In an impassioned but garbled and confused rant, Sam Harris argues in the LA Times that religion lies at the core of what appears, in his view, to be an inevitable and apocalyptic clash of civilizations. It is a shame, then, that Mr. Harris’ conviction is as firm as his understanding of history is shaky.

At best, Mr. Harris has made the extraordinarily unique observation that religion, like anything else, can be manipulated. At worst, he belligerently ignores history (forgetting the violent traditions of Christian aggression and Buddhist sectarian division), unproductively and ethnocentrically demonizes Islam (asserting that “a social policy based on the Koran poses even greater dangers” than one based on Christianity), and demands what is definitionally impossible (demanding that we accept faith only if it passes the litmus test of some vague sense of what constitutes “reason”).

Mr. Harris asks if it is not “time we subjected our religious beliefs to the same standards of evidence we require in every other sphere of our lives,” and in doing so he misses the point; by demanding “proof” of the validity of a particular religion, Mr. Harris only mires himself further in the morass of dogmatic mudslinging. To judge a religious adherent’s actions as proof or disproof of the validity of his faith is preposterous; if this were our standard of judging the validity of a religion, there would likely be no faith unscarred by the shameful acts of its believers.  

Furthermore, such an understanding of religion also blinds Mr. Harris to the political and social contingencies of our lives. Mr. Harris writes

“Why did 19 well-educated, middle-class men trade their lives for the privilege of killing thousands of our neighbors? Because they believed, on the authority of the Koran, that they would go straight to paradise for doing so.”

While religious belief may have motivated the Al-Qaeda suicide bombers, many other crucial factors contributed to their anti-American sentiment and the resurgence of politically Islamist movements that ultimately led to the tragedy of 9/11 — the Arab defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; the failure of “modern secular nationalism;” the Egyptian-Israeli war and Arab oil embargo in 1973; the Iranian Revolution in 1979; the Wahhabi-oil connection; and the concrete consequences of modernization in the Muslim world, such as rapid population growth, an increase in urban population, mass literacy, a large young segment of the population, and high poverty and unemployment rates. It is incorrect and unproductive to characterize an essentially political movement, such as Al-Qaeda, as a religious abnormality.

In calling for an undefined rationalistic scrutiny of religion, Mr. Harris merely digs himself deeper into a dogmatic quarrel. If we are to understand the rise in radically violent and politically Islamist movements, we should not focus our energies on close readings of religious texts; rather, we must come to a more complete understanding of the historical, social, and political contingencies that coincide with religious belief.  

Mimi Hanaoka