In this two-part series, Michelle and Lauren explore some of the most hot-button issues in religion this past year.
Subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes!
Featured in Part 1:
Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ramadan Debate: Is Islam a Religion a Peace?
Highlights and exclusive interviews with Hitchens, Ramadan, & New York Times National Religion Correspondent Laurie Goodstein
Read more and watch a video courtesy of the 92nd St Y HERE.
* * * * *
Nick Mafi, Oxford University Press employee extraordinaire
* * * * *
David Sehat, author of The Myth of American Religious Freedom
* * * * *
The Ben Daniels Band
This past Tuesday, October 5th, Tariq Ramadan and Christopher Hitchens met at the 92nd Street Y to address the question: Is Islam a religion of peace? The footage below is from the latter, Q&A portion of the event, reposted with permission from 92Y Blog.
Click here to view the embedded video.
With the Obama administration in its nascent years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict proving as intractable as ever, relations with Iran reaching a boiling point and the political landscape changing rapidly both in the United States and the Middle East, wrestling with the issue of Islam is more crucial than ever and will be a defining feature of the 21st century. In the video clip above, famous atheist and prolific author Christopher Hitchens and the accomplished and controversial scholar Tariq Ramadan debate one of the most pertinent questions of our modern age. Conversation was moderated by Laurie Goodstein, national religion correspondent for The New York Times.
For more comprehensive view points from those in attendance, Danny Groner, Online Assistant Editor at TheWeek.com filed a report for The Huffington Post as did Marc Tracy at Tablet Magazine.
* * * * *
Prior to the Q&A, both gentlemen engaged in a proper debate. Here, I have done my best to present a sample of what was said.
Hitchens
- “I want to maintain that there is no such thing as a religion of peace, by definition.”
- I find it problematic, “the idea of the perfect human being – the prophet Muhammad, and the idea of the perfect book – the Qur’an.”
- On literal interpretations of the Qur’an: “Demands that you believe the impossible do not lead to peaceful outcomes.”
Ramadan
- “I do not like this question, ‘Is Islam a religion of peace?’ Islam is a religion for human beings, and if you deal with human beings, you deal with violence…You must ask, ‘Is my religion helping us towards peace?’”
- “Islam is as complex [as any other religion]…the problem is not the book, the problem is the reader.”
- “Peace is what you achieve after self-education.”
- “What is the will of God? Diversity. But the risk of diversity is lots of knowledge and lots of wars.”
- On Islam being a young religion: “Respect the Christians, respect the Jews, respect the religions before you.”
- “I will never deny that some Muslims, some theologians are using the verses in a way which is – for me – unacceptable.”
Hitchens
- “You’re right – and I’m surprised to find my self saying this, Professor – that the problem is not the book, but the reader.”
- “I don’t like the idea that there is the promise of paradise for martyrs.”
- “Where is the authoritative statement in the Sunni world
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The 
Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at the election in Iran. Read his previous OUPblogs here.
Let me be the first to admit that I don’t know if the recent Iranian “election” was fraudulent, but the faith some pundits have placed on the “evidence” for their conviction that it was gives me pause.
The elections certainly weren’t free and fair, not least because the regime had hand-picked the slate of candidates, but we are unlikely to ever know that straight-up fraud was involved or if voting irregularities were of a higher frequency than those we have routinely taken for granted even in this country. Our failure to contemplate even the possibility that many a dictator has been democratically elected is a dangerous democratic hubris that has shaped and sometimes thwarted our foreign policy.
I am not asserting that the Iranian election was definitely legitimate, only that it is at least remotely possible that it was. At least two independent pollsters agree, and have offered the illuminating factoid from their poll that the only demographic group that found Hossein Mousavi leading Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were graduates and those with high-incomes. (That is to say, they are people most likely to resemble western spectators still staring at the final vote tally in disbelief.) Yet Christopher Hitchens would have none of it and Steve Clemons has decided that there will be blood. But is the blood that Clemons not implausibly predicts will ensue the result of the subversion of democracy in the Iranian electoral process or its success?
Shutting down the media may be egregiously non-democratic, but it is different than creating ballots out of thin air. The reason why this distinction matters is that we must learn to contemplate why millions of people around the world would want to rally behind fanatical leaders who hold such spectacularly repugnant positions as denying the holocaust. This has happened so many times before that it makes our failure to accept its possibility even more revealing of the depth and scope of our mind-block: consider the cases of Gamal Nasser (Egypt), Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Jerry Rawlings (Ghana), Slobodan Milošević (Serbia), and now, possibly, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Democracy is messy, and it is not naturally or dialectically inclined towards human rights, western liberal ideals, or the best candidate according to our standards. Neo-conservatives in America positing that the Iraqi people would welcome our troops as liberators back in 2003 have had to learn the hard way the costs of believing what they wanted to believe. In an analagous way, today’s pundits have been so quick to assert that the Iranian people in their post-election riots have exposed the charade of their recent “elections,” but maybe it is democracy itself that has outwitted the pundits. To understand the unpredictable and poigant path of democracy and democratization in the world, those of us who believe in democracy must urgently and honestly contemplate the number of times we have been hoisted by our own petard.
