One of the guiding principles of the Fighting the Gods project has always been that the target of attack is directed towards ideas, ideologies, or supernatural beings, never towards people. This project is, after all, advocating on behalf of human progress, without consideration of race, nationality, or gender, and it does so by challenging ideas that can lead to general intolerance towards our fellow human beings. 

This has required that I take some controversial, yet consistent, positions. I’ve maintained that all monotheistic religions have the general tendency to engender an exclusionary ethics that can lead individuals to violent extremes, while acknowledging that the vast majority of adherents to those religions are good, decent people (thanks to secular advances in morality, I would argue). Yet this fact does not absolve each faith from its underlying moral failures or epistemological perversions. The upshot is that attacking the tenets of any religion is no more “racist” or “xenophobic” than attacking the doctrines of Communism. 

This principle seems especially relevant to any discussion of Islam. There is a general tendency to conflate the criticism of an idea with the criticism of an individual person, or even of an entire race. But that stance needs to be rejected. It hardly needs saying that there are countless Muslims who are kind, decent people, able to read their scriptures as selectively (or not at all) as even the most charitable, peace-loving Christian. But the religion of Islam itself—or at least significant parts of its doctrine and tradition—are far from kind and decent, especially towards nonbelievers. 

What follows, then, is an argument against Islam as an ideology, not against Muslims as people, who, like anyone else, deserve the freedom to examine and revise the beliefs they have inherited. Nor will this be the standard indictment of Islam’s violent tendencies. The problem, as we’ll see, runs far deeper than violence itself. It reaches into the foundations of Islamic theology—exposing philosophical problems that may well be unresolvable.

But before we confront those deeper problems, we need to begin with the man at the center of it all: Muhammad, the founder of Islam. 

Muhammad, Final Prophet and Messenger of God 

For practicing Christians, any list of the faith’s nonnegotiable requirements must begin with belief in Jesus himself, including his ministry, his teachings, and his message. To reject Jesus and the things he is purported to have said is, in effect, to reject Christianity. Likewise with Islam; to practice the faith requires a corresponding commitment to its prophet, Muhammad. 

So who was Muhammad, according to Islamic theology? He is said to have been the final prophet in a long line of prophets that included Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Born in Mecca around 570 CE, Muhammad received his first revelations from God through the angel Gabriel at about the age of forty. These revelations, which continued for roughly twenty-three years, were eventually collected into the Quran, Islam’s sacred scripture. Muhammad, of course, didn’t write these revelations down himself. As an illiterate man, he depended on the services of others to transcribe his divine dictations from God. 

Muhammad ultimately preached uncompromising monotheism, called his fellow Arabs to abandon their traditional gods, and proclaimed himself the messenger of the one true God. After facing persecution in Mecca, he migrated to Medina in 622, where he established a religious and political community that rapidly expanded across Arabia. By the time of his death in 632, Muhammad had become not only the founder and prophet of a new religion but also the political and military leader of much of the Arabian Peninsula. 

Of particular interest is the famed Night Journey. According to Islamic tradition, in 621, shortly before his migration to Medina, Muhammad was carried from Mecca to Jerusalem on the back of a supernatural creature called the Buraq, and from there ascended through the heavens to stand in the direct presence of God. During this miraculous journey, Muhammad received divine confirmation of his status as God’s final prophet and messenger—a claim that would ultimately be embraced by billions of his followers. 

From the skeptic’s perspective, stories like this are hardly surprising. Long before the rise of modern science and the demand for more rigorous standards of evidence, ancient and medieval audiences were far too willing to accept as evidence extravagant tales of bodily resurrection, divine revelation, miraculous journeys, and ascents into heaven. Many of us have since outgrown such claims. Billions, however, have not. 

But for the moment, I’m not going to argue that an illiterate Arabian merchant didn’t actually fly to heaven on a winged donkey. If you believe that he did, I’m not entirely sure how I could talk you out of it. My concern, instead, is even more consequential: to explore what happens when someone comes to believe that Muhammad really did make this miraculous journey, and that the Quran is the literal word of God. 

The Unique Problem of Islam 

It seems that many people, particularly those outside the Islamic tradition, fail to appreciate just how extraordinary Islamic theology’s central claims really are. To be a Muslim means, at minimum, to believe that Muhammad was the final messenger of God, that he received revelations directly from God, and that the Quran is the literal word of God. 

Or, to put it another way, if the Quran is not the literal word of God, then Muhammad was either delusional or lying, and therefore not worth listening to. Since Muslims do not believe this, and place unwavering faith in their prophet, then they, in consequence, believe that they possess God’s final revelation for all time. If this fact does not trouble you, at least a little, then you probably haven’t thought about it deeply enough. 

Unlike the other “People of the Book” (Jews and Christians), who can, more or less, reject biblical literalism and ignore the verses in scripture they don’t particularly like (and believe me, there are several), the theology of Islam specifically encourages a literal reading of the text. While Jews and Christians can maintain that the Bible was written by several “divinely inspired” yet fallible men—and thus adopt a selectively allegorical rendering of the text—Muslims must insist that the Quran is the perfect word of God, dictated to an eminently trustworthy man. This rather locks them into a literalist reading. 

Now, it hardly needs pointing out why this could present some major problems. But I will point it out anyway. The truth is, if the Quran is the literal word of God, and it contains violent calls to action, then believers may be compelled to feel that, not only is violence warranted, but that it’s mandated. 

Other religions simply do not suffer from this defect, at least not to the same degree. It is the reason that Jains and Buddhists and Christians, for the most part, do not transform themselves so eagerly into human bombs and missiles. There is nothing within their sacred scriptures that suggests that they ought to do so, or that they will be immensely rewarded for their violent services to God. Yet the Quran says otherwise:

When the Sacred Months have passed, kill the idolaters wherever you find them. And capture them, and besiege them, and lie in wait for them at every ambush. But if they repent, and perform the prayers, and pay the alms, then let them go their way. God is Most Forgiving, Most Merciful (Quran 9:5). 

Or consider how nonbelievers are to be treated after their expedited demise:

Those who reject Our revelations—We will scorch them in a Fire. Every time their skins are cooked, We will replace them with other skins, so they will experience the suffering. God is Most Powerful, Most Wise (Quran 4:56). 

In reading verse 4:56, don’t forget that, according to Muslims, this is God speaking directly to you. Clearly, Allah doesn’t have a very high opinion of nonbelievers. “The worst of creatures in God’s view are those who disbelieve,” says Quran 8:55. This combination of utter contempt with calls to violence and the promise of heavenly rewards is, quite literally, explosive, and presents all the textual justification one would need for divinely sanctioned mass murder. 

The more liberal Muslims among us will rationalize or contextualize verses like these (there are several others), but it doesn’t take much imagination to envision a scenario where a devout Muslim could take the words “kill idolaters wherever you find them” as explicit instructions to kill nonbelievers or perceived aggressors. In fact, this is exactly what has happened, historically, on numerous occasions. And to make matters worse, the Quran seems to promise eternal rewards for doing so: “God has purchased from the believers their lives and their properties in exchange for Paradise” (Quran 9:111). 

To be fair, there is a counterargument for reading the Quran in a more peaceful light. The Quran does also say that “there shall be no compulsion in religion” (Quran 2:256), that “God does not prohibit you from dealing with [those who have not fought against you] kindly and equitably” (Quran 60:8), that “God does not love the aggressors” (Quran 2:190), and that one should “repel evil with good, and the person who was your enemy becomes like an intimate friend” (Quran 41:34).  

Moderate defenders of the faith will say, if critics can select verses for evil, then we can select verses for good. And they may be right. Yet what they fail to see is that the ambiguity and uncertainty over how Muslims should treat nonbelievers is precisely the problem. And it’s a problem, crucially, that an all-knowing God should have anticipated. 

This is the philosophical paradox at the heart of Islam: If God is omniscient and Islam is truly a religion of peace, and, further, that God is displeased with the violence many Muslims have inflicted upon infidels, then God ought to have foreseen that his own words would have come to be so readily misconstrued by so many people. 

Could not God, in his infinite wisdom and power, have delivered a more unambiguous and internally harmonious message, if he truly intended Islam to be understood as a religion of peace, love, and tolerance? The Quran is, after all, presented as God’s timeless and unalterable manifesto to humanity. Surely an omniscient God could have anticipated the confusion his words would create—and spared humanity the trouble by omitting commands to violence altogether, or making unmistakably clear that such commands applied only to the specific circumstances of warfare. Instead, we are left with the troubling possibility that Muslim “fundamentalists” are correct after all, and that God really did intend to authorize the destruction of unbelievers.

The fact that we cannot answer this question by appealing to any authority outside of the Quran—because it is the final word of God—condemns us to a situation where violent interpretations can always be recovered from the text. When the text contains both commands to tolerate peaceful nonbelievers and passages that sanction violence against them, competing interpretations will always inevitably arise unless the tradition’s foundational premises are rejected altogether. 

This isn’t “Islamophobia,” it’s the recognition of the dangers of divinely sanctioned moral absolutism. When one believes that they have the word of God behind them, they can be made to do and think horrific things, without the need for philosophical or moral justification outside of their own personal interpretation of selected scriptural passages. 

In the end, arguing over which interpretation of scripture is correct rather misses the point entirely. Those who think Islam is a religion of war and those who think Islam is a religion of peace both still agree on the one fact most unlikely to be true: that the Quran is the literal word of God. Yet this should be the target of our unrelenting criticism. The miraculous claims at the foundation of Islam are no more credible than the miracles claimed by any other religion, and there is no compelling reason to consider the Quran to be anything other than the work of man, and man alone. Its words therefore should have no special authority over the most consequential moral question of all—whether one human being has the right to kill another. 

The Fight Against Dogmatism and For Humanism

It goes without saying that we should harbor no ill will toward Muslims, or toward anyone else, simply for their religious beliefs, although it’s interesting to note that some Muslims use the Quran as justification to deny the same favor to us. But we won’t sink so low. The principles of secular humanism demand that we respect the rights of individuals to believe whatever they choose, granted no undue harm is inflicted upon others. 

Precisely where the boundary between individual liberty and harm should be drawn is a question for liberal democracy to work out. But violent calls to kill nonbelievers—or to denigrate them as “the worst of creatures”—must be repudiated wherever they are found, without concern for “offending” those who subscribe to the same religion from which those calls quite explicitly spring. As the philosopher Karl Popper famously warned, unlimited tolerance can ultimately destroy the very conditions that make a tolerant society possible. 

As a humanist, my principles require me to respect your freedom of conscience—to determine for yourself what you believe and why you believe it. But respect for your right to believe something does not require respect for the belief itself. I have no obligation to treat every religious claim as intellectually credible simply because someone holds it sincerely.

The claim that God’s final prophet flew to heaven on the back of a supernatural creature, or that God entrusted his final message to humanity to an illiterate merchant/warlord in the caves of an Arabian desert, is not something I am required to take seriously. You are free to believe these claims and to defend them. I am equally free to scrutinize and criticize them, provided that we do so peacefully and extend to one another the same freedom of conscience we claim for ourselves.

That is the only way a pluralistic society can work. We do not settle competing claims by appealing to revelations that one side regards as divine and the other does not. We settle them through reasoned argument, evidence, and open debate among fellow human beings. And to the extent that Islam—or any other religion—demands immunity from such scrutiny, it should be rejected, not because its adherents are unworthy of respect, but because no idea deserves exemption from criticism.

References and Further Reading

Lings, Martin. Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources. Revised ed. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2006. 

Spencer, Robert. Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World’s Fastest-Growing Faith. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003.