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

But this condescension is belied by the history of Islam and by nascent movements within it. Classical Arabic civilization, as I mentioned, was a hothouse of science and secular philosophy.¹⁰³ Amartya Sen has documented how the 16th-century Mughal emperor Akbar I implemented a multiconfessional, liberal social order (including atheists and agnostics) in Muslim-ruled India at a time when the Inquisition was raging in Europe and Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for heresy.¹⁰⁴ Today the forces of modernity are working in many parts of the Islamic world. Tunisia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia have made long strides toward liberal democracy (chapter 14). In many Islamic countries, attitudes toward women and minorities are improving (chapter 15)—slowly, but more detectably among women, the young, and the educated.¹⁰⁵ The emancipative forces that liberalized the West, such as connectivity, education, mobility, and women’s advancement, are not bypassing the Islamic world, and the moving sidewalk of generational replacement can outpace the walkers shambling along it.¹⁰⁶

Also, ideas matter. A cadre of Muslim intellectuals, writers, and activists has been pressing the case for a humanistic revolution for Islam. Among them are Souad Adnane (co-founder of the Arab Center for Scientific Research and Humane Studies in Morocco); Mustafa Akyol (author of Islam Without Extremes); Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar (founder of the Global Secular Humanist Movement); Sarah Haider (co-founder of Ex-Muslims of North America); Shadi Hamid (author of Islamic Exceptionalism); Pervez Hoodbhoy (author of Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality); Leyla Hussein (founder of Daughters of Eve, which opposes female genital mutilation); Gululai Ismail (founder of Aware Girls in Pakistan); Shiraz Maher (author of Salafi-Jihadism, quoted in the introduction to part 1); Omar Mahmood (an American editorialist); Irshad Manji (author of The Trouble with Islam); Maryam Namazie (spokesperson for One Law for All); Amir Ahmad Nasr (author of My Isl@m); Taslima Nasrin (author of My Girlhood); Maajid Nawaz (coauthor, with Sam Harris, of Islam and the Future of Tolerance); Asra Nomani (author of Standing Alone in Mecca); Raheel Raza (author of Their Jihad, Not My Jihad); Ali Rizvi (author of The Atheist Muslim); Wafa Sultan (author of A God Who Hates); Muhammad Syed (president of Ex-Muslims of North America); and most famously, Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Malala Yousafzai.

Obviously a new Islamic Enlightenment will have to be spearheaded by Muslims, but non-Muslims have a role to play. The global network of intellectual influence is seamless, and given the prestige and power of the West (even among those who resent it), Western ideas and values can trickle, flow, and cascade outward in surprising ways. (Osama bin Laden, for example, owned a book by Noam Chomsky.)¹⁰⁷ The history of moral progress, recounted in books such as The Honor Code by the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, suggests that moral clarity in one culture about a regressive practice by another does not always provoke resentful backlash but can shame the laggards into overdue reform. (Past examples include slavery, dueling, foot-binding, and racial segregation; future ones targeting the United States may include capital punishment and mass incarceration.)¹⁰⁸ An intellectual culture that steadfastly defended Enlightenment values and that did not indulge religion when it clashed with humanistic values could serve as a beacon for students, intellectuals, and open-minded people in the rest of the world.

After laying out the logic of humanism, I noted that it stood in stark contrast to two other systems of belief. We have just looked at theistic morality. Let me turn to the second enemy of humanism, the ideology behind resurgent authoritarianism, nationalism, populism, reactionary thinking, even fascism. As with theistic morality, the ideology claims intellectual merit, affinity with human nature, and historical inevitability. All three claims, we shall see, are mistaken. Let’s begin with some intellectual history.