Tonight's guest on The Daily Show is Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the panelists on The Nightly Show are 2 Chainz, Rosie Perez, Kenneth Cole, and Phoebe Robinson.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an activist, writer, and politician. She is known for her views critical of female genital mutilation and Islam and supportive of women's rights and atheism. She collaborated on a short movie with Theo van Gogh, entitled Submission (2004). Critical of Islam, it provoked controversy, and death threats were made against each of the two. Van Gogh was assassinated later that year by a Dutch Muslim. Tonight she is on to discuss her latest book
Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now
Today, she argues, the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims can be divided into a minority of extremists, a majority of observant but peaceable Muslims and a few dissidents who risk their lives by questioning their own religion. But there is only one Islam and, as Hirsi Ali shows, there is no denying that some of its key teachings—not least the duty to wage holy war—are incompatible with the values of a free society.
For centuries it has seemed as if Islam is immune to change. But Hirsi Ali has come to believe that a Muslim Reformation—a revision of Islamic doctrine aimed at reconciling the religion with modernity—is now at hand, and may even have begun. The Arab Spring may now seem like a political failure. But its challenge to traditional authority revealed a new readiness—not least by Muslim women—to think freely and to speak out.
Courageously challenging the jihadists, she identifies five key amendments to Islamic doctrine that Muslims have to make to bring their religion out of the seventh century and into the twenty-first. And she calls on the Western world to end its appeasement of the Islamists. “Islam is not a religion of peace,” she writes. It is the Muslim reformers who need our backing, not the opponents of free speech.
Interweaving her own experiences, historical analogies and powerful examples from contemporary Muslim societies and cultures, Heretic is not a call to arms, but a passionate plea for peaceful change and a new era of global toleration. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders, with jihadists killing thousands from Nigeria to Syria to Pakistan, this book offers an answer to what is fast becoming the world’s number one problem.
She has a very long but worth reading piece in The Wall Street Journal
Why Islam Needs a Reformation
I believe that it is foolish to insist, as Western leaders habitually do, that the violent acts committed in the name of Islam can somehow be divorced from the religion itself. For more than a decade, my message has been simple: Islam is not a religion of peace.
When I assert this, I do not mean that Islamic belief makes all Muslims violent. This is manifestly not the case: There are many millions of peaceful Muslims in the world. What I do say is that the call to violence and the justification for it are explicitly stated in the sacred texts of Islam. Moreover, this theologically sanctioned violence is there to be activated by any number of offenses, including but not limited to apostasy, adultery, blasphemy and even something as vague as threats to family honor or to the honor of Islam itself.
As I see it, the fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts.
Instead of letting Islam off the hook with bland clichés about the religion of peace, we in the West need to challenge and debate the very substance of Islamic thought and practice. We need to hold Islam accountable for the acts of its most violent adherents and to demand that it reform or disavow the key beliefs that are used to justify those acts.
As it turns out, the West has some experience with this sort of reformist project. It is precisely what took place in Judaism and Christianity over the centuries, as both traditions gradually consigned the violent passages of their own sacred texts to the past. Many parts of the Bible and the Talmud reflect patriarchal norms, and both also contain many stories of harsh human and divine retribution. As President Barack Obama said in remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast last month, “Remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”
No symbol represents the soul of Islam more than the Shahada. But today there is a contest within Islam for the ownership of that symbol. Who owns the Shahada? Is it those Muslims who want to emphasize Muhammad’s years in Mecca or those who are inspired by his conquests after Medina? On this basis, I believe that we can distinguish three different groups of Muslims.
The first group is the most problematic. These are the fundamentalists who, when they say the Shahada, mean: “We must live by the strict letter of our creed.” They envision a regime based on Shariah, Islamic religious law. They argue for an Islam largely or completely unchanged from its original seventh-century version. What is more, they take it as a requirement of their faith that they impose it on everyone else.
I shall call them Medina Muslims, in that they see the forcible imposition of Shariah as their religious duty. They aim not just to obey Muhammad’s teaching but also to emulate his warlike conduct after his move to Medina. Even if they do not themselves engage in violence, they do not hesitate to condone it.
The second group—and the clear majority throughout the Muslim world—consists of Muslims who are loyal to the core creed and worship devoutly but are not inclined to practice violence. I call them Mecca Muslims. Like devout Christians or Jews who attend religious services every day and abide by religious rules in what they eat and wear, Mecca Muslims focus on religious observance.
It is an interesting read and I hope the interview will be good. I excerpted so much of the article because I wanted to try to present the fuller picture of what she is saying. To me she is missing a key point, which is that the religion is being used to further an agenda, the agenda is not necessarily coming from the religion. Fundamentalism uses religion or other common belief systems to manipulate people. In the US, not only would Christianity be used by fundamentalists, but also the national identity and founders stories. In the Middle East the geopolitics of the area have meant that tribal and local identities have more pull than a national identity. This means that if you want to get a large following you must use something larger and more unifying and that happens to be Islam.
She seems to be suggesting that there is problem with the religion itself in that it has not yet renounced and removed the practices that are incompatible with modernity. I can see that to a point, outdated practices do allow more of an opening for the extremists, however, the extremists would still be fighting progress even without those beliefs being mainstream. We still have various types of Christian extremists here in the US despite Christianity leaving much of its misogyny and intolerance in the past. I tend to see it as people who are afraid of progress looking for anything they can use as a tool to bring others into their view of the world. They wield the tool with bad intentions and so the outcome is bad, the tool is not necessarily the problem.
2 Chainz
is an American rapper from College Park, Georgia. He initially gained recognition for being one-half of the southern hip hop duo Playaz Circle, alongside his longtime friend and fellow rapper, Earl "Dolla Boy" Conyers. They are perhaps best known for being signed to fellow Georgia-based rapper Ludacris' Disturbing tha Peace label, as well as their debut single "Duffle Bag Boy".
Rosie Perez
is an American actress, community activist, talk show host, author, dancer, and choreographer.
Her film breakthrough was in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989). She followed this with White Men Can't Jump (1992), and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Fearless (1993). She was also nominated for three Emmy Awards for her work as a choreographer on In Living Color. In 2007, Perez starred on Broadway as Googie Gomez in a revival of The Ritz, and she was nominated for an Indie Spirit Award for her performance in The Take.
She is currently a regular host on The View and in 2015 she returned to Broadway to star in Fish in the Dark, a new play written by Larry David.
Kenneth Cole
is an American clothing designer.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, his father, Charles Cole, owned the El Greco shoe manufacturing company. Cole graduated from John L. Miller Great Neck North High School in 1972. Before learning the family business and starting his own company in 1982, Cole graduated from Emory College of Arts and Sciences of Emory University in 1976.
Phoebe Robinson
According to Serial Optimist, NYC-based stand up-comedian and writer Phoebe Robinson “is brilliant and able to critique some really complex concepts in a sentence or two. Bask in it, people.” Which is precisely what Flavorwire is trying to get the public to do when it listed her as one of “25 Female Comedians Everyone Should Know,” and with the way things are going, it seems the place to get to know her is on TV.
Phoebe most recently appeared on Last Comic Standing, the TODAY show, Comedy Central’s Broad City and is a staff writer for MTV’s Girl Code. She has co-hosted an episode of the series Raising McCain, starred in the MTV pilot Chicks Out of Water, written on the VH1 pilot Chateau Buteau, appeared on FX’s Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, VH1’s Big Morning Buzz, HuffPo Live, and has been featured on several talking head shows for Pivot TV, VH-1, and the TV Guide Channel such as 100 Shows to See Before You Die, 25 Biggest Reality Star Blunders, and 40 Greatest Hip Hop Songs.
When not on television, Phoebe’s a writer for Glamour.com and contributes to The New York Times, bitch magazine, xoJane, VanityFair.com, and TheDailyBeast. Her blog Blaria (aka Black Daria) was picked up by The Huffington Post and has been featured on their website. She has also been published in Time Out NY, The NY Post, and The Smoking Jacket.
This Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
Tu 3/24: Jon Ronson
We 3/25: Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering
Th 3/26: John Hargrove