Islam and Civil Society

via Andrew Sullivan, truthdig has an interesting interview with Sam Harris, who it calls the most prominent atheist in America. He wrote the book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason in which he argues that faith is the most dangerous element in modern life. A thesis like that may sound a bit shaky a first...but not so much after you think about all the misery in the world today that is associated, for example, with conflict between different religions...but then begins to seem to be on shaky ground once more if you suspect that faith may actually be just one possible convenient mode/excuse for conflict, the existence of which wouldn't be jeopardized by the absence of religious conflict and would probably just find another convenient pretext for expression of the underlying thirst in human nature for conflict itself or as a means to an end to other desirables like wealth, for example. Here's the quote that got Andrew Sullivan's attention and also mine along with a bit more:

But what about the tradition in Islamic societies of consulting with Mullahs or Imams before acting on a directive in the Koran? Don't those people tend to moderate the harshest edicts of Islamic law? It's not that there's not a wealth of discourse about what the Koran actually says. There is a lot of Muslim scholarship out there. The problem is that there really is no basis for what we would call a moderate and genuinely pluralistic worldview to be pulled out of Islam. You really need to do some seriously acrobatic theology to get an Islam that is compatible with 21st century civil society. This is witnessed virtually every day we open the newspaper now, the latest case being the apostate in Afghanistan who converted to Christianity. The basic message of this episode should be clear: this is a government that we came in and reformulated and propped up, and the fact that it had to have a constitution that was in conformity to Islam, opened the door to the true face of Islam, which is: apostasy is punishable by death. That is a fact that no liberal exegesis of Islam is going to change. We have to find some way to change it, of course. Islam needs a reformation. But at present, it's true to say that the real word of God in Islam is that if you change your religion, you should die for it. Isn't that also the case in the Bible? Don't we see similar edicts and punishments for apostasy? Yes. There's nothing worse than the first books of the Hebrew bible: Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Exodus, these are the most barbaric, most totalitarian, most Taliban-like documents we can find. But there are a few loopholes, and these loopholes don't exist in Islam, to my knowledge. One loophole for Christians is that most Christians think that Jesus brought us the doctrine of grace, and therefore you don't have to follow the law. While it's true that there are other moments in the New Testament when Jesus can be read as saying that you have to fulfill every "jot and tittle" of the law (this is in Matthew)- and therefore you can get a rationale for killing people for adultery out of the New Testament-most Christians, most of the time, don't see it that way. The Bible is a fundamentally self-contradictory document. You can cherry-pick it in a way that you really can't the Koran, even though there are a few lines in the Koran that say, "Allah does not love aggressors"-if you hew to just those few lines, you can say things like, "Osama Bin Laden is distorting the true teachings of a peaceful religion." But the basic fact is that Osama Bin Laden is giving a very plausible reading of Islam. You have to split hairs to find a basis for what we would recognize as real moderation in Islam.