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Notes -
I don't think they believe Islam is uniquely evil and irredeemable but we have to endure it because POC. I think they believe Islam as currently practiced in Islamic countries is still stuck in the pre-modern age where Christianity once was, which makes it "uniquely evil" in our modern era. There's a distinction between "Islam is objectively worse than other religions today" and "Islam is a unique existential threat that rationally we should treat as Ebola."
I used to be a big Harris acolyte, so my read on him over multiple podcasts, interviews, and books was something like:
"Pound for pound, the Old Testament may have more content we'd find objectionable than that in the Quran. Despite that, there are wrinkles in Islam such as the Hadith that are difficult (if not impossible) to detangle from the religion - a necessary component for its defanging and modernization. WWJD and WWMD entail very different behaviors, and the horrific negative consequences of the latter make Islam inherently and uniquely more problematic to deal with than any other world religion. Even if the others were 'worse' by several other metrics, none pose the challenges that Islam does, both historical and modern."
He had a long-running dialogue with Maajid Nawaz over this specific issue, trying to find a path forward for Islam and modernity. A decent effort, but I got the impression he was never particularly hopeful about its prospects. Essentially, there are features of Islam that preclude it from ever becoming sufficiently progressive in the way Christianity did - at least on a timescale or with the population numbers he'd be comfortable with.
Shit, I should have checked if some other former Harrisite had basically made the point more succinctly. To try to emphasize:
In his first meeting with Maajid they apparently got into an argument because Harris paid him a backhanded compliment of saying his work was necessary but essentially a noble lie. That tells you all you need to know.
Even in the book they eventually wrote -Islam and the Future of Tolerance - he was throwing cold water on his own reforming project:
Harris: I said, essentially, this:
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Harris The tensions you’ve been describing are familiar to all religious moderates, but they seem especially onerous under Islam. The problem is that moderates of all faiths are committed to reinterpreting, or ignoring outright, the most dangerous and absurd parts of their scripture—and this commitment is precisely what makes them moderates. But it also requires some degree of intellectual dishonesty, because moderates can’t acknowledge that their moderation comes from outside the faith. The doors leading out of the prison of scriptural literalism simply do not open from the inside. In the twenty-first century, the moderate’s commitment to scientific rationality, human rights, gender equality, and every other modern value—values that, as you say, are potentially universal for human beings—comes from the past thousand years of human progress, much of which was accomplished in spite of religion, not because of it. So when moderates claim to find their modern, ethical commitments within scripture, it looks like an exercise in self-deception. The truth is that most of our modern values are antithetical to the specific teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And where we do find these values expressed in our holy books, they are almost never best expressed there.
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So when you say that no religion is intrinsically peaceful or warlike, and that every scripture must be interpreted, I think you run into problems, because many of these texts aren’t all that elastic. They aren’t susceptible to just any interpretation, and they commit their adherents to specific beliefs and practices. You can’t say, for instance, that Islam recommends eating bacon and drinking alcohol. And even if you could find some way of reading the Qur’an that would permit those things, you can’t say that its central message is that a devout Muslim should consume as much bacon and alcohol as humanly possible. Nor can one say that the central message of Islam is pacifism. (However, one can say that about Jainism. All religions are not the same.) One simply cannot say that the central message of the Qur’an is respect for women as the moral and political equals of men. To the contrary, one can say that under Islam, the central message is that women are second-class citizens and the property of the men in their lives.
I want to be clear that when I used terms such as “pretense” and “intellectual dishonesty” when we first met, I wasn’t casting judgment on you personally. Simply living with the moderate’s dilemma may be the only way forward, because the alternative would be to radically edit these books. I’m not such an idealist as to imagine that will happen. We can’t say, “Listen, you barbarians: These holy books of yours are filled with murderous nonsense. In the interests of getting you to behave like civilized human beings, we’re going to redact them and give you back something that reads like Kahlil Gibran. There you go … Don’t you feel better now that you no longer hate homosexuals?” However, that’s really what one should be able to do in any intellectual tradition in the twenty-first century. Again, this problem confronts religious moderates everywhere, but it’s an excruciating problem for Muslims
Honestly, this feels like someone almost contractually obligated to claim he has an alternative.
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