Sam Harris' Exaggerations

In looking at Sam Harris' long collection of quotes from the Koran in his book, The End of Faith, I couldn't help noticing that--whatever he might say about them--at most, four of the passages (2:190-93, 2:216, 2:217-18, and 3:156) could be seen as supporting actually fighting nonbelievers. And even these passages are somewhat questionable in that regard: the first might only apply to retaliation, the second and third could be figurative (since I can't see them in context), and the fourth could also be in self-defense. The rest of the passages do promote a vicious attitude toward the nonbelievers, but Allah seems to be the one taking all the action against them, not the Muslims themselves (Harris 118-123). If it weren't for those few passages about fighting, I personally would interpret this part of the Koran to mean that nonbelievers are damned by Allah to eternal suffering after they die and that they deserve it--not that Muslims must go attack them and bring their death sooner (after all, they should be given time to accumulate as many sins as possible to increase their punishment...). Just because Muslims may hate nonbelievers, they don't necessarily have to kill them: hating and murdering are very different things. As far as fitting in those other passages about fighting, I'm not sure what to do. Since I don't have them in context, it's hard to discern what meaning they were originally meant to convey, but again, it may be figurative. Like Augustine said about violent Biblical passages, the fighting may have been geared toward the sin of the nonbelievers, not the people themselves (Augustine 76-77). However, Harris says that Muslims see the Koran as "literal and inerrant," so it all depends on one's interpretive methods (Harris 110).

Reading Harris' brutal attack on Islam, I feel that he highly exaggerated both the prevalence of Islam-related terrorism as well as the amount of support for it in the Koran. I think Noelle is very right to say that terrorism is far from "commonplace" as Harris describes it (Harris 109). And I'd like to elaborate: not only are the 2.8 million Muslims in the United States acting perfectly peaceful, but so are the majority of Muslims even in the Middle East and all across the globe. While some small factions of the religion have embraced terrorism as the most highly religious act, not everyone has. I admit that the survey results Harris cites, showing such widespread acceptance of suicide bombings as justifiable, are surprising, but they're also inconclusive (Harris 125-26). In asking participants if suicide bombings are ever justifiable, the survey is including situations in which the bombings could be counterattacks to previous violence by nonbelievers. To most people, violence in response to violence is at least sometimes justifiable, and if this is what the Muslims surveyed were thinking, the survey results become much less surprising.

Noelle also brought up another good point--that the militant Islam that does occur can just as easily be explained by psychology or sociology as religion. While the civilians being bombed wouldn't have attacked Islam themselves, they could easily be a scapegoat for the Muslim's retaliation. Once people start thinking in groups, they start to see people outside their "in-group" as less than human, and it becomes easier and easier for them to rationalize immoral behavior toward those outsiders. With the addition of the pressures of obedience to authority (as Milgram described and Noelle also mentioned), the situation can quickly get out of hand as people blindly obey their corrupted leaders. However, this has not happened to a very large faction of Islam. The sects in which it has occurred probably had cultural circumstances lending themselves to such violent measures; since Islam itself hasn't adopted them, I think there's good reason to believe that the core religious beliefs of Islam are not the cause of this terrorism. (Noelle said this in her post as well, but I thought it was very important and worth repeating.)

To me, Harris' arguments seemed very naive for ignoring these major points. Not only is the Koran much less supportive of outright violence than he seems to indicate, but Muslim violence int he world today is also much less widespread. As we've learned in this class, religious writings can be interpreted to mean many different things, and the militant Muslims who have committed acts of terrorism are just one example of imposing views not explicitly supported by the text onto other passages.