The Four Horsemen, episode 1

[SH] But, you have many other subjects!

[CH] And I certainly didn't say that I thought if they'd only listen to me, they would stop going. Okay, so there are two questions here. So that was my very experimental answer, but I'd love to hear … would you like to say that you look forward to a world where no one had any faith in the supernatural?

[RD] I want to answer this. Whether it's astrology, or religion, or anything else, I want to live in a world where people think skeptically for themselves, look at evidence. Not because astrology's harmful, I guess it probably isn't harmful, but if you go through the world thinking that it's okay to just believe things because you believe them without evidence, then you're missing so much. And it's such a wonderful experience to live in the world, and understand why you're living in the world, and understand what makes it work, understand about the real stars, understand about astronomy, that it's an impoverishing thing to be reduced to the pettiness of astrology, and I think you can say the same of religion. The universe is a grand, beautiful, wonderful place, and it's petty and parochial and cheapening to believe in djinns, and supernatural creators, and supernatural interferers. I think you could make an aesthetic case that we want to get rid of …

[DD] Well, fine, I …

[CH] I could not possibly agree with you more.

[DD] But, let's talk about priorities.

[RD] Okay.

[DD] If we could just get rid of some of the most pernicious and nauseous excesses, what would be the triumphs we would go for first? What would really thrill you as an objective reached? Let's look at Islam, and let's look at Islam as realistically as we can. Is there any, remote chance of a reformed, reasonable Islam?

[RD] Well, isn't the present, savage Islam actually rather recent? Isn't it the Wahabi … I mean, doesn't …?

[DD] You have to go back quite a ways, I think, to get …

[SH] Only up to a point. I mean, I think there's … and again none of us are the … whether we're equipped to do it, we're not the most persuasive mouthpieces of this criticism. I mean, I think it takes someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or a Muslim scholar, somebody like Ibn Warraq to authentically criticise Islam, and have it be heard by people, especially the secular liberals of the sort who don't trust our take on this, but it seems to me that you have different historical moments in the history of Islam that are distinct, one where Islam really has … you have some Muslim or you have a Caliphate, or you have some Muslim country which has a reign of Islam and is unmolested, for whatever period of time, from the outside, and then Islam can be as totalitarian and happy with itself as possible, and you don't see the inherent conflict, and the inherent liability of its creed. I mean, Samuel Huntington said that Islam has bloody borders. It's at the borders that we're noticing this problem and the borders of Islam and modernity, at this moment, the conflict between Islam and modernity. But yes, you can find instances in the history of Islam where people weren't running around waging Jihad, because they had successfully waged Jihad.

[DD] But what about women in that world?

[RD] Exactly, the suffering of women within those borders.

[DD] Yeah, yeah. Even in the best of times.

[CH] But there's obviously some kind of synchronism, and we know quite a lot now. There have been some wonderful books; Maria Menocal's book on Andalusia, for example, on periods where Islamic civilisation was relatively at peace with its neighbours, and doing a lot of work of its own on matters that were not Jihadist. And I saw myself, during the wars in post-Yugoslavia, that the Bosnian Muslims behaved far better than the Christians, either Catholic or Orthodox, and were the victims of religious massacre, and not the perpetrators of them, and were the ones who believed the most in multiculturalism. So it can happen. You could even meet people who said they were Atheist Muslims, or were Muslim-Atheists, Muslim-Secularists in …

[DD] Wow!

[CH] In Sarajevo, you could, yeah. Which is a technical impossibility, but the problem is this; whether we think, as I certainly very firmly do believe, that totalitarianism is innate in all religion, because it has to want an absolute, unchallengeable, eternal authority.

[DD] In all religion.

[CH] It must be so. A creator whose will can't … our comments on his will are unimportant. You know, his will is absolute, it cannot be challenged, and applies after we're dead as well as before we're born. That is the origin of totalitarianism. I think Islam states that in the most alarming way, in that it comes as the third of the monotheisms, and says nothing further is required.

[SH] Right.

[CH] There have been previous words from God, we admit that, we don't claim to be exclusive, but we do claim to be final. There's no need for any further work on this point.

[SH] And we do claim that there's no distance between theology and …