Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

However baleful theistic morality may be in the West, its influence is even more troubling in contemporary Islam. No discussion of global progress can ignore the Islamic world, which by a number of objective measures appears to be sitting out the progress enjoyed by the rest. Muslim-majority countries score poorly on measures of health, education, freedom, happiness, and democracy, holding wealth constant.⁹⁰ All of the wars raging in 2016 took place in Muslim-majority countries or involved Islamist groups, and those groups were responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks.⁹¹ As we saw in chapter 15, emancipative values such as gender equality, personal autonomy, and political voice are less popular in the Islamic heartland than in any other region of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa. Human rights are abysmal in many Muslim countries, which implement cruel punishments (such as flogging, blinding, and amputation), not just for actual crimes but for homosexuality, witchcraft, apostasy, and expressing liberal opinions on social media.

How much of this lack of progress is the fallout of theistic morality? Certainly it cannot be attributed to Islam itself. Islamic civilization had a precocious scientific revolution, and for much of its history was more tolerant, cosmopolitan, and internally peaceful than the Christian West.⁹² Some of the regressive customs found in Muslim-majority countries, such as female genital mutilation and “honor killings” of unchaste sisters and daughters, are ancient African or West Asian tribal practices and are misattributed by their perpetrators to Islamic law. Some of the problems are found in other resource-cursed strongman states. Still others were exacerbated by clumsy Western interventions in the Middle East, including the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, support of the anti-Soviet mujahedin in Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq.

But part of the resistance to the tide of progress can be attributed to religious belief. The problem begins with the fact that many of the precepts of Islamic doctrine, taken literally, are floridly antihumanistic. The Quran contains scores of passages that express hatred of infidels, the reality of martyrdom, and the sacredness of armed jihad. Also endorsed are lashing for alcohol consumption, stoning for adultery and homosexuality, crucifixion for enemies of Islam, sexual slavery for pagans, and forced marriage for nine-year-old girls.⁹³

Of course many of the passages in the Bible are floridly antihumanistic too. One needn’t debate which is worse; what matters is how literally the adherents take them. Like the other Abrahamic religions, Islam has its version of rabbinical pilpul and Jesuitical disputation that allegorizes, compartmentalizes, and spin-doctors the nasty bits of scripture. Islam also has its version of Cultural Jews, Cafeteria Catholics, and CINOs (Christians in Name Only). The problem is that this benign hypocrisy is far less developed in the contemporary Islamic world.

Examining big data on religious affiliation from the World Values Survey, the political scientists Amy Alexander and Christian Welzel observe that “self-identifying Muslims stick out as the denomination with by far the largest percentage of strongly religious people: 82%. Even more astounding, fully 92% of all self-identifying Muslims place themselves at the two highest scores of the ten-point religiosity scale [compared with less than half of Jews, Catholics, and Evangelicals]. Self-identifying as a Muslim, regardless of the particular branch of Islam, seems to be almost synonymous with being strongly religious.”⁹⁴ Similar results turn up in some other surveys.⁹⁵ A large one by the Pew Research Center found that “in 32 of the 39 countries surveyed, half or more Muslims say there is only one correct way to understand the teachings of Islam,” that in the countries in which the question was asked, between 50 and 93 percent believe that the Quran “should be read literally, word by word,” and that “overwhelming percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the official law of the land.”⁹⁶