My wonderful review of "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," by Christopher Hitchens. This review was prepared for Islamica Magazine before, terribly but hopefully only temporarily, that magazine went on hiatus -- don't we Muslims realize we need a professional media? I have reproduced the review in full below.
I can barely explain how unsatisfying
this book was to read. For a person to seriously criticize all religions, he would
have to ask and answer a number of questions – which by no means could justly
fit into one volume – and Hitchens seems unaware of any of these questions
except in their most superficial form. What is a religion? Where does the term
come from? Why is it used, by whom is it used, and for what reasons? How can we
fairly compare two different traditions, say Catholicism and Buddhism, and
consider the two to be the same type of thing – “religions” – if we have not
explained what a religion is in the first place?
I will illuminate Hitchens’ ignorance
of religions and religion – never mind what I could make of his unsubtle fear of
Islam: The book’s subtitle rather obviously singles out one religion above all
others. (What ecumenism! Is Hitchens really attacking all “religion,” or trying
to shift our attention elsewhere? He hates religion, but supports a war on
states of only one kind of religion.) Firstly it must be said that given an
opportunity to scan the interior of this man’s mind, we might expect a gibbous Moon.
Littered with craters of ancient origin, gaps in knowledge which reflect his
having missed out on more recent scholarship, such as those books published
over the last 50 or 60 years. Secondly, a caution about academic modesty. Insofar
as Hitchens discusses Mormonism, his insight is no better than a poor summary
of better studies; considering Hitchens’ baseline assumption of religious
delusion or ill-will, any fair-minded author would do better to reference a
more scholarly work. So
far as Islam goes, he confirms my Law of Wikipedia Articles: One is impressed by a Wikipedia article in
inverse proportion to one’s knowledge of that topic.
Hitchens’ summary of other people’s
books about Islam does little better, condensing that best of times, the rational
sunshine radiating from Europe’s 8th-12th centuries. What
about all the recent scholarship and debate which challenges Hitchens’
contrived lines separating religion and rationality, or the detailed
investigations into the intersection of Islam, knowledge and power? The reader will find no reference to
reputable texts, no close reading of theology, revelation or history, and no
attempt at weighing the evidence. He
can’t even read the evidence! (Hitchens’
Arabic extends to little more than well-broadcast awareness of the definite
article. Hitchens needs very badly for
us to know that he knows the definite article is transliterated “al-”.) In all of two footnotes we conclude that the “Koran” is simply a
mish-mash of Christian and Jewish ideas. But
Islamic scholarship understands the religion to be the completion of a chain of
Divine Reminders, including Judaism and Christianity. For Hitchens to accuse Islam of plagiarizing
Judaism and Christianity is to conclude that Islam is what it says it is
supposed to be, albeit messily so.
Hitchens should more concern
himself that the premises of his book undermine its conclusion. He tells us that religion is an illusion of
the mind; now that we have matured as a species, we should snap out of it (the
“Enlightenment” is that snapping sound.) Be scientific, reasonable, pleasant and
empirical. But if we were to be
scientific, reasonable, etc., should we not toss out at first chance any study
which attempts to explain evil through the influence of religion, which is an
illusion? ‘X’ is made up, he says, and ‘X’ is the cause of all the problems in
the world; wouldn’t the Creator (or “creator”) of ‘X’ be better to blame? I wonder why it is that when a person does
evil, that evil is because of that
person’s religion? If a person is an
adherent of two religions, will he be twice as evil? If an extremist kills in
the name of religion, do we hold the extremist responsible, or the religion, or
is that question too simple? But Islam
doesn’t validate actions simply because one undertakes them in the name of
Islam. Even if it did, why would
hundreds of millions of people identify with such moral vacuity?
Hitchens wants us to believe that
men need no ethical instruction book; if that is the case, why does he have to
write a book to tell people to stop reading (religious) books? Should it not be dazzlingly obvious? But Hitchens fundamentally fails to grasp
human complexity; never mind his stunning ignorance of the Islamic ideal of
innate and basic morality – the fitra;
Dartmouth Professor Kevin Reinhart has done a wonderful job of explicating and
clarifying early Islamic debates on the implications of this original innocence. Contrarily, Hitchens’ sample individual is basically
a passive and clueless idiot, not only affected by the religious idea but
seized, occupied and liberated by it all at once; he offers no resistance but instead
welcomes faith’s tanks and guns with flowers and parades. To be at all consistent, Hitchens should
understand religion as a set of beliefs, practices and customs adopted by different
people in different ways, and then debate how much agency a person,
historically or morally, can be said to have. Just as a language does not spread itself, but
is adopted by peoples and cultures – accounting for dialects, slang and change
over time – so too faiths. We cannot
trace when faith began, or separate
it from modern humanity anymore than we can separate spiritual and metaphysical impulses. Moreover, the idea of religion as an academic
category of study dates from Europe’s 19th-century,
when the hierarchical view of the spiritual world was displaced by the secular idea
of “world religions,” each of which was measured against Christianity.
Such ways of living and believing are
commonly if contentiously labeled “religions” as a legacy of past practice, and
pragmatically because we need a language to represent an innate impulse far
beyond Hitchens’ simple dialectics. People
want a system to make sense of their lives. This is not a need Hitchens takes
seriously, all the more embarrassing because this need is fulfilled by the atheism
he so champions. Is atheism a religion? On certain interpretations, Hinayana
Buddhism does not recognize a soul or a spiritual realm; it has no otherworldliness,
so to speak, but it is still somehow a “religion.” Neither the rational nor the
empirical perspective indicates a preference for theism or atheism, and atheism
proceeds from the physical to the metaphysical. That a belief in God imposes an
admission that our understanding can go no further is an interesting point, but
no different than the tautology that is empiricism. We can use our minds to
explain the way the world works because the way the world works created minds
that are capable of understanding the way the world works. No matter how far
you go, the end is always the beginning: If not God, then some other force or
process takes His place. No philosopher
has yet dug us out of this apparent conundrum; suffice it to say Hitchens
cannot.
But a
debate of this intensity is too much seriousness for a man disinterested in the
directions of his argument, and more so the people they doom. If religion
poisons everything, the religious are either infected or contagious. If we are
infected, we are infected in the mind. Our brains must be cleansed. If we are
contagious, we must be put under quarantine. A glow-in-the-dark yellow jacket is
not blinding enough to throw us off the obvious inversion of an Islamic
expression, God is Greater.
Hitchens’ actual goal is to cheer on and encourage war on one religion above
all others. What Hitchens requires is a sufficiently ecumenical outrage. An insulting book that apparently offends every
faith and tradition, to justify or distract from his pretensions to intellectual
integrity. George Bush came, confronted and conquered Hitchens far more easily
than he did Iraq.
(Which I suppose is Islam’s fault, too.)
Hitchens’ recent flip-flopping is
miraculously convenient; it explains much of the actual harm religion can cause. Hitchens condemns religion and
cheers the Bush administration’s end-times foreign policy. Like setting Iraq and Iran on fire for eight years; let
the religions fight to the death! But “religion” poisons everything, which means
all religions are equal(ly bad), which means he shouldn’t prefer any one
religion over any other. Here is how bad things happen in religion’s name:
People who don’t even believe in religion use religion to further worldly and
bloody ends. Retain this the next time you hear the vacuity that “religion” is
the source of all bad things and only bad things. Those with sharp tongues and
minds are often the most dangerous. They can justify to themselves any kind of
moral contortion or selfish necessity.
Keep in mind that the sole uniform aspect to each
enormity Hitchens calls up is that it involves human beings. Hence, to blame
religion – when he does not even tell us what religion is except that it is
false – is not just inconsistent but obtuse. After all, we can isolate
sexuality and argue that sexuality is to blame for humanity’s ills. It helps
that sexual desire is as real, and yet as hard to define or pin down as the
spiritual impulse. Or we could take a different tack. Were it not for
evolutionary developments in the human intellect, humans would simply be too
dumb to cause each other the traumatic and total harm the ability to harness
nuclear fission has realized. Why not blame human intelligence for evil? If we
were a stupider species, there would be no oppression, hypocrisy or class bias.
As an added bonus, we’d be too thick to come up with religion. And since
religion poisons everything, problem solved. Though, “How Intelligence Poisons
Everything” would be an unpopular subtitle.
FOOTNOTES
Imagine
if a man in, say, Tajikistan penned a treatise on the absolute evilness of America – yet spoke no English, and
understood no English. That fictional
man is Christopher Hitchens’ imaginary best friend. There is more revelation into Hitchens' arrogance, his fundamental imperialism, and the nonsense of his book in this analogy than in anything else my review can sustain.
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