Ali Rizvi, author of The Atheist Muslim, critiques North American Muslims’ selective adherence to progressive values while ignoring core teachings like LGBTQ+ condemnation or Quranic verses justifying violence. He contrasts Saudi Arabia’s brutal executions—19 in August 2014, including Raif Badawi after 50 lashings—and public beheadings for "sorcery" with Western hypocrisy, like Obama bowing to King Abdullah while ignoring his repression of daughters or oil-fueled extremism. Rizvi argues Islam’s fundamentalist factions resist secularism and women’s rights, unlike Christianity or Judaism, which evolved past scriptural contradictions, leaving faith-based oppression as a persistent global challenge. [Automatically generated summary]
He's this amazing psychedelic artist, and he has this organization called the Chapel of the Sacred Mirrors.
And what he essentially does, is done, rather, is create his own religion.
And he has tax-exempt status, although his...
I think...
The state recognizes it, but the town doesn't want to recognize it.
They want local taxes.
It's very interesting.
It's because people are cool with religions as long as they're really old.
As soon as you know who made the religion, even Mormonism gets looked down upon because Joseph Smith, although he lived in the 1800s, there's a historical record of Joseph Smith that's pretty easy to track.
But they were like, you know, you're shitting on our holiday.
To me sort of highlights what religion is for a lot of people.
It's a group that you belong to.
It's a team.
Like, I'm a Patriots fan.
You know, don't fuck with our team.
I mean, it really does become something like that.
And when you're talking about American Jews or Muslims maybe perhaps that don't really follow all of what's in the Quran, they just decide to cherry pick.
I mean that's how people sort of progress forwards, right?
I mean, we're talking about Jews and the Old Testament is, you know, we're talking about killing gay people.
Like Leviticus 20.13 says it.
It says, you know, if there's two men and you find them, you know, together in the way that a man should be with a woman, then they will be put to death.
That's exactly what it says.
But most Jews don't really take that seriously.
They've moved beyond it.
Even, you know, Christians, you know, one of the things I look at is Catholics.
The Pope says you should not use birth control or abortion is a bad thing.
Well, people forget about this, about Joe Biden, but, you know, not to...
Everybody makes mistakes, and I'm sure it probably wasn't his fault, but in the 1980s, he was running for president, and he plagiarized a huge chunk of John F. Kennedy's speeches.
It didn't come up during the debate, but during the campaign, there were people who tried to bring it up.
But I think that it had been so long, and he had done so much more since then, like with foreign policy, with the violence against women legislation and so on, that people were willing to...
Let him get past it.
He has a really strong personal story too that he emphasized.
And before the heart transplant, he had some sort of a device that eliminated his pulse.
He didn't have a pulse.
There was some artificial method of pumping blood through his body, and if you checked his pulse, it didn't exist, which is probably in the Bible somewhere.
You know, a guy who causes the death of millions.
I mean, he's directly connected to the death of at least a million people, and he doesn't have a pulse.
I've seen the beheadings and the assassinations and it's just like, okay, I get it.
There's evil people.
I get it.
But it's just like this.
It's almost like if you were a conspiratorially minded person, if you're the type of person that believes black helicopters are circling in your house every day, taking scans of your phone and Yeah, I am.
You would say, okay, it's almost like we're creating this monster that's so unbelievably horrific and so impossible to feel any sympathy towards.
That's like you want them all wiped off the face of the planet.
It's almost like they have become...
They're so evil and their acts are so horrendous that it's the perfect instigating The perfect method of instigation.
If you were an evil dictator or the evil head of some sort of government and you had this desire to go to war with another country, what you would create would be ISIS. You would say, all right, we need some bullshit CIA propped up organization.
It's not real.
And we need them to be just so heinous, so beyond belief, that everyone agrees we should go over there and fuck them up.
This whole idea that they're a fringe and that they don't have a lot of support.
It is one thing that, yes, they don't represent all Muslims.
They don't even represent the majority of Muslims and everything.
Unfortunately, I think they have a lot more support than we'd like to believe.
Everybody who comes out and says that they're just a friend, just a group of guys who are doing this stuff and nobody really follows them, that's not true.
There's a lot of support.
You see it online.
I've talked to people online in Pakistan who are totally in support of ISIS. It's bizarre.
They won't go out and commit those acts themselves, but they'll definitely cheer it on.
So, you know, they do what they can and they go all out.
And they, I think that...
You know, like the Yazidis that they killed, right?
Or the Christians that they're killing in Mosul or the poor people, the women and the gay people, they're throwing off buildings and, you know, crucifying and stoning to death.
These are not people who are oil hungry.
They're not people who have been sort of invading their lands or anything like that.
These people have nothing to do with it.
They just have some of their crimes.
They're just Shia.
They have a different belief in a different strain of Islam or they're apostates.
You know, they left Islam.
They changed their mind.
Or they're, you know, they're a Christian, they're non-Muslims, they're infidels who are not going to subscribe to the, you know, the ISIS philosophy.
They're not going to pay that tax, the jizya that they want them to pay.
So, like, you know, I think that the foreign policy thing is an excuse, specifically for people like ISIS. It is, like, it helps them recruit people, for sure.
It doesn't hurt, but I don't think that that's the primary motive.
I think, you know, like the U.S. foreign policy is one thing, too.
But this is actually part of the religious belief.
And you've had Sam Harris here, you know, he's talked about this as well, like beliefs and behavior.
And most of the time, you know, when they're You know, when you have an entire world and you're seeing these guys and they're, you know, accurately quoting the Quran, I mean, there's a couple of verses in the Quran that say, behead disbelievers, you know, 812, you know, you can Google that, like Surah 8, verse 12 and 13. 47-4 is another one that says, you know, behead disbelievers.
So they actually quote this stuff and they say Allahu Akbar when they do it and they call themselves the Islamic State.
And they don't just target, you know, People who are involved in U.S. foreign policy or anything like that.
They actually target poor people, Yazidis, minority groups, Shias, gay people who are in Iraq and Syria.
That's what they do.
So it's a lot more complicated.
I think it is part of their religious belief.
And one thing you're going to see when you go to their Twitter accounts is that they genuinely believe what they're doing is right.
You know, people say Muslims are not a monolith, and they're not.
I mean, there's 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, so they're obviously not all the same.
The ones in Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, they're all very different from each other.
But the one thing they all have in common is the Quran and belief in the Prophet Muhammad.
So the Quran, again, you know, has different interpretations, but it's supposed to be an immutable text.
And unlike a lot of Christians and Jews who don't believe that they're, like, You know, like with Christianity, if you say that the Bible is a literal word of God, you're part of, I think, just 30% of the US population.
I think it is 30% that is considered fundamentalists, where they believe that it's a literal word of God.
Islam among Muslims, among the vast majority of Muslims, that is a fundamental requirement to believe that it is the literal word of God, like the idea of scriptural inerrancy, that anything in the Quran, it can't be wrong.
So you'll have the more progressive people who try to justify it, they'll never say, well, you know, that verse in the Quran, I don't believe in it, I don't think it's right.
They'll try to justify it by saying, at that time it was okay, Or it's being mistranslated, or the word kill actually means embrace, you know, whatever it is.
They look at the Arabic roots, you know, just find other justifications for it.
But unfortunately, to the rest of us who can read it now, you can Google it in all kinds of different translations and interpretations and, you know, commentaries.
You just find it online, and when you see the words, the words are what they are.
I want to be real clear here that I'm not justifying what they're doing or not trying to exonerate them from the horrific nature of what their crimes are, but what I was going to get to was that, is that dissimilar?
This belief that you can kill people because of the Quran, because they're not following the word of the Quran.
Is that dissimilar than this belief that you can launch drones into these non-specific areas where, you know, this idea of surgical targets is pretty preposterous at this point.
When you look at the number of people, the overwhelming number of people that are innocent, that are killed by drones, Versus the number of people that are guilty.
If you look at that and you look at this being sanctioned by the United States government, the Constitution, our ideas about law and justice and war, Those are also just things that are written down on paper.
I mean, they might be less ideologically based and more state-based or more based on the idea of protecting our nation as opposed to doing the will of God.
But it is one nation under God, ultimately.
This is what we say when we pledge allegiance now since the 1950s, since they were worried about the big communist scare.
It used to be one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all, right?
Now it's one nation under God.
That was all because of communism.
Most folks don't even realize that wasn't even in there until the 1950s.
She lives in Norway now, but she's from that area.
She's from North Waziristan, where a lot of the drones were.
And she wrote this article a couple of years ago.
I think it was in the Daily Times, an Asian paper.
And what she talked about was...
It's sort of the different groups that are in that area, in like northwestern Pakistan, the Pak-Afghan border.
And she said that the locals over there, a lot of times, you know, they feel like they're caught between the Taliban that's sort of taken over the whole area and they, you know, they go out and they put, they're shooting young girls in the head for going to school and they're, you know, doing all this other bullshit.
And then on the other hand, there's the Pakistani military, And they're coming in with their planes, and they're trying to bomb, and that's even more nonspecific.
So they feel a lot of them are actually in favor of it.
There's many of them.
That's what she said.
I don't know how true that is, but it's definitely a plausible claim.
I think it sucks that sometimes they're necessary.
But unfortunately, I think sometimes they are necessary.
Like, these are people who are...
If you have a sniper who's going around killing, you know, hundreds of people, and you want to stop him, and, you know, he's around a place, and you have a choice between, you know, targeting this guy and taking him out, and that may kill a few civilians, whereas if you don't do that, it'll go out and, you know, he'll kill hundreds more people, then...
And you're making that call.
That's a really tough call to make.
I don't know if I could do it.
But when you're running countries and when you have a foreign policy, when you have to do something about something that's happening, then it's a call that you have to make and it's a choice between bad and worse.
Now the army's in there because they're fighting against them recently after the Taliban has been, like, really focusing all their attacks within Pakistan.
They've attacked the army school...
And killed all those kids and so on.
So now they're in there.
But before, when a lot of these figures were coming out, she said that there's no UN people, there's no independent sort of watchdogs or agencies that are looking at it.
No journalists can go in there.
No politicians can go in there.
Even the police, the Pakistani police, is scared to go in there because it's just completely ruled by the Taliban, all these sort of militant elements.
So A lot of these numbers, like if you look at the, I think there was a report, detailed report from Stanford, and they talked about how these numbers were arrived at.
And there's a wide range.
Some people report they're very low, other people report they're very high.
That's not to say there haven't been civilian casualties.
There have been, and that's terrible.
But I think during Bush's time, when he just carried out a few drone strikes, they were relatively non-surgical.
I think Obama, one of the reasons that he decided to go ahead and continue the drone strikes is that he found it the most surgical and the most accurate compared to all of the other options that they had.
It eventually comes down to this that war sucks, and if we're going to have that debate, I will agree with you.
It's terrible.
When you can avoid it, you can.
But if you're of the view that sometimes it is necessary to prevent even larger atrocities, and sometimes you need to do it to stop it, I think...
Which is the view that I have.
I think that the more surgical your methodology is, and it seems like drone strikes tend to be a better option than the other ones.
I mean, there's elements of it that I know about the debate, like the fact that you're sitting far away.
It's very sort of inhuman.
There's no contact.
You're very detached because it's like a remote control and they're firing off a missile.
That part of it sucks.
There's a lot of things about it that suck, but I just don't know how else.
I don't know what other options there are to handle the situation.
It is affecting them.
The Taliban seem to be more upset about the drone strikes than anybody else.
That means that it is kind of hitting them.
They do know that the world has a lot of sympathy for civilian casualties.
They know that And that itself, just the fact that they know that they can use these civilian casualties to their benefit, that automatically shows you that there is an ethical difference between both sides.
Well, you're saying that meaning that they do it on purpose, that they have areas set up in high civilian population areas, knowing that they'll get hit in those areas and it will cause civilian deaths so that those civilian deaths will be used to sort of promote their cause.
Again, you were talking about getting in the mind of...
You know, conspiracy theorists.
I mean, think about if you were one of those people and you knew that, you know, that a lot of people don't agree with you.
Everybody thinks that, you know, you're back in the stone ages and so on.
But the one time you get a lot of sympathy is when there are a lot of innocents killed.
And then, you know, everyone, all these powerful political figures and journalists, everything around the world suddenly start, you know, sort of coming to your side against your enemy.
Well, I can certainly see that, but I can also certainly see the argument that one of the best recruiting methods for the Taliban or Al-Qaeda is having your family blown up by a drone.
He predicted, he was this political scientist, and in the 90s he wrote this paper and later expanded it into a book, and it was called The Clash of Civilizations.
It was sort of a prophecy about the future and what kind of conflicts people are going to get into, and he said that it wouldn't be ideological.
This is about the post-Cold War.
And he said it won't be ideological, it'll be cultural, and it'll be between religious groups.
And he actually talked about the Islamic world and about seven or eight other civilizations and how they're going to get into cultural conflict.
And he was conservative and a lot of people criticized it.
And at that time I thought it was kind of I wasn't completely, completely in line with it.
But now, as time goes on, every once in a while I go back to To revisit the paper.
And it seems to make more sense, almost like he kind of knew what he was talking about.
Have you ever tried to look objectively, like if you were the engineer of modern society or modern civilization, and you tried to look objectively, like sit in a high chair with a desk above the earth, and go, all right, how do I fix this mess?
How do I stop all these silly monkeys from blowing each other up and shooting rockets from robots that fly above their cities?
Blowing up bombs in their buildings.
How do you stop that?
Have you ever tried to see, like, is there a way, like a long-term, short-term, any-term way, to sort of engineer this away?
I think the long-term, I think we discount the role of ideology and belief when it comes to this.
And I don't know how to solve it, but I know one way to move closer to solving it, and that's just being honest about what the problem is.
You know, a lot of the problem, like for example, the Islamic State, you know, they're yelling Allahu Akbar, you know, quoting the Quran and everything.
I mean, this is weak, but, you know, cartoons, people making cartoons and then getting shot up for it.
Like, you know, these are all things that, you know, there is an identifiable issue.
There's a root cause here that everybody seems to deny, like including all the prime ministers and like this has nothing to do with religion.
I grew up in Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan.
I didn't come to North America until I was 24. I grew up in pretty much Muslim-majority countries and some very conservative ones all the time.
Whenever I hear people say that this has nothing to do with religion, it just doesn't make any sense to me.
What's hilarious to me is that a lot of quote-unquote progressive, very left-wing people will openly mock Christianity while defending Islam or by labeling people Islamophobic or conservative.
If you're a true liberal, and everybody's saying this, well, unfortunately, not everybody's saying it.
I wish more people were saying it.
But, you know, if you are, for instance, opposed to killing gay people, you should be opposed to killing gay people, whether it's in the KKK manifesto, or in the Bible, or in the Quran, or in the Republican Party, you know, or in Uganda.
It doesn't matter what it is.
If you're opposed to something, you should be opposed to it across the board.
It doesn't suddenly become respectful.
Okay, now, well, it's in the Bible, so we've got to respect that.
Respect for ideas is just such an overrated...
It's considered a virtue, respecting people's ideas and beliefs.
Ideas are not people.
That's the problem with the word Islamophobia, is that it implies criticism of an idea.
If you look at Mecca, you see like the people that are in Mecca, you'll see red-headed people, red-haired people that are walking around with the traditional garb on, circling Mecca.
Yeah, and there's, in Turkey, so, you know, Turkey's a big Muslim country, Egypt's a big Muslim country, there's Indonesia, there's Iran, where everybody's Persian, There's the Arab world, and there's South Asians.
It's just racially incredibly diverse.
It's not really a race.
I think I saw something.
There was this woman wearing a niqab.
And someone wrote a funny comment about it and got the face veil and the full cover, the burqa.
And someone's like, you know, that's what you're doing is racist.
I'm making fun of this.
And I'm like, can you tell me what fucking race she is?
And I was trying to give the example of myself, is that if I went back to Saudi Arabia or any of the countries where I grew up, and if they knew the stuff that I write, then I have reason to be Islamophobic.
Because by their Islamic laws, it's just not something I like thinking about, what could happen to me.
And then, you know, my passport has, you know, my record of living in all these different Middle Eastern countries and things like that.
And the name and the skin color.
So that does put me in the same category.
So I share that experience with a lot of people who do look like me and have the same name that I do.
Right.
The problem with the word Islamophobia is that I think it's an injustice and it's actually an insult to the struggles of Muslims who have genuinely been victims of anti-Muslim bigotry to use their pain and their experience and exploit it to stifle criticism of Islam.
You know, sort of the same way anyone who disagrees with feminist ideology is automatically some sort of a woman hater, a misogynist, someone who's just a bigot in some way against the female gender.
That's just how it is, man.
People love to silence ideas with a real simple categorization of you.
You are a racist.
You are a warmonger.
I saw someone who wrote that about Christopher Hitchens, that he was a sexist and a warmonger.
I'm like, okay, did you read any of what he wrote?
Did you listen to any of what he said?
That's...
That's kind of hilarious.
Like, to categorize someone and dismiss them so openly like that.
And I think a lot of times, you know, you don't even have definitions for these terms.
When you say Islamophobia, if you ask, you know, someone, a Muslim, a liberal Muslim in Boston, you know, what Islam is, they'll give you a very different definition.
Than someone who's in ISIS or the Taliban.
Oh, sure.
So they have different definitions of it.
I think feminism is the same way.
You can talk to 10 different feminists and they'll give you 10 different definitions.
And what really sucks sometimes is that When you have a certain agenda associated with just a really radical, insane group, then even if they have legitimate viewpoints about something, supposing they have one or two points that are legitimate.
I was talking to a friend about this yesterday, that I think when you have movements, when you have, like, organized movements, it's something that you want to achieve...
Being in opposition to something just makes a lot more sense and it's more unifying than standing for something.
But I'm saying supposing feminism was defined as that, as something that's in, it's a movement that's in, or an ideology that's in opposition to gender inequality or patriarchy or whatever it is.
Then it unifies everybody.
But the moment it starts standing for something, like, okay, you're not a feminist if you're not pro-choice.
You're not a feminist if you believe that Males and females are not exactly the same, you know, psychologically.
Or if you don't subscribe to this, like, sort of gender sociology theory or, you know, whatever it is.
The moment you start excluding people based on that and you start talking about what feminism stands for rather than what it stands against, then you start getting fragmentation.
And I kind of feel the same way with religion and a lot of atheists.
I like the anti-theist position that when you're opposed to You know, the idea of religion and faith and believing things without evidence.
You know, we're doing things for no other reason apart from the fact that it was written in a book, you know, 2000 years ago.
If you're opposed to that, you have a lot of people, you know, who will be part of your movement.
But the moment you start saying, well, atheism stands for being, having this political stance on something, where it means that you have to like what, you have to agree with what Glenn Greenwald says, you have to be in a social justice, then you start excluding people.
And attached this idea, it was just a lack of belief in a deity to, on top of that, all these things that anyone with any ethics ordinarily, automatically believes in.
Sexual discrimination, gender discrimination, racial discrimination, all those things that moral, ethical people already disagree with, they've attached that to atheism and called it atheism plus.
So, you know, standing against all those other things.
But now it becomes like an ideology.
It's essentially, in a way, like a religion.
Because to ascribe to atheism plus, you have to be someone who, you know, these people that go to these conferences and you listen to their speeches, These fucking droning, boring...
They should call Atheism Plus, duh.
Because anyone who's intelligent already thinks, yeah, of course, if you're a balanced person, you shouldn't believe in racial discrimination.
Of course you wouldn't support sexual discrimination.
Of course you wouldn't support, you know, fill in the blank.
You know, of course you would be pro-women's rights.
Of course you'd be pro, you know, there's a whole group of desires that they have or ideological desires that they've attached.
I think that's exactly, that was a point I was making, that the moment atheism starts standing for something beyond just not believing in a god, the moment that happens, you start, you know, there's this fragmentation that starts to take place.
And I just think that it's better, like the anti-theist position, just the idea that, okay, It's been many many years and now this whole religion thing like respect for religion and all the stuff that's being done in the name of it this is kind of enough so all of us rational people I'm going to take a position against this.
Find something else to guide your actions apart from these sort of archaic social and legal codes.
And if we had that position, you could have people from all kinds of...
subscribe to all kinds of belief systems.
They can join your cause.
But the moment you start saying, well, if you're an atheist, then...
You have to stand for this, or you have to be pro-choice.
There's a lot of pro-life atheists that are still atheists.
Well, that's why they call it atheism plus in their ideas.
But if you listen to the talk, it's a lot of these really weak guys who just are looking for social brownie points and trying to get women to love them by standing so powerfully and strong in favor of equality.
It's like there's a certain aspect of feminism that's sort of in...
Sort of engaged themselves with atheism and they've kind of embedded into it and these radical feminist ideas have also like become a part of atheism plus and it's very strange to listen to what they say and completely intolerant of other people's ideas and aggressive in attacking and doxing and going after people who disagree or who they think have you know in some way or another just You know, stood out against what their ideas are.
I mean, look, religious ideology, especially radical religious fundamentalism, has done horrible damage to people, and there's a lot of people that grew up in that, and they have an extreme backlash against it, and so they're angry because of that.
50. And it was supposed to continue every week, but he had a medical review and the doctors said that he's not fit to be lashed the next week, which is fucking bizarre because basically they said that his wounds haven't healed enough yet.
And after the first lashing, you know, he was in really bad medical condition.
He wasn't getting any medical help.
And she just said, she's like, you know, I don't think he's going to survive it.
And he's, you know, like when you talk to him, he's just like a very gentle, very nice, you know, thinking kind of guy, just very sort of, you know, introspective.
And he's like really more of an intellectual kind of person.
I mean, he's not very physically robust or anything like that.
He started talking about how religion and politics should be separate, just the basis of secularism.
There was one post that I liked that he wrote that was about astronomers.
There was some Saudi cleric religious leader with a lot of influence.
You know, who was essentially saying that, you know, I think he said something like traveling to planets is haram or, you know, he was saying something about astronomy.
And he essentially wrote this really sarcastic thing about Sharia astronomers.
He was like, oh...
I didn't know these Sharia astronomers existed, and we should just forget about what all the scientists are saying, what all the telescopes do, and we should just listen to these guys because they have knowledge nobody else has from centuries ago.
So he would write sort of sarcastic things like that.
He never openly challenged religion being wrong or anything, but he was just an advocate for secularism.
So, and that's really all he did.
I mean, I know, you know, people tend to think that like, well, what did he really do?
In August, the month that James Foley was beheaded by ISIS, the Saudi government, our ally, the one that Obama just recently went, you know, to pay respects to the king.
And Fareed Zakaria actually asked him, he asked Obama about, he's like, are you going to mention the blogger that they have jailed?
He's like, well, you know, right now I'm just going to pay respect to the king, you know, but with human rights abuses, you know, with our allies, it's very tough to have that dialogue.
So they can't do that even with permission of a male guardian.
Pretty much anything else, whether it's working or traveling or any of that stuff, they can't do it without express permission of a male guardian.
So they spoke out about it, because their guardian was their dad, who was a king who they barely even knew, and their mother, she's also female, so it really restricted a lot of things that they could do.
So they started talking about gender discrimination, issues, The situation of women in Saudi Arabia.
And they did an interview in 2013. And it's online.
It's with Russia Today, with RT. I think that's what it stands for, Russia Today.
And they were able to get a Skype connection and do this interview.
And they spoke out.
And after that, nobody really heard from them again.
They didn't do any other interviews.
So I actually got in touch with...
So here's where my connection happened is I went to a school called Manar al-Riyadh, which was like an English medium school for foreigners and Saudis as well in Riyadh.
And she was in the girls' branch.
And I knew these two girls who were in the girls' branch who went to school with her, who were good friends with one of the daughters, the youngest one.
Her name is Jawahar.
And when they found out about this imprisonment, they were just shocked.
I mean, they went to high school with this girl, and she was King Abdullah's daughter.
So I'm actually working on a piece about that.
I just did a whole interview with them for an hour.
It's about a week ago.
And it's just, the whole story is crazy because Abdullah is being, you know, Cameron, Obama, everybody's been praising him as a reformer and all the things that he's done for women.
In Saudi Arabia.
His own four daughters have been imprisoned.
They've been starved.
Their dog died of starvation because they weren't getting enough food.
All these things that have been happening.
The hypocrisy and the double standard is just amazing.
Westminster Abbey in the UK flew their flags at half-mass when Abdullah died.
This is a guy who sanctioned all those beheadings.
I mean, he can stop that shit if he wants to.
The sorcery beheadings and the lashing of bloggers and the imprisonment of his own daughters.
He could stop that.
He could have stopped it.
And he didn't.
He just said that we'll allow women to vote in 2015. Fuck.
That's why it's hard when you're there and you come here, and when you hear the Noam Chomsky thing or the Glenn Greenwald thing, You know, we need to...
Like, the same way people are so terrified of Islam that when this Charlie Hebdo thing came out, no one, no one on the left, like, actively criticized it or published those images or, you know, put it on the front pages of their magazines.
It wasn't something that was done.
It wasn't like something where everyone stood in unity and said, everyone's terrified.
They're terrified that they're going to be next.
They're going to get their heads cut off.
They're going to get shot.
Someone's going to storm their office and gun them down because they also published the cartoon.
And Sam Harris made a really good point.
It was the one chance that journalists had uniformly to stand up against this type of shit and just everyone published it.
Every fucking magazine, every newspaper, everyone across the world published those images.
There was this woman who was interviewing, like when they did the reprint and they put the cover of, you know, they put Muhammad on the cover again, you know, crying and so on.
So she was interviewing somebody about that.
And then the woman that she was interviewing started pulling up the paper and showing the cartoon.
And she immediately cut away.
It's like, I'm sorry, we can't show that, and I'm so sorry to anybody who was offended, and so on.
Well, it just means that when you make fun of it, when you draw cartoons, when it's insulting, then it's different.
And I understand where she's coming from.
But I think mockery is super important.
If you think about the interview, the Seth Rogen movie, you have all of these journalists and everybody writing all these inquisitive, biting critiques of the North Korean regime.
And all it does is, you know, because Kim Jong-un wants to be taken seriously.
And he gives him, you know, he's like, okay, I'm legitimate.
Everybody's criticizing me and, you know, they don't like what I do.
But when you make a movie with, like, dick jokes and, you know, the kind of thing that the interview was, and you make fun of it, he goes apeshit.
Why is that part of the world so archaic in their beliefs?
Is it because that's the cradle of civilization?
That's the oldest form of symbol?
What we know today, like the oldest civilizations that we're aware of that we can track is like 6,000 plus years ago, which is Mesopotamia, right?
The Middle East, Sumer, Iraq, Babylon.
Those areas, that's like where we believe Civilization sort of began, and those same areas have the most archaic form of religion and social justice.
Their ideas are so barbaric in a way, or so old.
I mean, the idea that women have to cover themselves in veils, and these oppressive ideas, it's the exact opposite of where the world is heading, especially because of the internet.
There's more and more openness, The exchange of information is quicker than it's ever been before.
And it's really hard to hold on to a really stupid idea today.
That's where I think our role comes in a little bit.
Or the role of the West, the U.S., is...
You know, the reason that the Saudis are lashing right for the reason that they're beheading people for sorcery has nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy or Western imperialism or really anything like that.
But the reason they've been able to maintain it, the reason they can actually, you know, keep those archaic legal codes in place and not really have to do anything about it is because, you know, they're very rich.
They have a lot of oil.
They don't really need to progress.
They're making that money.
And the reason that they have that is because we've all propped them up.
We have supported them.
Do you remember when King Abdullah visited Texas, I think it was in 2005, and then George Bush was holding hands with him?
So you had that, and then a few years later when Obama, his first year of his presidency, he was at the G20 summit in London, and there was a controversy where everybody thought he bowed to the Saudi king, which he sort of did, right?
When he met him, he shook his hand and he bowed.
So that's kind of, that symbolizes where the U.S.-Saudi relationship is.
But they have to do that.
It's not just, you know, we can blame the leaders for being allies in Saudi Arabia, but, you know, it's sort of the same thing that you see when, you know, people driving around their SUVs, filling them up with gas.
And I will say that, you know, Every time we fill our cars up with gas, we're all bowing to the Saudi king.
Yeah, it's oil and then tourism and things like that.
But it's not really innovation.
It's not like they're providing some sort of service or manufacturing any kind of goods or they've got any even cultural elements that are going around all over the world that is able to monetize.
When you have to move on with life, when you can't maintain that.
If the rest of the world is moving on and you are not able to stay in that bubble, when you need to have international trade relationships, when you are dependent on diplomatic relations with other countries and you can't just get away with the shit that you do all the time, then that's how countries evolve.
That's how they progress.
They haven't needed to do that yet because they're fine.
It's kind of like the people who live there and come stay there for a little while and go away, all the expatriates, it's like they're running a hotel.
It's like a family running a hotel and it's got all its money and sort of American accounts, Swiss accounts, you know, wherever.
And people just check in and check out all the time.
We're not talking about, like, Saudi Arabia, beheading people over sorcery.
It's not that, but...
That part of the world, it's almost impossible, I think, for a lot of people who are apologists for that part of the world to rationalize it or to understand it the way you do.
It's really unbelievable, and I understand that now.
When I was there, Just explaining the way that things happen there to people over here, it's just so removed and so alien that people either shut it out of their mind or they don't believe it.
I've seen that a lot.
I'll tell you stories.
What I'm doing in my book is when I talk about these things, I try to bring personal anecdotes into it before I go into the topic in detail because it helps It helps people to relate to it.
So this is something that happened when I was in fifth grade.
So I went to the American school there, which is kind of why I talk like this.
And when I was in fifth grade, we made snowflakes during the winter.
I got a paper.
Fold up a piece of paper and you cut it and you make snowflakes.
And we decorated them with glue and glitter and our names and so on.
I watched a documentary once on these suicide bombers and there was a school that they were running where they had these images in this children's school of these kids that had blown themselves up and they had images of them,
you know, these holy images of them covered with their explosive vests and they had a saying on the wall above them that said, The children of today are tomorrow's holy martyrs.
and there's just like trying to trying to wrap your mind around the idea that you are you're promoting that you are gonna raise these children to be holy martyrs meaning they are gonna blow themselves up and kill a bunch of bad people with them and this is going to be a great thing and then their images are gonna be displayed at this school and everyone's going to praise them and it's It's impossible.
They're basically two different schools of thought.
After the Prophet Muhammad died, you had his best friend.
His name was Abu Bakr, which is what the current ISIS caliph is named after.
And you had his son-in-law and his cousin, and his name is Ali.
So I'm named after.
I don't know how that ended up, like what we're named after, but anyway.
So what happens is you have these two different lines, and there was a conflict about, you know, people were, they couldn't decide who the successor was going to be.
Some people kind of flocked to the caliphate, which was Abu Bakr and the other caliphs, and others flocked to the imams.
Which was Ali.
So it was a successor.
It was just basically a conflict about who the successor was going to be and different people took different sides.
Well, that became incredibly confusing to Americans when the Iraq War went on and we realized that, oh, okay, there's a war going on now that we killed Saddam Hussein between the Sunnis and the Shias.
So in Indonesia and in a lot of Southeast Asian countries, you know, Indonesia, where Reza Aslan says that women are 100% equal to men, I would say, yeah, when it comes to circumcision rates, they are.
More than 80% of men and women there are circumcised.
And then the Maliki, they have a different belief.
The Hanafis have different beliefs.
So, and they'd range and, you know, there's really liberal ones within each sect.
There's really conservative ones.
So it's very wide.
Like, you know, you have jihadists who will actually go out and they'll carry out these martyrdom operations.
And you have Islamists who agree with political Islam, but not all of them are necessarily going to carry out these operations.
And then you have Moderate Muslims, and a lot of moderate Muslims are extremely conservative, and they do believe in all those conservative things like, you know, being gay is not a good thing, woman should cover herself.
So a lot of moderates will believe this, but they reject the political ideology of Islam.
And then you have liberal and progressive moderates, and they're different as well.
So it's a very, you know, it's 1.6 billion people.
He grew up in Iraq, and he started the global secular humanist movement while he was in Iraq.
So he became a target for a lot of people.
And the global secular humanist movement now has, I think, 300,000 followers on Facebook and so on.
So it became huge.
And he was also from a Shia family, and he was targeted by Al-Qaeda.
And they managed to kill his brother.
After that, he was running around over all kinds of different countries until he finally got refugee status in the U.S., and he came here recently.
He's full of stories about Iraq and how complicated it is.
Some of the other people I've talked to, they say that the reason Saddam Hussein was so effective is because he ruled with an iron fist and he kept all of these sort of religious rivalries under control.
And he prevented anybody.
He was fairly pro-secular.
A lot of these dictatorships, they're secular.
And in the moment you took that fist away, everything just went nuts.
Yeah, that's what it seems like from our point of view, from our conception.
Confused point of view when all that was going down.
There was a very strange moment where most Americans were standing back going, wait, wait, wait, what's going on?
Like, they're competing against, they're fighting with each other?
Like, in their two rival sections?
What?
No one knew that there were rival factions of Islam.
This guy Reza Aslan, he is a very interesting sort of polarizing figure.
Some people think that he is an interesting historian, a voice of reason, and other people think he's completely disingenuous and not just incorrect about certain things, but that he's full of shit.
- But they have this sense that they're like, okay, we don't want to be called racist.
We don't want to be called bigots.
So, and I think he kind of, he uses that a lot.
And one of the things that he said, for instance, is that he actually wrote, he's like, these books, the Quran, the scriptures, they don't mean anything in and of themselves.
These words have no meaning.
It is a people, like a misogynist, violent person will bring their meaning out and they'll see in it what they want.
Like as if the book is full of Rorschach texts.
It's like inkblots that you can interpret and these words don't mean anything.
And I was just thinking about the implication, and I wrote this for the Richard Dawkins website, is, you know, if he's saying that, like, these people, they didn't get their ideas from the book, the book has nothing to do with it, then he's saying that all the people in the Muslim world are disproportionately inherently violent and misogynistic.
And to neglect obvious causes, like, you know, when we talk about root causes, anytime someone says, Allahu Akbar, if they do something, or they say, Jesus made me do it, we always kind of ignore that.
Like, okay, let's ignore that.
Let's look beyond it.
But when you're looking beyond something, you're never going to see what's in front of you.
So if I tell you I did something, a horrific act because it was my political beliefs or because I played a certain video game or I liked a certain band or...
I was pissed off about U.S. foreign policy.
You'll take that at face value.
Everyone will.
The moment anybody says U.S. foreign policy, you know, Reza Aslan, Glenn Greenwald, I'll be like, oh, okay.
They said what the cause was.
We should believe them.
But way more than U.S. foreign policy, they're telling you why they're doing things.
They're doing it for God.
They're doing it for the afterlife.
But when we listen to that, we don't take that at face value.
We're like, no, that's impossible.
It has to be something beyond it.
It's the only thing that we don't believe.
That religion and religious belief can actually do these things.
I was watching this movie and I... No, was it a TV show?
And someone said something.
Well, they said that the moment you demonize your enemy or the moment you call your enemy the devil, You're not going to be able to understand them.
The moment you've decided that they're the other and that this is just pure evil, you'll never understand their motivation for why they do what they do.
The Charlie Hebdo thing confused the shit out of me.
Not that people were willing to kill people over the cartoons, I kind of already had that idea in my head, but the reaction by a lot of left-wing progressive people in the United States condemning the racism of those cartoons.
I was like, what the fuck are you even talking about?
You're talking about a massacre, a horrific, murderous massacre.
And you've chose to condemn the quote unquote racism of these cartoons, which, you know, it's like killing the people that write Mad Magazine.
I mean, it's not much different.
You know, Mad Magazine or, you know, name any sort of controversial South Park, going after the guys from South Park, killing South Park.
That apologist thinking, that weird sort of thinking that's embodied by a lot of those really progressive left-wing, like really radical left-wing people.
Do you think they're doing that because they're terrified of retribution and they're so terrified that they're willing to side with the murderous Religious fundamentalists because they're almost worried that they're going to get attacked themselves.
They're like, well, you know, I mean, those cartoons were kind of really racist.
And I mean, I'm not saying that the murders were cool, but I'm saying like, hey, why are you promoting like horrible racist cartoons?
That's something that I, and Faisal, the guy from Iraq I told you about, he says the same thing, you know, when he came here.
A lot of people are sort of apologists about it because there's a freedom of speech and then there is this sort of political correctness and not to offend anybody.
And people will say, one thing I've been hearing a lot is freedom of speech doesn't mean the freedom to offend.
Right, which is why I have a huge issue when people say something that other people deem to be offensive, they automatically go after their employers and try to get them fired.
Like, this isn't just a freedom of...
You're not just speaking about them.
Now you're taking action to try to get them fired, which is very different.
This is a very different kind of activism, and it's mean.
Like, what you're doing is like...
There's a negativity attached to it that's very strange.
It's an aggressive negativity, a rebound from something that they believe is incorrect.
We also talked about hate speech because I think one of the biggest problems with France and Europe and a lot of European countries is that they have laws against hate speech.
In the US, you have laws against hate crimes, but hate speech is protected as part of free speech, and I think that's right.
Remember the Westboro Baptist Church ruling, where the Supreme Court voted 8-1 to allow them to picket funerals?
And as much as that idea is abhorrent, or anything the Westboro Baptist Church does is abhorrent, That is their right, and they should be able to do it as long as it's not a crime and it's his speech.
But, you know, they have, in France, they've got Holocaust denial laws.
They have rules against, you know, attacking, you know, like, let me put it this way, the very same things, same rules, that their hate speech laws were actually used by the government at times to warn Charlie Hebdo.
Like, you know, what you're doing is you're engaging in hate speech.
So the same hate speech laws that actually protected the killers, right?
Protected their right to express themselves and to say, okay, do everything from subjugate women to, you know, impinge on gay rights, for instance.
Like, all of those same things, the same hate speech laws were used to warn the Charlie Hebdo people.
I mean, they had that fashion designer...
Who was arrested for anti-Semitic remarks that he made in a bar.
Yeah, so if you have hate speech laws, if you have things like that, then that causes a lot of issues.
It doesn't work very well for people who are making the cartoons, like Charlie Hebdo, and actually ends up protecting their attackers and their ideology.
When I look at the apologists, especially in America, I often wonder whether or not It's a case of people, it's like very similar to people almost like winning the lottery and becoming spoiled and not appreciating the earning of that money.
Or someone who inherited millions of dollars and you usually find them all fucked up and drunk and become drug addicts.
They're so spoiled.
They're so spoiled by this freedom that they don't appreciate it.
It's almost like we've had so much freedom and it's gone on for so long with no consequences that until you actually see personally the effects of those consequences of free speech, you don't appreciate free speech for what it really truly is.
You may disagree with someone, but if you disagree with their ability to express themselves, you're a part of the problem.
Yes, the merit of the content has nothing to do with it.
It shouldn't even be an issue.
I don't even know why it was an issue.
Spoiled.
And there's this idea that supposing we said that the cartoons were hate speech, and they were criticizing an ideology that a lot of people found, a belief that a lot of people were very sensitive about.
Or like a historical public figure who's been dead for a long time and, you know, that people are sensitive about.
So, supposing you had that, you know, again, you know, sort of even the competition there.
You know, pull out, they used to lampoon religions, all the religions, it wasn't just Islam.
So, you know, pull out the Bible, pull out the Quran, open it up to certain things and, you know, there's more hate speech in those books than there could ever be in the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
If you're talking about incitement to violence, you know, killing infidels, apostates, you know, go to Deuteronomy.
And if you go to Deuteronomy 20 and you read it, it reads like an ISIS rulebook.
It says, you know, go into the land, you know, put the sword to all of the men, you take the women and the children as slaves.
I mean, that's exactly what it says.
And then in the Quran, 47.3, it says the exact same thing.
So the good thing about secularism is that it allows freedom of religion.
It's the only system that allows every religion to really openly The complete religious freedom for everybody.
But at the same time, it separates that from politics.
So it allows a system of coexistence.
And I kind of, I always think that there's several steps to enlightenment.
I mean, for me, enlightenment would be if nobody had any religious beliefs at all.
Everybody was just kind of operating rationally.
That would be very nice.
Hasn't happened anywhere yet.
But I would say that, you know, you'd have a reformation.
And after the reformation, that would get you to secularism, where you separate religion and state.
And then you move to a point where, you know, people can actually have that conversation and they can, you know, reject irrational beliefs entirely.
But the step before Reformation, in order to have a Reformation, you have to, especially in the Muslim world, you have to reject the idea of scriptural inerrancy.
You know, you have to stop taking the Koran literally, not just justifying the stuff that's in there, but just saying, okay, you know, there's this in here, we don't believe that anymore.
And stop thinking that it's the literal word of God, which is a very tough thing to do.
They want to have some sort of a very rigid set of rules and patterns of behavior that they're expected to follow And if those aren't coming from God, then they're coming from man If they're coming from man, they're open to dispute and that becomes the issue with a lot of people so much so that they're willing to accept These ideas that were written down that are preposterous if proposed today like the ancient writings and stories from the Bible from the Old Testament especially and
If you tried to say today that you found a book and that this book was written last week by God and he wanted me to read it to you.
And apparently, fuck all these scientists, there was actually just two people.
It was Adam and Eve.
And that's where people came from.
And Eve actually came from Adam's rib.
So that bitch is super lucky.
She fucked up the whole thing because she talked to the snake and she ate an apple.
And the snake told her, eat the apple.
But God said, don't eat the apple.
She ate the snake, and so because of that, we're fucked.
And the more we become illuminated about the actual true nature of matter, of biological life, the process of atoms, and the subatomic particles, and when we get deeper and deeper into the very nature of reality itself, the more we can explain, the less religion becomes valid.
And the more it becomes pretty obvious that someone in a very distant time where there was no science and there was no There was no base of knowledge where it had been accumulated over thousands of years of people slowly but surely measuring things and figuring things out and coming up with newer and better ways to measure things that were based on the discoveries of people before them.
And we're all, all of us, I mean, the reason why we celebrate guys like Isaac Newton or Darwin is because we've all piggybacked on their discoveries and learned more.
And every scientist and every biologist and every anthropologist has dug up bones.
We've added another little piece to this puzzle that's constantly evolving and growing and changing.
And then something like religion comes along that says, stop all this fucking learning.
Cut it out.
I mean, the very idea of it is anti-progress because you're supposed to rely on some old ancient shit.
It's like going back to when Galileo was imprisoned or Copernicus was chastised.
Going back to when these people were thought of as enemies of God because they had these crazy ideas that we today accept as fact, measurable fact, undeniable fact.
I mean, what's at the heart of religion is infallibility, like the idea that this can't change, that it's immutable.
So you have infallibility.
On the other hand, with science, the heart of scientific inquiry is falsifiability, which means just the whole idea that you start with the assumption that, okay, this could be wrong.
How do I prove that it's right?
And with faith, it's different.
You start with the conclusion.
You're like, this is my conclusion.
I don't need evidence for it.
Now I'm going to work backwards and see what I can do to strengthen my belief.
And it also seems like as time goes on, because of these ideas being less and less compatible, the opposing factions, science and religion, are more vehemently opposed to each other.
They're more aggressive about their denial, or they're more aggressive about their Non-accepting of these fundamentalist ideas.
Scientists today are more aggressive about their ideas that atheism is the way to go and that these religious fundamentalist ideas that are being pushed on people are a form of ideological poison.
They fuck with the mind because they give the mind these very rigid Patterns that you're expected to adhere to and conform to and if you do not I mean the idea of like if you don't believe or you fall out of faith You should you're supposed to have your head removed.
I mean that should tell you right there What is what do you think you think with your fucking head?
Well, you've been thinking too much.
So we're gonna cut your fucking head off Don't think you need to abide by this shit that was written down on parchment Back when they thought the world was flat and the sun was 17 miles away.
Like that's what you need to abide by because otherwise you're gonna fuck up our party.
Yeah, it kind of brings you back to the whole community thing that I think a lot of people they want that identification and they want that sense of identity and you know group identity that religion gives them.
They need it so much that that's why they take just attacks on Their ideology, personally.
Where I grew up, people used to celebrate it all the time.
I mean, like educated people.
They wouldn't say it to...
Like, within our own living room, we're sitting there, you know, educated uncles and aunts who had, you know, been overseas and they'd studied overseas, they came back, you know, when...
Something like 9-11 would happen or, you know, any kind of attack against America would happen, even with civilians.
You know, be completely supportive of it.
But, you know, when they'd go out and they'd talk to their white friends, they'd be like, you know, yeah, this is terrible.
We condemn it.
There are root causes for it.
We should understand what their legitimate grievances are and why they did it, but that doesn't justify the murder.
Unfortunately, not particularly in my house, but...
Extended family, family friends, I mean, just on a daily basis, we're surrounded by it.
I mean, when the Salman Rushdie Fatwa came down, you know, a lot of my extended family, a lot of my friends, you know, teachers at school and everything, they all supported it.
I guess the way the Quran was supposedly revealed was that Muhammad got these revelations from above and at one point he got these revelations that said that certain elements of idolatry are okay.
It was like these three idol gods and you know, okay fine, we can respect that or people that follow them, they're okay.
And then later on he's like, no, no, that was Satan talking to me.
I mean, the hundreds actually happened in one incident.
There was a politician...
In Pakistan, who she knows personally and who has been sort of very vocal in his opposition to the Taliban.
And she just said that she supports him, right?
And just because of that and because he is under a lot of threat.
And she had some argument with some of the people who opposed him.
And then the rape threats started coming in.
And so at that point, you know, we would report it.
So we will report things like that.
I can't talk too much about what happened.
But most of the time they come from overseas and some kids sitting in villages with a laptop or a cell phone and sending threats.
But there's always a chance that one or two of them are real and this is obviously a real issue.
But generally, it's a lot worse for women than it is for men.
Because there's this idea, especially among conservative cultures and a lot of the Muslim culture, is that if a man decides not to follow religion, that's a separate thing.
But if a woman decides not to follow religion, she's lost all morality.
A lot of times they think that they have the updated software.
We have the most recent religion, you know, like Islam came after Christianity, it came after, and then we had this great civilization, which they did at one point.
And why are we in such bad shape in all over the world?
Sorry, I watched this speech once where this guy was talking about He was asking questions or the audience was asking questions about certain aspects of Islam and how do they know whether, you know, if one religion says one thing but Islam says another.
And his answer was, it's very simple, because Islam is the truth.
I think that, like, and this is one of the things I'm exploring in my book.
I think, like, with Jews and with Christians, they were able to, like, have a genuine reformation where they're able to bond and come together on a sense of community rather than ideology.
Like, you know, if you're Jewish, you can be an atheist Jew, you can be an agnostic Jew, you can be a secular Jew.
You can be an Orthodox Jew, but nobody's ever going to say, okay, you're not a Jew anymore.
And you don't even get excommunicated from the community just because you use condoms.
No one's going to say, okay, you use birth control, so you're not a Catholic anymore.
But with Islam, a lot of Muslims are still in that.
You can sit 10 people down.
One of them's going to say, music's a sin.
Another one's going to say, you've got to cover your head.
there's going to be fragmentation based on that.
But if they are able to come around, if they're able to focus instead of the ideology, focus on the community, you know, we were saying the identity of, you know, going to church, you know, having your own family and friends and, you know, that sort of communal atmosphere that religious, belonging to a religious group that sort of communal atmosphere that religious, belonging to a religious group Which is a benefit for a lot of people.
That sense of community is so huge for a comfort to people, providing people with this group that they can rely upon and they feel connected to and joined with.
There's a lot of benefit to that.
The idea that it has to be attached to some archaic belief system To some ridiculous old shit that was written down when people had a very poor understanding of reality.
Very poor.
And that's what's really bizarre about the Islamic religion, is that at one point in time, you know, in the early...
You know, just like the 1200s and before, Islam was at the forefront of science and philosophy and writing.
I mean, it was one of the Islamic world, the Muslim world, was one of the more advanced cultures on earth.
We don't identify like Albert Einstein's achievements as something, and he wasn't even, Albert Einstein wasn't even religious.
So with this, the fact that there were Muslims in a certain part of the world that were engaging in a lot of scientific inquiry, and they were really moving forward, and they were being progressive, and they're making new discoveries.
This is something that is more of a testament to science and to free thinking than it is to the religion itself.
That's similar to the fact that Darwin, when he was proposing his theories, the predominant scientific community was Christian.
Most of the people that he told his ideas to were in opposition of these ideas initially because It went opposite of their Christian beliefs.
We think of scientists today as being almost universally secular, or at least the ones that we pay attention to and respect, we think of them as having, at the very least, an agnostic religious base.
I think what we do is we sometimes look at it the other way around.
When you had all that scientific progress happening in sort of the golden age of Muslims, then that was happening again, like it was happening despite the fact that it was Islam.
Now when you have all of these, all the terrorism, all these things happening, there's a direct relationship between words and the scripture and what they're doing.
So what we do is now we say, okay, just because they're Muslims, you know, they just happen to be Muslim.
That's why they're doing it.
But at that time, we actually attribute it to Islam when it's really the other way around.
But it is unfortunately linked, like, you know, the words of the Quran, the scripture, it is linked to a lot of the violence that you see, a lot of the subjugation of women that you see.
And that connection It's something that should be acknowledged.
Like, I've just noticed that when someone says something like that, or if there's a Quran burnt or cartoons drawn, there's just, like, a lot of outrage.
But it's just not the kind of thing you see when people...