By the time I got round to reading Sam Harris then I was fairly acquainted with the atheist canon tenanted by thinkers like Russell, Mencken, Ingersoll and other torchbearers of reason who had reconfigured my synaptic wiring to banish any supernaturalism. And I was keen to add Harris to this proud tradition of God slayers. Happily, it was an easy task getting to like Sam: His prose style is readable with a gift for the bon mot, vital traits of the intellectual worthy. Any review of Sam Harris and his work is a review essentially of politics. And from there I will begin my examination of his thought and work my way back to the question of religion for which he is better known. Harris gave a revealing interview recently to Tablet that best sums up the key themes of his political writing on the Middle East, Israel and the Western relation to Muslims : “The Israelis are confronting people who will blow themselves up to kill the maximum number of noncombatants and will even use their own children as human shields. They’ll launch their missiles from the edge of a hospital or school so that any retaliation will produce the maximum number of innocent casualties. And they do all this secure in the knowledge that their opponents are genuinely worried about killing innocent people. It’s the most cynical thing imaginable. And yet within the moral discourse of the liberal West, the Israeli side looks like it’s the most egregiously insensitive to the cost of the conflict.” It’s a claim recycled from his book The End of Faith (2005), in which he maintains that Israel upholds the human rights of Palestinians to a high standard. His source? Alan Dershowitz. The spirit of the Zionist law attorney infuses a book in which he is approvingly quoted and in which he provides the basis for Harris’s ticking time bomb defence of torture. It’s not for nothing Dershowitz blurbs the book. But is it true as Harris gushes that Israel’s moral capital lies in the fact “They’re still worried about killing the children of their enemies”? Consider the findings of human rights groups like Amnesty International’s investigation into the Gaza war of 2008: “Amnesty International on Thursday accused Israeli forces of war crimes, saying they used children as human shields and conducted wanton attacks on civilians during their offensive in the Gaza Strip. “ What about the assertion that Arabs take cover behind their own children? Amnesty finds that although Hamas rocketed Israeli towns during the war, that: “It could not support Israeli claims that Hamas used human shields. It said it found no evidence Palestinian fighters directed civilians to shield military objectives from attacks, forced them to stay in buildings used by militants, or prevented them from leaving commandeered buildings” The co-author of the influential Goldstone Report for the UN Human Rights Council, Desmond Travers, has said: “We found no evidence that Hamas used civilians as hostages. I had expected to find such evidence but did not. We also found no evidence that mosques were used to store munitions. ” For a man who likes to badger Muslims about their “reflexive solidarity” with Arab suffering, Harris seems keen to display his own tribal affections for the Jewish state. The virtue of Israel and the wickedness of her enemies are recurring themes in his work. The End of Faith opens with the melodramatic scene of a young man of undetermined nationality boarding a bus with a suicide vest. The bus detonates, innocents die and Harris, with the relish of a schoolmarm passing on the facts of life to her brood, chalks in the question: “Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy-you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it-easy to guess the young man’s religion?” To which historians will answer: Because it is not. Owing to the narrow focus of his book, written after the 9/11 attacks, Harris wishes the trauma of recent events to yield a Muslim answer. Had it been written on September 10, 2001, the answer would have been the nominally Hindu Tamil Tigers who have racked up almost four hundred suicide attacks; or, in 1945, a Buddhist Kamikaze; or, reflecting the Eastern Front of the same conflict, the German Luftwaffe’s suicide squadrons. What the religion of the bomber is depends on at which point of history you begin to start your timeline. Harris knows this history only too well, for he secretes this admission in the footnotes away from the main body of the text. But that does not inhibit this bold oracle of reason from his anti-Muslim jihad. It’s a mode of reasoning that he’s perfected well because it crops up when he’s got to account for why, given that Islam forbids taking one’s own life in the roundest terms, some militant groups defy this. He concedes momentarily that the Quran does command “do not kill yourselves” (4:29), but gets around this prohibition by waving it away as having “loopholes”. Where these loopholes are he never says; it’s just asserted by fiat against the accumulated body of Islamic theology. He skips the numerous injunctions against it by Muhammad as a hellworthy offence: “And if somebody commits suicide with anything in this world, he will be tortured with that very thing on the Day of Resurrection.” (Sahih Bukhari) And no exceptions are made for wartime: “The Prophet said: A man was inflicted with wounds and he committed suicide, and so Allah said: My slave has caused death on himself hurriedly, so I forbid paradise for him.” (ibid) Harris is keen to blur the sharp demarcation between the concepts of martyrdom and suicide in the hope of confusing the reader into conflating the plain meaning of distinct words. To be slain in battle is what makes one a martyr or a “shaheed” in Islam; not self-murder. This is why the grand imam of the leading Islamic centre of learning at the University of Al Azhar, Muhammad Syed Tantawi, published a fatwa before his recent death blasting the airborne hijackings of 9/11 as a crime and attacked Bin Laden as an “enemy of Islam”; and why Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei castigated the attacks; and why six thousand Muslim clerics denounced Al-Qaeda; and why polls show that Muslims are far less supportive of killing civilians than Americans generally. None of these leaders of Islamic thought get any attention in the Harris formulation of “The Muslim World”; only cavemen in Tora Bora. In fact these leaders don’t even exist: “In our dealings with the Muslim world, we must acknowledge that Muslims have not found anything of substance to say against the actions of the September 11 hijackers, apart from the ubiquitous canard that they were really Jews.” ( The End of Faith, p. 134) It’s a well honed rhetorical ploy of Harris to demand why, if interventionism drives terrorism, there are no Tibetan suicide bombers. For are they not occupied as well? The alert reader will spot the shift of focus here from religion to nationality. As well ask why there are no instances of Indonesian suicide terrorists against Dutch colonialism, or Indian suicide bombers against the British Raj. The correct analogy is not between nationals from Tibet and Indonesia, but rather believers from Islam and Buddhism. When framed in term of religious affiliation, one observes why Buddhist suicide pilots loom very large indeed in recent military conflicts. In the Harris depiction, Tibetans bear the jackboot of Chinese occupation meekly and in Christ-like surrender to violence in deep contrast to the mindless violence of Palestinians, proof yet again that Islam, and not the depredations of US foreign policy, is the progenitor of terror. From this narrative one would never guess that Tibet fought a bitter conventional war against China. The national liberation struggle of Tibetans doesn’t quite mesh with the dovish non-violence Harris conjures. And so out it goes from the record. Given that Harris rails against pacifism in later chapters as being, not a worthy but impossible ideal as so many cherish, but an “evil” precept that would let killers go unmolested, his sudden enthusiasm for turning the other cheek is a suspect one. And you will seek in vain for any reference to Arab civil disobedience against the occupation in his work from the peaceful protests of the first Intifada in which scores of unarmed demonstrators were gunned down by the IDF to the present wave of mass hunger strikes.
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 18:13:18 +0000
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