandaq.
And he hit a rock and he said, Futihat Rum, the Roman Empire has been conquered.
He hit another rock again.
He said, Futihat Faris, that the Persian Empire has been conquered.
And then he knocked the rock again.
He said this in his weakest moment.
He said that Yemen has been conquered.
I see that the expansion of the Islamic Empire is a proof of Islam.
And you know, it's not just me.
Even historians say this.
Barnaby Rogerson, he said the fact that Islam spread To the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire is equivalent to Eskimos taking over Russia and America.
I believe it's miraculous, if anything, that this happened.
I don't think it's unjustifiable.
I think, actually, Jordan Peterson...
Then why did it stop at Europe's borders, so to speak?
If it was a miraculous expansion.
Yeah, it stopped because it wasn't successful there.
It stopped where it couldn't go further.
But the point is that it's not like the Christians at that time in Rome cared.
I mean, they did the same thing for years.
They were expanding themselves.
That's why I said I wasn't making a prima facie case, that this was wrong.
I'm trying to understand it.
And you objected to my use of the term warlord, and perhaps rightly so.
Perhaps that was an injudicious comment.
I was rather shocked when I was reading Islamic history, when I encountered the degree of violence that surrounded these events.
And so, you know, maybe I was...
No, I appreciate what you said there.
I think that shows real sincerity.
And it's one step closer to creating real...
Meaningful relationships between...
Well, I think your defense that, well, the world was a battleground of empires, and if it's pushed out from our territory or being encroached upon and dominated, then it isn't obvious that being encroached upon and dominated is the right approach, the correct approach, the most moral approach, let's say.
Especially because there'd be no shortage of bloodshed that would also accompany that.
So sometimes you're in a bad place.
But, you know, it's not an easy thing for any of us to, what would you say, mediate between doctrines like turn the other cheek and love your enemy, and also at the same time discuss the necessity of both defensive and sometimes expansionist wars, right?
We all have to contend with that.
And it's very difficult to contend with it.
The arguments are extremely complicated.
You're absolutely right.
And I think what's really important here, because I think this is a huge misconception, is to outline, because I know you're against totalitarianism.
You're very vocal about that.
And I want to tell you that this is a point of commonality.
We are also against totalitarianism.
If we define totalitarianism as a central government trying to encroach every private and public matter of the citizens' lives, and this is something we don't believe in.
In fact, this is very important.
Islam does not say you have to force people either to become Muslim Or they have to live an Islamic lifestyle within an Islamic governance.
And I'm not sure if you know this, but at the time of the Prophet, he made a constitution with Jewish people, with other people who are not Muslim at the time, protecting their rights, protecting their rights to worship whoever they wanted to worship, and actually even guaranteeing that if there were intruder forces that they would be protected like that as well.
Is that the arrangement made with fellow people of the book, essentially?
Yes, it was the arrangement made with them.
Yeah, I'm aware of that.
Yes, and so not only this, but this was implemented at the time of the caliphs.
So Omar ibn Khattab or Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, Ali ibn Abi Talib and so on.
We believe in a kind of pluralism in this sense.
And in fact, I would argue that it was more legally efficacious than what we have in the West.
Do you know why?
Because...
Do you think that's true now?
Yes, let me tell you why.
Because Christians were given courts that they could rule in and that the law would be a parallel dissenting law system which would have effect.
So they would effectively be able to go and judge their affairs outside of the general framework of Islam.
And in fact, this is in the Quran.
And they took this, even though we believe that the Torah has been corrupted to some extent, they can use the Torah, whatever corrupted version they have, to rule their affairs.
And this is something that was done at the time of the Prophet, done at the time of the Caliphs.
And so even now we would say, and I'm not saying that the whole of Islamic history has presented this conviventia that we saw in Spain between Muslims, Christians and Jews, a good time and all other times in India.
A good time was held by all, yeah.
Yeah, I'm not saying that, of course I'm not.
But what I'm saying is that I think it is disingenuous to point Islam as if it's been the most intolerant of all of these religions.
Look at the Alhambra, look at the Spanish Inquisition, look at the Crusades, look at the colonialism that has happened in the name of religion.
There's no disputing with me the fact that, in some sense, we all have the blood of history on our hands.
I'm firmly aware of that.
It's an existential burden for everyone, and I'm not trying to make the case that this is particularly or uniquely true of Islam.
I certainly know that that's not the case.
What I'm saying instead is that these are things that we have to contend with, and we don't exactly know how.
We still have the problem of these two evangelizing religions, right?
That they're going head to head in some sense.
Yes, it's true.
Evangelizing doesn't mean that it's compelling.
And this is very clear.
Okay, now there's an interesting point.
Not that the points you made before aren't, you know, because I kind of think, well, let he who can tell the best story win.
And then that story also has the best actors, so to speak, right?
And so I would say the proper mode to conversion is something like shining example.
And then if you're governed by a doctrine that is in fact divine, and you're managing to embody that in the sense that gives you the glow, the charismatic glow of embodied divinity, two steps removed, let's say, and people are willing to abide by your words as a consequence, well, more power to you.
And that's a lot more efficient and effective than compulsory war, armed conflict, or any of those things.
I mean, this is a constant problem, and I would also say that given our technological mastery now, We really can't afford this anymore.
We have to solve this problem of defensive war, expansive war, evangelical religion, you know, how to go about uniting us under some umbrella that isn't so vague that it means nothing, how to preserve our traditions from the past.
And I can't see any better way than each of us trying to be shining exemplars of our tradition.
And then letting that goodness shine forth in a way that people...
It may be the case that we'll find that the better we are, the more we're like each other.
I mean, wouldn't that be a kind of union under something approximating God?
That all good men could see in each other a reflection of something that was the highest?
And that that should be compelling in and of itself?
Absolutely.
But I think in terms of the jurisprudence, in terms of what Islam is capable of, people in the West must realize that Islam is fully capable of peace.
This is what must be realized.
How do we know that?
It's not despite the Quran and the Sunnah or the sayings of the Prophet and the actions, but it's because of them.
If you look at the Quran and you look at, for example, chapter 4 verse 90, or if you look at, for example, chapter 2 verse 190, you'll see that the Islamic commandments are clearly sometimes about defensiveness, but sometimes also clearly about...
About creating peace treaties.
And this Treaty of Hudaybiya is a bedrock example.
We are, so long as there's peace treaties, there is peace.
And so in terms of Muslim countries, they can perpetually create peace treaties with other people.
Muslim people, even more so because we believe we're fully under contract.
And therefore...
So you're willing to abide by a contract.
This is the thing.
Let me tell you something, Jordan Peterson, okay?
The thing, one of the clearest for me, and I've done a lot of work studying liberalism, studying Christianity, studying Islam, okay?
The clearest...
The commonality between liberal theory and Islam is contractarianism and contracts, consent.
That is a clear thing because in liberal theory, you have the theory of consent.
And in Islam, you have the same thing.
Contracts are binding.
The Quran says...
Even with people outside the faith?
Yes, especially with people outside the faith.
Why especially?
Why especially?
Is that part of the tradition of hospitality in some sense?
Yes, because if you break a contract with a non-Muslim, then you're driving them away from Islam.
Okay, so...
Yes, that's definitely true.
That's absolutely definitely true.
So remember, Islam is attempts to attract people to its own religion.
One of the categories of zakat was...
Money that you pay to non-Muslims so that they can feel comfortable and they can feel as if...
You're doing them a favor and there's relationships going on.
It's a category.
It is a category of zakat, which is one of the five pillars of Islam, to give such money.
So the fact that Islam states in chapter 5 verse 1, O you who believe, fulfill your contracts.
That is generic.
And that means to abide by your word.
You have to stick by your word.
For us, if you don't stick to your word, then this shows a lack of character.
It shows that you...
In fact, one of the signs of a hypocrite Is that he goes against a religious hypocrite.
If he makes a contract, he goes against it.
It seems one of the most despicable things.
Do you think that there are other things that I've said about Islam that we could talk about right now that I could clear up?
Because I don't want elephants under the carpet.
I don't like elephants under the carpet or snakes under the carpet.
So are there other things that I've said that people on the Islamic side who would maybe like to not be my enemy, let's say, because who needs enemies after all, unless you want them?
Are there other things that you think, places that I've misstepped in a serious manner that should be rectified as far as you're concerned?
In a serious matter, I will confine it to the warlord comment because I think that's the one that most Muslims Well, you know, people in the West are afraid of Islamic expansionism.
Okay, so let's go after that again.
So the other thing that I find upsetting, let's say, is the civil war in Islam.
Yeah.
The Prophet didn't tell people to fight each other.
I mean, Islam doesn't say there should be a civil war.
In fact, it was predicted, but it was never encouraged.
In fact, the Quran clearly encourages against civil war.
Yeah, and I would say the same thing about Christianity in relationship to the endless Protestant and Catholic wars.
Sorry, just to interrupt.
In fact, the Quran is the only religious book I know that tells you how to deal with a civil war.
It says that if two groups of Muslims fight, then create peace between them.
It says that if one of the groups rebels against the other group, then fight the one that is rebellious until it wakes up to the command of God.
So Islam is categorically against civil war.
Islam is clearly for pluralism.
It's not for compulsion.
These misnomers and misconceptions must...
Okay, so fair enough.
And as I said, I know that the Protestants and the Catholics were at each other's throats for years.
And despite the fact of there being no justification for that, let's say, or quite the contrary, in the Gospels, So, this isn't a problem that's unique to Islam, but it is an ongoing problem in Islam.
And it's not like there isn't sectarian strife in the West.
I also understand that.
And so, that makes people watching the religious community, say, wary, because, well, for obvious reasons.
And so, I know you can't answer this question in totality, but Islam hasn't been able to bring its own house into unified order.
And so, why do you think that is?
And how is that related to Islam itself, if it is at all?
There's nothing exceptional about Islam in that regard.
And this, once again, you made this point many times, and I'll tell you something again.
Just because there's multiple interpretations of something, it doesn't mean that that thing is false.
Like, there may be multiple interpretations of the killing of JFK. It doesn't mean that JFK didn't get killed.
People differ on things which...
Especially if there's a lot of those people, which there can be more than one interpretation about.
Now, in terms of body count, there was actually a book that was written.
And there was a chapter of the book by, I think his name is Nazir Sheikh.
And he'd done a study looking at the numbers of people that have been killed in all the major world religions.
And he puts Christianity firmly at the top.
I mean, this doesn't require too much historical research anyway.
Look at the 30-year war.
Compare that with any war.
Look, I'm not...
Okay, okay.
So the point you're making is twofold, is...
The necessity for civil war isn't embedded in the doctrine.
And there's no reason to throw stones at the Muslim world when we could perfectly well look to our own history.
And I do think what we should do is look to our own history.
I really believe that.
And I believe that we all carry historical guilt for the bloodshed that's preceded the structure of all of our societies.
But in the West, we look at the Muslim world and we see that it's riven apart.
And we wonder, well, I know there's a hypocritical element to that.
I'm not claiming that there isn't.
It's not like we have our own house in order.
You have to remember something else.
You have to remember there was a colonial reality that existed.
Where Britain, France, and many of the European countries and the Western European extensions, they dominated the Muslim world for the last two, three hundred years.
Yeah, but I don't think that's a particularly good argument.
No, it's a very good argument.
Well, hang on, hang on a sec.
I don't want to knock it away completely.
The rift that I'm talking about, though, was evident far before that.
Now, the fact of that colonial complication, that could well be.
The fact of that colonial complication could well be a contributor.
I know the nation-state lines, first of all, were imposed.
They were imposed quickly.
They were imposed arbitrarily and without...
And partly that was a consequence of, what would you say, having to do a lot of things very quickly in the aftermath of a terrible war.
I'm not trying to excuse it, but it was complicated.
And I know that that's left the Middle East in this, you know, group of nation-states that now comprise the world in a very complicated situation.
So it's a reasonable point.
But the rift was there before.
Okay, here's what I'll say to that, yeah?
You're right to say that there was arbitrary lines that were drawn, but it's not just that there were arbitrary lines that were drawn.
You mentioned the Middle East.
Syria, for example, which is where most of the problems are happening now, in terms of the Middle Eastern countries, it's probably number one.
Maybe Libya, number two.
But say Syria, for example.
They put three, four, five, ten different factions, all of which have differing understandings, Of religion, of ideology, of whatever it may be, together.
That produced wars.
You had Christians in Lebanon fighting Sunnis, Shias fighting Sunnis, and this happened especially after the revolution.
A lot of it is political factors.
That's really what happened.
Yeah.
If you look at how what they're doing now, like look at Lebanon as an example, you have to have a Christian president and a Sunni prime minister and a Shiai, I don't know what it is, first minister or something.
I mean, they have systems that try and mitigate these issues, but it's a mess because you're putting people that have different visions of how to run a country together and they have their similar demographics.
It's like 30%, 40%, 20%, and so that creates more wars.
But they put them together almost, I would argue, on purpose, to be honest.
It's divide and conquer.
If you look at countries like Denmark and Sweden and Norway, which are very peaceful and very prosperous, they're also very homogenous.
And they're relatively small.
So the problem of governance over diversity is much reduced in countries like that.
It's simpler for them to be at peace because the culture is relatively homogenous.
And so I take your point.
It's not easy to bring a true diversity into something approximating a unity, especially when that unity has been...
In some sense, arbitrarily imposed and also rapidly and arbitrarily imposed.
So that's a reasonable point.
Yeah.
I think what it is, and I've seen this in your reading list, it's like when you follow kind of Bernard Lewis's or Samuel Huntington's kind of clash of civilization narratives, sometimes you miss the nuances.
And these are the nuances.
Yeah, well, that's for sure.
There are myriad contributory factors to why.
And I still don't see how Islamic countries, there's like almost 50 Muslim majority countries, In general, you made a point about economic potential one time.
You said that.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that.
Well, that's another thing that's quite a mystery.
Comparatively speaking, per capita, the Muslim countries are not that productive economically.
There's four Muslim majority countries.
In what sense?
There are four out of ten Muslim majority countries in the GDP per capita top ten.
Brunei, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, well, I'm not sure that I'm willing to grant the fact that most of that wealth is generated by oil as an indicator of productivity.
No, no, that's fine, but the point stands.
You said per capita.
GDP per capita.
Sorry, yes, fair enough, and you were right to call me on that.
That isn't what I meant.
I'm sorry, because I don't think...
Well, no, I do.
We've got to get the words right here.
We've got to get them exactly right, because these things matter.
I don't...
Well, all you know is that oil wealth is often a curse as well as a blessing.
So outside of oil wealth?
You have Brunei.
Brunei is another country that's in the top 10.
Okay, so let's talk about Brunei.
What have they done right in your estimation?
I don't know much about Brunei, but I know they're in the top 10, I have to be honest with you.
Yeah, well that's part of this low-resolution knowledge that we all have a problem with, right?
I mean, talking about these things is very difficult because you have to know everything to do it right.
It's not that easy to know everything.
I know that they were trying to implement Sharia to a very high level, and whatever they're doing is not despite the Sharia.
But what I also know is that the methodology is flawed when you look at Muslim-majority countries and say, well, they're not doing well as non-Muslim-majority countries.
The Ottoman Empire 400 years ago was doing better than most countries in the world.
Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.
And I know, I know, and historical timeframe matters, you know, because it's definitely, so that's a perfectly valid point.
Let me tell you something, John Pearson.
You are an epistemological pragmatist, from my understanding.
You said before in an interview that anything which serves life is true.
That's what you said, I think with Sam Harris.
If this is the case, and you said it's nested in Darwinism, if this is your position, then the truth of the matter...
It's nested in a very complex manner in Darwinism.
I think that highest truth is something like love, and I think it's very much associated with the notions of love that are central to religious traditions.
I'm with you, but you still believe that truth is utility, and you still believe, because that's the pragmatist position.
And so truth is relative.
Yeah, but I also believe that the basis of utility is love.
I'm not so sure that you and I differ so much on that particular issue.
John Peterson, what I want to say to you is this, right?
First of all, pragmatically, Islam is doing the best.
Because if you're talking about evolution, then we're talking about reproduction and survivability.
And Islam has got the highest birth rates in the world today.
It's the fastest growing religion by a mile.
By 2100, it will be number one.
So in your definition, it should be the most true, by the way.
Number one.
Number two is this.
Well, that's a lot of love, all that reproduction.
They'll try and change the subject now.
Look, so number two is this.
Look, Dr Jordan Peterson, I'll tell you that I think I've seen your struggle against postmodernism.
I've seen your struggle against nihilism.
And I don't think you will be successful.
And I'm sorry to say it like this.
And the reason why I don't think you'll be successful is because your framework is itself relativistic.
If it's utility and epistemologically pragmatic, then truth is relative.
And if truth is relative, what are you going to say to him?
You actually agree with the postmodernists in that sense.
I think you're closer to postmodernist than you think.
In fact, the pragmatist position is not inconsistent.
It's a secret love.
It's not inconsistent, Jordan Peterson, with the pragmatic position that you hold.
What we are offering you in the list...
Well, I'm going to detail out that in much more detail when I go to Cambridge and Oxford.
So, I don't know.
You should come.
Why don't you come to one of the talks?
I'll come.
Okay, just send me an invitation.
Do you want an invitation?
I'll get you an invitation.
Well, why don't you come?
Because I'm going to talk about exactly that.
One of the things in Islam is to always accept invitations as well and gifts.
And I'm going to send you some gifts as well, my friend, yeah?
All right.
Because we need to get you some gifts.
All right, so look, I'm going to ask you one more.
I've got to stop because I'm getting burned out.
I want to ask you one more question, okay?
And I would like to talk to you again, and I do hope you come and join me in Cambridge or at Oxford for one of these talks.
That would be real good.
I'll get the person organizing the trip to extend you an invitation.
Thank you.
Now, you described yourself as a traditionalist, as opposed to a liberal, Muslim.
And we were talking a little bit about Mustafa Akul.
So why, for you, is the traditionalism particularly important?
And why should that carry more weight than, let's say, attempts to hypothetically liberalize Islam?
What is it doing for you?
We have, and this goes back to the pragmatism point and the postmodernism point, Islam gives you moral anchorage in and of itself.
We believe Islam itself has an inbuilt flexibility, but objectively, from a correspondence theory perspective, it's an outside truth, which is hard, which is strong, and which can oppose and destroy postmodernism and nihilism.
And that's what I think a lot of your followers want.
So you think that a traditionalist grounding is a firmer foundation as far as you're concerned?
When a liberal decides that they want to fuse Islamic ideas with Islamic ideas, with liberal ideas, they're almost...
Okay, fair enough.
I can understand that.
And it's partly why I have some sympathy for the conservative perspective.
Just one point.
Okay, yes, yes.
So they're admitting that there's almost an admission that Islam is not complete and it's not perfect.
We believe Islam is complete and it's perfect and it's guidance.
And we believe we have evidence for that.
Whether it's the prophets...
Yeah, well, okay.
But there's two problems I have with that, I would say.
I mean, look, and I'm taking your point seriously.
And I understand the utility of firm foundations as a bulwark against chaos.
Yes, of course.
But here's two problems I have with that.
It's not easy to protect yourself, if you're a traditionalist, against the temptation towards an authoritarian interpretation.
And flawed as we all are, when we approach, let's say, sacred texts, we also have to remember that it's us who are reading them.
Divine though they may be, that doesn't mean we're perfect in our receipt of their message.
The danger on the more traditionalist side is the slide into authoritarian certainty, as opposed to the slide into chaos on the more liberal side.
So how do you personally defend yourself against that?
Well, first of all, authoritarianism and pragmatism are not inconsistent because an authoritarian leader can...
I'm not saying I have the answer to that problem.
Okay, fine, fine.
That's the first thing.
Number two is, I would say, you know, you've said one time I think in a lecture that one of the miracles of Christianity is render on to Caesar first.
You know, render on to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and render on to God what belongs to God.
What if Caesar is Hitler?
Then you've got authoritarianism all over again.
Yes, definitely.
You didn't answer my question, though.
It was a technical question.
Look, and maybe I'm wrong in the formulation, and you can tell me if you think I am.
What I see as a danger on the liberal side...
Is the possibility of a descent into something like chaos.
That's hopelessness and despair.
But what I see on the more traditionalist side, let's say the conservative side, is a retreat into a kind of authoritarian certainty.
And those are twin temptations that might be, what would you say, specific to given temperaments.
And I was asking you personally, like you're a traditionalist believer, how do you protect yourself from You know, your soul against the temptations of overweening certainty.
All right, I got you, I got you.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, no, no, I don't.
In terms of certainty, I strive for it.
In fact, we want it.
We don't want to...
The problem is not in my view...
How do you rectify error?
Like, you know, you're not perfect, obviously.
No, no, me personally, of course I'm not perfect, but we believe we follow a perfect guidance.
Right, but you follow it imperfectly.
Yes, I am following it.
And there's the rub.
Right, so that's my point, is that given that you have to follow it imperfectly, given that you're imperfect, how do you defend yourself against inappropriate certainty?
Because look, if you're imperfect, it means you think you're right about things you're not right about.
That's the definition of imperfect.
It's compounded ignorance, right.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
So there are things that I, you know, in terms of my own personal, you're talking about my own personal faith.
Yeah, you bet.
You bet.
Okay, I got you.
There are certain things which I'll agree I will believe in 100%.
And there are certain things I will suspend judgment on.
So the things which, for me, constitute the anchor.
I believe the moment I take the anchor away, I plunge into chaos and anarchy and depression.
And that's not something I'm willing to do for myself.
So the certainty I have is that there's one God worthy of worship.
That God's wisdom and guidance is the truth.
That whatever God says is true, that the prophets are true, that heaven is true, that hell is true, all that stuff.
The things I will suspend judgment on is how to deal with situations.
Because that, I do believe, by the way, in a kind of Sharia consequentialism.
And I do believe that within the Islamic framework is something called usool al-fiqh, which is basically the principles of jurisprudence that rules are not always going to work in all cases.
We do believe that, by the way.
So, for example, I'm not allowed to drink alcohol, but in certain cases, if it's the last thing that one can do, if they're not going to die, if they're going to die, if they don't do it, then you can do it.
And this is just one extreme example.
We're not allowed alcohol in Islam, obviously.
This is one of the injunctions.
But there are things we do believe in a consequence, an inbuilt flexibility.
With that, we have to communicate, we have to discuss, we have to speak to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Okay, okay.
I'm still not getting at what I want to hear from you specifically.
Go on.
You know that, well, all of us struggle with the desire to have what we believe be right at all costs, right?
Because it's, well, it is satisfying and it's difficult to be wrong because it means you have to improve.
You have to look at your errors.
I'm asking you personally, like when you're dealing with your wife, when you're dealing with your kids, you know, how do you know when...
How is it that you can protect yourself against being overweening?
This is a good question.
You're going to get me in trouble with this kind of thing right now, you know, this is a good question.
What it is, is that, you know, I've been married for like nine years now, you know, and I've had to learn that the hard way.
You know, I've had to learn that the hard way that I protect myself by realizing or know my own vulnerability, my own fallibility, my own weakness, the fact that I don't get everything right.
The fact that there's another perspective, that there's something outside of myself, which is greater than me.
Yeah, well, that's okay.
So that's something like, you know, because a serious discussion can be had about the relationship between humility and love, right?
I mean, I think a certain degree of humility is a precondition for love, because otherwise you can't take the perspective of the other person.
Like, how can you, if you don't think you're wrong?
And for me, and it's certainly been the case, this was useful in my clinical practice, and certainly in my marriages, I'm trying to be as attentive as I can to when I'm wrong.
And that seems to be a reasonable move forward.
Yeah, that comes out.
And I think that's really good.
That's a good part of your person.
I think that's why a lot of people actually love your work and love you as a person.
Because you come across as extremely authentic and sincere.
We don't find that kind of thing in a lot of public discourse.
It's not like it's obvious to me that the Christians have it right and the Jews and the Muslims have it wrong.
And so that's certainly not the case at an individual level.
It's way more complicated than that.
Way more.
And so we're just not going to go for answers.
If we go for answers like that, we're going to be at each other's throats.
And how about we aren't?
How about we're not?
How about we make peace?
Hey, and so you and I, we had a peaceful conversation, so good for us, and hooray!
And hopefully we'll have some more.
And I would very much like to see you in Cambridge or Oxford, and you can listen to my arguments in a more detailed manner that way, and that might address some of the philosophical concerns that you were raising.
So I'll get an invitation out to you, well, likely today.
And hopefully we'll be able to talk again.
And thank you very much for agreeing to speak with me.
I appreciate it.
And for correcting me on my misapprehensions.
Thank you, Dr.
Jordan, and you're most welcome to come and speak on my podcast as well.
And as I said, a lot of traditionalist Muslims really look up to you.
And I think we've actually come quite a long way in being able to build bridges.
To summarize, really, from my side, so long as today we have realized that, okay, Islam is a religion not too dissimilar, okay, from the other previous dispensations, as we would see it, and that there are things, there's a flesh that joins these religions, and also that Peace is possible.
Peace is possible.
Well, then let's see if we can be good enough people to actually want peace.
Let's try and see what we can do.
All right, man.
We'll see you.
I hope we see each other in the UK. And I'd like to say hello to all the listeners and watchers of this from the Islamic community.
And, like, let's see what we can do together, man.
Yeah, and you're invited to anything, any mosque, I think, in the UK will have you because you've already got the presence there.
Just name the mosque and I'll get you an invitation.
Send me a suggestion.
When I can send you this invitation, send me a suggestion.
I don't know if I can do it on this visit, but I'm coming back in, I think, March, and I'm certainly willing to do it, not only willing, eager, And I mean that.
I mean eager.
I would love to be welcomed in that manner.
That would be a tremendous privilege as far as I'm concerned.
No, I think you will be surprised as to the amount of acceptability that you have in particular in the Muslim community.
Well, hooray for that.
So let's try not to muck it up with foolish words.
All right, man.
Good talking to you.
Thanks again.
Thanks so much, man.
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