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The Diversity of Islam
A few days ago, I was on a panel on Bill Maher’s television show on HBO that became a religious war.
Whether
or not Islam itself inspires conflict, debates about it certainly do.
Our conversation degenerated into something close to a shouting match
and went viral on the web. Maher and a guest, Sam Harris, argued that
Islam is dangerous yet gets a pass from politically correct liberals,
while the actor Ben Affleck denounced their comments as “gross” and
“racist.” I sided with Affleck.
After
the show ended, we panelists continued to wrangle on the topic for
another hour with the cameras off. Maher ignited a debate that is
rippling onward, so let me offer three points of nuance.
First,
historically, Islam was not particularly intolerant, and it initially
elevated the status of women. Anybody looking at the history even of the
20th century would not single out Islam as the bloodthirsty religion;
it was Christian/Nazi/Communist Europe and Buddhist/Taoist/Hindu/atheist
Asia that set records for mass slaughter.
"No religion exists in a vacuum. On the contrary, every faith is rooted
in the soil in which it is planted. It is a fallacy to believe that
people of faith derive their values primarily from their Scriptures. The
opposite is true. People of faith insert their values into their
Scriptures, reading them through the lens of their own cultural, ethnic,
nationalistic and even political perspectives."
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