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[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Comments

[garote]

Incidentally, when you say "he does not consider Muslims to be good choices as journalists" and then link to a tweet about Mehdi Hasan, you might be missing some context. Mehdi Hasan and Richard Dawkins have been beefing for quite a while leading up to that.

Here's Hasan referring to Dawkins directly, four years earlier:

"The Quranic phrase "people of no intelligence" simply and narrowly refers to the fact that Muslims regard their views on God as the only intellectually tenable position, just as atheists (like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris) regard believers as fundamentally irrational and, even, mentally deficient. As for the metaphorical use of the word "cattle", that has no more pejorative charge than does the word "sheep" when applied by atheists to religious believers."

That is a clarification of a statement he made earlier, but its intention is pretty clear, with or without the surrounding context. He is invoking the Quran to declare that Muslims are exactly as intolerant as the most strident of atheists, and that they refer to non-believers with as much derision as atheists would use the term "sheep". (If you think that's an unfair summary, I'm open to discuss that, though.)

I don't think this disqualifies him from being a journalist. But I can see how it would disqualify him in Dawkins' view. Dawkins wants everyone who claims affiliation with a religion to be held accountable for every questionable idea espoused in the religion's inspirational texts, as though being Christian means you _must_, for example, believe that Genesis is literally true. It's a kind of reversed all-true-Scotsmen fallacy. I don't think such an attitude is very fair: Most people are born into a religion and learn how they fit into its framework as they go, accepting what feels right and ignoring or rationalizing away what they don't. So they have an inbuilt understanding that the inspirational text is just that: Inspirational. Not literal. Not a math or science book; and not meant to be treated that way. So Dawkins is making a very tone-deaf argument.

On the other hand, Mehdi Hasan has made his own attitude and interpretation quite clear. If he believes that the road to being a true Muslim is to be as steadfast as Dawkins is with regards to God - perhaps even to the point of using the word "bigoted" - well... I don't like him very much either.

No one wins in a Twitter war :D