What I appreciate here is the refusal to let extremists and critics share the same narrow definition of Islam. If the terrorist, the authoritarian, and the empire all read the text and see domination, that says something about what they brought to the mirror. The Sufi path keeps asking a different question: what in me needs to be purified before I can read with mercy? Criticism of religion is fair. But handing the definition of Islam to its harshest readers is not criticism. It is surrender.
Thanks for this! When I began teaching World Religions at a small college in 2003 I knew very little about Islam, but felt a moral obligation to teach a fair and open-hearted view of this great tradition to counter the propaganda in the news media at the time. Sadly, that propaganda persists.
Before I knew who Sam Harris is, someone I trust recommended his meditation app, citing his extensive inquiry into Buddhist practice. It's been super helpful in helping me focus and start to reconnect emotional wiring fried by trauma. But then... I discovered what you're talking about. I can't square it. No one has the "correct" interpretation of anything, but I have to say it has really soured my experience of his meditations. The dissonance and ungenerous spirit raises too many unanswerable doubts. I'm transitioning away from those meditations. (Recommendations welcome.)
For guided teachers, I’d recommend Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. Tara has a huge library of free guided meditations, and her work has a much more compassionate, emotionally intelligent feel. Jack Kornfield is also excellent for lovingkindness, grief, forgiveness, and coming back into the body without turning the whole thing into a philosophy debate.
BTW, thank you for bringing up his meditation app. I did some research, and as expected, found out he doesn't have any issue with Buddhist or Hindu traditions having legalistic, political, nationalist and violent expressions. But when he looks at Islam, that's all he seems to see. I am going to be making an update to the article, watch for a ping.
Yeah, this is precisely why I started with the Sam Harris app. I specifically did not want dogma overtly informing the meditations. I wanted it to be as centered on embodiment as possible without interpretation. I like all the Richard Rohr affiliated stuff but centering prayer was not the thing I needed at this moment. No diss to ritual. Just not right now. But I also was somewhat skeptical of lightweight "mindfulness" stuff.
Yes. Sometimes the soul is not looking for another system. It is looking for a doorway.
The body becomes the prayer mat. The breath becomes the teacher. Silence becomes the scripture no one can weaponize.
Dogma can guard the fire, but it can also stand between you and the flame. Ritual can open the heart, but sometimes even the most beautiful cup gets in the way when what you need is water.
I used to use the Waking Up app. healthyminds is what I use now because it's free and I love its structure (and because I grew up in Wisconsin and it's run through UW Madison)
That’s a great question… what is it in Sam Harris that sees what he sees in Islam and is incapable of entertaining any other view? It’s beyond depressing given how popular he is with white western males. Not only is it blatant Islamophobia but he espouses a world view that hasn’t evolved beyond ‘cowboys vs Indians’. The childishness is staggering and would be funny were it not so downright dangerous.
This part really stood out to me, “…have not fully addressed their issues with the Abrahamic God.”
When you’ve seen even “your God” through the fear-based lens, it’s hard to shake that lens when you turn it towards other religions.
As I’ve leaned more into an awe-based lens, it’s really allowed me to open my eyes to nuance and depth in so many places in my life.
Ironically, the relational experiences I had with Muslims in Iraq during deployments really opened my eyes to the how differently the Qu’ran can be read & interpreted….not too distant from how Christians do the same work with scripture.
Thank you for this. In a time of such division, derision and shallow accusation, it is so important to have this kind of reasoned and careful debate and discussion. What I love about your writing, including in other pieces that cause me to laugh out loud, is that it is indeed "care filled". Thank you. (I see below some discussion about books you and others are reading. Can you recommend something in relation to understanding Sufism and the mystics of Islam better?)
This is less the argument and more the question of reading itself.
I don’t have the scholarly grounding to adjudicate the textual claims here, and I know that matters. But I kept noticing how easily depth or literalism shifts depending on what one is already inclined to see in a tradition.
Even the contrast with Sufism felt less like a correction and more like a reminder that every scripture seems to contain multiple possible centres, and we tend to call whichever one we are drawn to “the real one.”
I may be overreading this, but it made me wonder whether the disagreement is sometimes not about Islam at all, but about the kind of attention we bring to it.
If the world were to see Christianity as viewed through the lens of conservative evangelical thought, it would also be seen as “war, white male dominion, prejudice, misogyny, and hate”. For those of us who follow a mystical path, we are more alike than we are different.
First, the vast majority of Muslims are not sitting in Gulf monarchies cheering on jihadists. Most Muslims are not even Arab. The biggest Muslim populations are in places like Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. So when people speak as if “Islam” means Saudi Arabia, Iran, Hamas, ISIS, or Boko Haram, they are already working from a distorted map.
Second, nobody is asking you to ignore jihadist violence. Boko Haram is evil. ISIS is evil. Hamas murdering civilians is evil. Threatening Jews with annihilation is evil. Full stop.
But you do not get to use Jewish suffering as a shield for Zionism while ignoring the Christians Zionism has also crushed.
Palestinian Christians, including Orthodox Christians, have opposed Zionism for generations because they are Palestinians too. This did not begin yesterday. Christians were part of Palestinian resistance going back to the 1936 uprising against British rule and Zionist colonization. Their churches, homes, families, and communities have also been bombed, displaced, and strangled by the same project.
So no, this is not Muslims versus Jews.
That framing erases Palestinian Christians completely. And I will not erase the memories of the Indigenous Orthodox Christians I've know where were murdered by Zionist.
And it is especially rich to invoke Christianity here when many of the historic Christian leaders in Jerusalem have explicitly rejected Christian Zionism as a corruption of the Gospel. Orthodox Christians in the Holy Land are not begging American evangelicals to baptize occupation, displacement, and apartheid with Bible verses.
The KKK does not get to define Christianity just because it burned crosses.
ISIS does not get to define Islam just because it quotes scripture.
And Zionism does not get to hide behind Judaism when the people being crushed under it include Muslims, Christians, and Jews who reject supremacy in every form.
Christian Europe watched Bosnian Muslims get ethnically cleansed. A UN “safe area” fell. More than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were murdered at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces from an overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian community.
So by your standard, Christianity is not a religion of peace either.
And no, I do not believe Orthodox Christianity is defined by Srebrenica. I do not believe Christianity is defined by the KKK. I do not believe Catholicism is defined by the Crusades or colonial slaughter.
For the uploaded piece:
What I appreciate here is the refusal to let extremists and critics share the same narrow definition of Islam. If the terrorist, the authoritarian, and the empire all read the text and see domination, that says something about what they brought to the mirror. The Sufi path keeps asking a different question: what in me needs to be purified before I can read with mercy? Criticism of religion is fair. But handing the definition of Islam to its harshest readers is not criticism. It is surrender.
Thanks for this! When I began teaching World Religions at a small college in 2003 I knew very little about Islam, but felt a moral obligation to teach a fair and open-hearted view of this great tradition to counter the propaganda in the news media at the time. Sadly, that propaganda persists.
That propaganda has been going for a little over 1,000 years. I am about finished with the biography on Muhammad, pbuh. It is a big eye opener.
Indeed. Which bio are you reading?
Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources
by Martin Lings
Don't know that one. Sounds good.
I’m so glad you wrote this 🙏
Before I knew who Sam Harris is, someone I trust recommended his meditation app, citing his extensive inquiry into Buddhist practice. It's been super helpful in helping me focus and start to reconnect emotional wiring fried by trauma. But then... I discovered what you're talking about. I can't square it. No one has the "correct" interpretation of anything, but I have to say it has really soured my experience of his meditations. The dissonance and ungenerous spirit raises too many unanswerable doubts. I'm transitioning away from those meditations. (Recommendations welcome.)
For guided teachers, I’d recommend Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. Tara has a huge library of free guided meditations, and her work has a much more compassionate, emotionally intelligent feel. Jack Kornfield is also excellent for lovingkindness, grief, forgiveness, and coming back into the body without turning the whole thing into a philosophy debate.
Excellent, thank you. I'll dive in.
BTW, thank you for bringing up his meditation app. I did some research, and as expected, found out he doesn't have any issue with Buddhist or Hindu traditions having legalistic, political, nationalist and violent expressions. But when he looks at Islam, that's all he seems to see. I am going to be making an update to the article, watch for a ping.
This small, welcoming, non-judgmental group has changed my life! Easy but very profound:
https://usa.rigpa.org/
This is great. Thank you.
You might like it. No dogma, no ritual, but still very spiritual, not just “learn to relax with mindfulness”.
Yeah, this is precisely why I started with the Sam Harris app. I specifically did not want dogma overtly informing the meditations. I wanted it to be as centered on embodiment as possible without interpretation. I like all the Richard Rohr affiliated stuff but centering prayer was not the thing I needed at this moment. No diss to ritual. Just not right now. But I also was somewhat skeptical of lightweight "mindfulness" stuff.
Yes. Sometimes the soul is not looking for another system. It is looking for a doorway.
The body becomes the prayer mat. The breath becomes the teacher. Silence becomes the scripture no one can weaponize.
Dogma can guard the fire, but it can also stand between you and the flame. Ritual can open the heart, but sometimes even the most beautiful cup gets in the way when what you need is water.
I used to use the Waking Up app. healthyminds is what I use now because it's free and I love its structure (and because I grew up in Wisconsin and it's run through UW Madison)
Fantastic. I'll check it out, thank you.
That’s a great question… what is it in Sam Harris that sees what he sees in Islam and is incapable of entertaining any other view? It’s beyond depressing given how popular he is with white western males. Not only is it blatant Islamophobia but he espouses a world view that hasn’t evolved beyond ‘cowboys vs Indians’. The childishness is staggering and would be funny were it not so downright dangerous.
This part really stood out to me, “…have not fully addressed their issues with the Abrahamic God.”
When you’ve seen even “your God” through the fear-based lens, it’s hard to shake that lens when you turn it towards other religions.
As I’ve leaned more into an awe-based lens, it’s really allowed me to open my eyes to nuance and depth in so many places in my life.
Ironically, the relational experiences I had with Muslims in Iraq during deployments really opened my eyes to the how differently the Qu’ran can be read & interpreted….not too distant from how Christians do the same work with scripture.
Thank you for this writing.
Thank you for this. In a time of such division, derision and shallow accusation, it is so important to have this kind of reasoned and careful debate and discussion. What I love about your writing, including in other pieces that cause me to laugh out loud, is that it is indeed "care filled". Thank you. (I see below some discussion about books you and others are reading. Can you recommend something in relation to understanding Sufism and the mystics of Islam better?)
This is less the argument and more the question of reading itself.
I don’t have the scholarly grounding to adjudicate the textual claims here, and I know that matters. But I kept noticing how easily depth or literalism shifts depending on what one is already inclined to see in a tradition.
Even the contrast with Sufism felt less like a correction and more like a reminder that every scripture seems to contain multiple possible centres, and we tend to call whichever one we are drawn to “the real one.”
I may be overreading this, but it made me wonder whether the disagreement is sometimes not about Islam at all, but about the kind of attention we bring to it.
When non-Muslim Westerners hear “sharia law”, I think what scares them is a prohibition on alcohol.
If the world were to see Christianity as viewed through the lens of conservative evangelical thought, it would also be seen as “war, white male dominion, prejudice, misogyny, and hate”. For those of us who follow a mystical path, we are more alike than we are different.
First, the vast majority of Muslims are not sitting in Gulf monarchies cheering on jihadists. Most Muslims are not even Arab. The biggest Muslim populations are in places like Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. So when people speak as if “Islam” means Saudi Arabia, Iran, Hamas, ISIS, or Boko Haram, they are already working from a distorted map.
Second, nobody is asking you to ignore jihadist violence. Boko Haram is evil. ISIS is evil. Hamas murdering civilians is evil. Threatening Jews with annihilation is evil. Full stop.
But you do not get to use Jewish suffering as a shield for Zionism while ignoring the Christians Zionism has also crushed.
Palestinian Christians, including Orthodox Christians, have opposed Zionism for generations because they are Palestinians too. This did not begin yesterday. Christians were part of Palestinian resistance going back to the 1936 uprising against British rule and Zionist colonization. Their churches, homes, families, and communities have also been bombed, displaced, and strangled by the same project.
So no, this is not Muslims versus Jews.
That framing erases Palestinian Christians completely. And I will not erase the memories of the Indigenous Orthodox Christians I've know where were murdered by Zionist.
And it is especially rich to invoke Christianity here when many of the historic Christian leaders in Jerusalem have explicitly rejected Christian Zionism as a corruption of the Gospel. Orthodox Christians in the Holy Land are not begging American evangelicals to baptize occupation, displacement, and apartheid with Bible verses.
The KKK does not get to define Christianity just because it burned crosses.
ISIS does not get to define Islam just because it quotes scripture.
And Zionism does not get to hide behind Judaism when the people being crushed under it include Muslims, Christians, and Jews who reject supremacy in every form.
Christian Europe watched Bosnian Muslims get ethnically cleansed. A UN “safe area” fell. More than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were murdered at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces from an overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian community.
So by your standard, Christianity is not a religion of peace either.
And no, I do not believe Orthodox Christianity is defined by Srebrenica. I do not believe Christianity is defined by the KKK. I do not believe Catholicism is defined by the Crusades or colonial slaughter.