Islam is So Weak, It Must Be Protected by Law

You can tell a religion can't stand up to criticism when its adherents have to resort to blasphemy laws to protect it.

That's the case with Islam. The film actor and comedian Adel Imam was recently sentenced to jail in Egypt for movies where he parodied conservative Muslim beliefs.

I won't be visiting Egypt anytime soon.

Two Perspectives on Islam

Here are two perspectives on Islam of today:

A Palestinian doctor who lost his children in an Israeli attack, but continues to work for peace.

A network of Islamic schools in Britain that teaches that Jews look like "monkeys and pigs" and demonstrates the proper place to amputate hands and feet as punishment.

Which is more representative? I hope the former.

Portrait of a Jihadist

Andrea Elliott in the New York Times has this troubling story about Omar Hammami, a college boy turned Muslim extremist. It's definitely worth reading.

Clearly the path that took Hammami from Alabama, where he was raised, to Somalia, where he leads a rebel movement, is complicated and formed from multiple incidents in his life. But it is interesting to see the role played by religion, and in particular, Christianity.

Raised by a Christian mother and a Muslim father in the deep South, Hammami clearly felt conflicted. But, according to the story, he was indoctrinated in "Perdido Baptist Church, a tiny congregation whose preacher warned of hellfire and damnation" and induced to attend Bible camp. He found it hard to reconcile the claims of fundamentalist religion with science: he wrote “Sometimes I get confused because the Bible says one thing and our textbooks and Darwin say another" in his journal at age 12. Well, of course, if you feed your child religious lies, they're going to be confused when they learn about science.

We can see in the article the corrosive influence of the particular brand of Islam that Hammami adopted. After his conversion, he swore at a former teacher, "assailing her for being Jewish". He dropped out of studying computers because he couldn't tolerate the presence of women. "He began subscribing to conspiracy theories about 9/11", the article explains.

Now he participates and leads troops in an extremist Somali movement that does things like publicly stoning to death a 13-year-old girl accursed of adultery. How did his mind get so warped?

Part of the answer, it seems to me, is the credulity induced by his religious upbringing and his failure to regard religious and other kinds of claims skeptically. There is a direct path from the claims of fundamentalist Christianity to the claims of 9/11 truthers and the claims of radical Islam. All spin an elaborate tale with no evidentiary justification.

We don't serve our children's or society's best interest by indoctrinating them with these kinds of claims at an early age. We need to teach kids to think more skeptically and give them the tools to analyze and decide between conflicting claims. And somehow we need to make sure kids aren't threatened with hellfire if they don't adopt the views of their minister. That's just a form of psychological terrorism, which in this case led to tragic consequences.

Taner Edis visits Waterloo

Taner Edis, a professor of physics at Truman State University in Missouri, and the co-editor of the anthology Why Intelligent Design Fails? visited Waterloo briefly last Friday. He gave at talk at Wilfrid Laurier University, down the street from me, on "Science and Religion in Islam". This is a topic of his recent book, An Illusion of Harmony.

I've known of his work for quite a while, but had never heard him speak in person. Edis is noteworthy in part because of his Turkish roots, which give him some insight into the Muslim world's flirtation with pseudoscience and creationism. And he is an extremely fair writer, in the model of Ed Brayton, who always tries to understand the other side's position and summarize it accurately.

He started by pointing out that different sciences have converged, through separate paths, on naturalistic explanations for the world. ( If I may quote Stephen Weinberg, "religious skepticism is not a prejudice that governed science from the beginning, but a lesson that has been learned through centures of experience in the study of nature." ) These explanations cast doubt on the reality of supernatural beings.

Scientific materialism, therefore, is a threat to modern religious belief, although technology itself is attractive. There are two kinds of responses: try to show that science supports religious belief (say, by finding passages in the Koran that supposedly presage modern scientific developments) or argue that "true science" is compatible with religion.

While there are many Christian sects that support a young-earth creationist view, in Islam, the old-earth creationist view predominates. There is a strain of Islamic creationism that originated in Turkey but has become popular world-wide. As an example, Edis passed around a truly revolting tract by Harun Yahya entitled Fascism: The Bloody Ideology of Darwinism.

Edis discussed two science-related "urban legends" that are widely repeated in Islamic communities. One was that Jacques Cousteau became a Muslim after observing that there is a salinity barrier in the Mediterranean which is supposedly mentioned in the Koran.

Edis pointed out that Muslims who advance pseudoscience are not opposed to all science and technology. As an example, he cited the Nur movement, whose followers are very pro-technology.

Edis stated that Darwinian evolution, particular human evolution, is not widely accepted in Islam because a naturalistic process with random elements is unacceptable theologically. Islam differs from Christianity in that Christianity has a large number of moderate sects that view science as a separate domain, while Muslims typically see science as subordinate to the revelations of the Koran. Liberal Muslim views are much rarer than liberal Christian views.

Edis pointed out that Muslim countries are very weak in science, although applied science does better than basic research. Those who point out that creationism is pseudoscience are labeled as "secularist".

Altogether, I found Edis' talk to be informative and well-presented. I can't say as much, regrettably, for the questions that followed. I was startled at how incoherent some of the questions were, and some questioners didn't seem to listen carefully to his replies, apparently preferring to base their remarks on caricatures.

A Muslim woman who said she was a professor of chemistry at Wilfrid Laurier (probably this professor) made two statements. First, she said that, as a chemist, she saw no conflict between science and her religion, because Islam instructs its followers to be seekers after truth. Second, she disputed the title of the talk, saying that "Science and Religion in Islam" was misleading because the talk was not about the true Islam. In other words, she employed the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

In reply, Edis correctly observed that chemistry enjoys a slightly different position than physics or biology. Some aspects of physics and biology (e.g., cosmology, evolution) provide explanations for the world that are significantly at odds with religious claims. Chemistry, however, seems to intrude less significantly into what has traditionally been perceived as religion's domain.

Edis rebutted her second statement by pointing out that, as a non-believer, for him there was no "true Islam", but only a variety of different Islams as practiced by different religious groups. He said it would be arrogant for him to pick one of these Islams and declare it as the true Islam; that was for believers to decide. His concern was to examine Islam as it was actually practiced.

Another Muslim questioner heard Edis' response about chemistry and didn't seem to grasp the distinction Edis was making, saying that he had dismissed chemistry as less important than biology or physics (something not even remotely implied by Edis' reply). The same questioner dismissed the theory of evolution as just one explanation among many.

It was an interesting afternoon, and I only wish I had had more time to discuss with Edis after the talk.

Canadian Muslim Group Invites Al-Zarqawi Supporter as Speaker

Well, I see my colleague Mohamed Elmasry is at it again.

Elmasry, you may remember, is the Electrical and Computer Engineering professor who claimed that Israeli citizens were fair game:

COREN: So everyone in Israel and anyone and everyone in Israel, irrespective of gender, over the age of 18 is a valid target?

ELMASRY: Yes, I would say.

Elmasry later apologized for his remark.

Now, in his role as "Chair and National President" of the Canadian Islamic Congress, he's bringing Al-Zarqawi supporter and general froot loop Yvonne Ridley to speak in Montreal, Toronto, and Waterloo. Yes, that's certainly the way to improve relations with the Jewish community.

A convert to Islam, Ridley has urged British Muslims not to cooperate with the police and has been an apologist for both Al-Zarqawi and a Chechen terrorist involved in the Moscow theater hostage crisis.

Recently she has blustered that "However if any of those Zionist idiots continue to try and paint me as an anti-semite I must warn you ... one of my closest friends is one of Britain's best defamation lawyers." Let's see, the last British journalist that blustered about libel in the same way was David Irving... and that didn't work out so well for him, did it?

In response to accusations of anti-Semitism, Ridley writes "Well a semite is a person who can be an Arab or a Jew ... hmm, so these dingbats are accusing me of hating the entire Jewish and Arab world?" Except that, as Robert Wistrich points out in Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, "`Antisemitism' is a problematic term, first invented in the 1870s by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr to describe the `non-confessional' hatred of Jews and Judaism which he and others like him advocated... `Antisemitism' -- a term which came into general use as part of this politically motivated anti-Jewish campaign of the 1880s -- was never directed against `Semites' as such.... ...As a result, for the last hundred years, the illogical term `antisemitism', which never really meant hatred of `Semites' (for example, Arabs) at all, but rather hatred of Jews, has come to be accepted in general usage as denoting all forms of hostility towards Jews and Judaism throughout history."

I don't like the fact that B'nai Brith "would have supported" a ban of Ridley from Canada. By all means, let the attention-seeking froot loop speak. Her own words demonstrate her intellectual bankruptcy and the dangers of mixing religion with politics.