Bill Maher’s comments grossly misrepresent the nature of religion

Ever since the Twin Towers fell, there has been a daft proclamation permeating from the media and pseudo-intellectuals like Sam Harris and pundits such as Bill Maher that the Muslim world doesn’t speak out against extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS when they commit atrocious acts in the name of Islam. Furthermore, pundits have made sweeping generalizations arguing that extremist groups actually represent the fundamentals of Islam. This isn’t just Fox News, but they’re still the best at it.

Bill Maher’s recent rant alongside Sam Harris on Oct. 3 ignited a firestorm of debate on this issue, including a vitriolic denunciation by actor Ben Affleck, who lambasted Maher for making “gross” and “racist” generalizations about Muslims.

Harris has gone even further, reiterating over the past several years his view in “Letter to a Christian Nation” that, “The idea that Islam is a ‘peaceful religion hijacked by extremists’ is a fantasy, and is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge.” The use of ‘hijacked’ stands out.  It’s as if he were saying, “Extremists (by which he means all Muslims) can’t take over an ideology and bend it to their means because that’s why they hijack things in the first place.”

In a recent episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Maher stated that Islam has “too much in common with ISIS.” The implication of Harris and Maher’s generalizations about Islam is that the majority of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims are thus accepting of – or even in cahoots with – the most violent people who claim to speak on behalf of their faith.

What they’re exhibiting is not a pristine argument for the advancement of reason but a staggering deficit of knowledge. What they miss is that religion is more often an identity that allows the believer to contextualize his or her place in the world as opposed to an acceptance of a specific ideology, such as the approval of terrorism.

Although the detractors of Islam scour the Quran to find passages that support their agenda, they fail to understand that the interpretations of scriptures from all religions are naturally colored by other more important factors, such as the reader’s ethnic, national and cultural identities.

For example, the cultural practices regarding the place of women in society will vary sharply from place to place; while Muslims in Afghanistan might draw radical conclusions from either the Quran or the Hadiths to preclude women from taking a meaningful role in society, such interpretations will be largely irrelevant to the more secular Muslim communities in Indonesia, Turkey or the U.S.

Thus, asserting that believers draw their values from their scriptures is fallacious; rather, believers read the scriptures through the lenses of their personal identities to conform to their preexisting views of the world.

Instead of noting that political ideologies have more to do with the environment of the given believer than the religion of Islam, the Sam Harrises and Bill Mahers of the world construct a straw man. Once they burn it down like naked hippies on a weekend drug binge in the desert, they make sweeping generalizations that further alienate the Muslim community, inflame anti-American sentiment at home and abroad, and drive us further and further away from establishing meaningful partnerships in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the vast majority of Muslim leaders across the world are speaking out against ISIS and the beheading of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. Last month, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest civil liberties organization for the Muslim community in the US, held press conferences to publicly denounce ISIS. In Los Angeles, the Executive Director of CAIR-LA, Hussam Ayloush, stated on Sept. 2 that, “The barbaric conduct of ISIS is an outright violation of Islam and its teachings. It’s morally repellent and it’s cruel.” Of course this rarely makes national news.

The truth is, every religion contains deeply problematic passages that can be used as a justification for violence; on the same token, every religion contains passages that can be used for the advancement of peace. The Torah commands Jews to “love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18),” yet it also instructs them to “kill every man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,” who worship any other God (1 Sam. 15:3).

The same Jesus who instructed his disciples to “turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39)” also told them that he had “not come to bring peace but the sword (Matthew 10:34),” and that “he who does not have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one (Luke 22:36).”

Although the Quran contains violent passages such as “slay the idolaters wherever you find them” (9:5), it also warns believers that, “if you kill one person it is as though you have killed all of humanity (5:32).”

Bill Maher and Sam Harris are correct when they say that beliefs that compromise the human rights of others should be denounced; however, making such sweeping generalizations about all Muslims is counterproductive.