Matthew Kaemingk:
Welcome to Zealots at the Gate, a podcast of Comment Magazine. I’m Matthew Kaemingk.
Shadi Hamid:
I’m Shadi Hamid.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Together we research politics, religion, and the future of democracy at Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life.
Shadi Hamid:
We are writing a book together. This podcast represents an informal space where we can talk about how to live with deep difference. Thanks so much for joining us.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yes, welcome friends, and do make sure you subscribe wherever you listen. Please leave us a review, five stars. We love all that. Feel free to join the conversation and ask questions by using our hashtag on Twitter. The hashtag is #zealotspod. You can also feel free to email us. You can find us at zealots@comment.org and you can expect a good exchange. So yeah, why don’t we get started? By way of introduction, Shadi and I are good friends. That said, perhaps we shouldn’t be. I’m a Christian, Shadi’s a Muslim. I research and teach theology while Shadi researches and teaches in the area of political science and international relations.
So we come from pretty different perspectives, but this is our space to work those things out and discuss politics, religion, democracy, and how we live together with deep difference. And Shadi, today we’ve got a guest and a good spicy topic to explore. So why don’t you introduce our guest?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, thanks a lot, Matt. So we have a treat today for all of you. Our guest is Jonathan Brown, who is a professor at Georgetown. You see him waving there. And I’m not just saying this because he is a friend. I do think he is one of the most important and influential scholars of Islam and Islamic history around today. He is a Muslim convert. He’s the author of a book, which is an excellent primer on Islamic law and Islamic tradition. It’s called Misquoting Muhammad. We’ll include a link to that in the show notes, highly recommended. And his most recent book has a provocative title of Islam and Slavery, we’ll also include a link to that in the show notes.
The topic we’re going to be talking about today, I’m excited about it, but I’m also slightly apprehensive because I don’t like thinking about certain things in the Islamic tradition. Sometimes it’s better not to know and to not overthink things but one of Jonathan’s big contributions is pushing us to contend with maybe uncomfortable things in the Islamic tradition. One of those is slavery. Islam or at least the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad did not expressly forbid or prohibit slavery. Slavery is there in Islamic history, and as we’ll find out, it’s also in Christian history and Jewish history. We’ll get to all that, but maybe just to share more of a personal perspective on this, I think the bigger set of questions here is how do we understand or reinterpret the past in light of what we know now? Are we morally superior today than the prophet Muhammad was or even Jesus Christ was because Jesus Christ did not forbid slavery either?
So we have a bit of a conundrum here, and what do we do about that? How do we reconcile our sense of morality that we hold to so strongly today versus what was acceptable and what was customary centuries ago, 14 centuries ago, and so forth? And I’ll just quote one thing that Jonathan says in his book on Islam and Slavery, which I think gets at this conundrum in a really profound way. He says, “If slavery is a manifest in universal evil, why did no one seem to realize this until relatively recently?” It’s a good question. He also says, “I believe slavery is wrong. What interests me is explaining how almost all moral authorities in human history thought it was right.”
There’s a lot of implications here, but maybe that’s a good place to start because let’s imagine if we went back in time and we did talk to Prophet Muhammad or Jesus Christ, would we really get all worked up and say, “Hey, Prophet, hey, divine figure, you are wrong and we are morally superior?” Just maybe try to imagine that as a hypothetical scenario, and that I think gets across the puzzle. So Jonathan, with that over to you. How would you respond to some of these earlier points? As many of our listeners will be believing Christians, also believing Muslims, people who are religiously oriented, and they may avoid looking at the past for precisely these reasons.
Jonathan Brown:
Well, yeah, thanks guys for inviting me. Shadi, I always like talking to you about this kind of stuff because you’re not afraid to talk about these things. I think that there’s two points to keep in mind. One is that the question we’re asking is a much bigger question than about slavery, right? Slavery is the thing that forces us to ask the question, but the question is really much bigger, which is how do we think about the authority that the past has over us if we’re going to hold certain moral convictions today? And in some ways… And this is not a Muslim problem, this is not a Christian problem, this is not an American problem. This is basically an everybody problem. And actually, for a lot of communities and traditions, it was actually slavery that forced this as well.
The issue, the moral problem of slavery isn’t just something that let’s say Christians or Muslims or Jews have had to wrestle with. It’s actually strongly influenced how people come to view their scripture. Imagine you go into a cocktail party today and you’re like, “Oh yeah, I think slavery’s fine.” Imagine what would happen. Imagine the reaction. The profound transhistorical, moral evil of slavery is a fixed point in our discourse. It’s maybe one of the few things that you can’t question. So Holocaust is bad, slavery is bad. That’s maybe two things that just no one can disagree on and remain a person in good standing in our society and in the global western society more broadly.
On the other hand, I don’t know of any religious or philosophical tradition that prior to, let’s be generous, let’s say 1700, but really probably more 1800, but let’s say 1700, okay? Prior to the year 1700 of our common era was not totally comfortable with slavery, didn’t endorse it or defend it or consider it natural or tolerate it. So all of the human heritage prior to 1700 is essentially morally unacceptable according to our standards today, and it’s mind-boggling that people don’t have to confront this all the time, and they tend to get very upset when they are confronted with it and a great… You can see this constantly being performed in our society with these debates over statues.
I don’t know if you want to play the clip from Fox News, but I’ll just give an introduction about why I wanted to mention this is because when I… So I wrote this book on Islam and Slavery in… I think I started in the very end of 2016. So basically after Trump had been elected right around the time of his inauguration. Inauguration, is that correct? Yeah. I was going to say coronation, inauguration. So because the ISIS phenomenon had happened and this had really caused a lot of Muslim’s big problems because ISIS had been taking these sex slaves and reintroducing slavery and saying, “Hey, slavery’s in the Quran and the precedent of the Prophet Muhammad and slavery’s in the Sharia. So why are you guys all upset?” And Muslims didn’t really have an answer for this, and this was constantly in the newspaper, this was causing a lot of Muslim serious crisis in their faith.
And so I wanted to write a response to this or try and answer these questions myself. And when I did so, I found that when I tried to talk about this, everybody would get upset at me and people would say things like, academics, scholars would say things like, “The Quran prohibited slavery.” And I’d be like, “No, it didn’t. Look, I understand you want to make Muslims look good. You’re not an Islamophobe. You’re trying to push back against Trump and the Muslim ban and all this. I understand you have good intentions, but you can’t say something that’s not true. You can’t say that the Quran prohibited slavery because it didn’t.”
And people would say things like, “Slavery is…” I remember this one Muslim guy was debating with me, and he was like, “You need to say that slavery is wrong throughout history.” And I said, I was like, “Look, I don’t know what is the case? Because the Quran allowed slavery, the prophet had slaves, at least at some time in his life. And so either that’s wrong, or you’re telling me that the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad did something that you considered to be morally evil, in which case you’re not Muslim anymore, that caused you to exit Islam. And even if weren’t an official statement that makes you not Muslim, why would any of us take religious advice from somebody who thought slavery was okay?”
If somebody came today and was like, “Hey, I want to be president. By the way, I think slavery’s fine.” Would that person get very far in political life or public moral life? So I was like, “How can you ask me to do something that you know is going to either result in me in an absurd statement? Either I’m going to deny that history or I’m going to deny my own religion, and how can we have this discussion?” And when I confronted the guy about this, he said, “Well, I won’t discuss this in public, only in private.” I was like, “Well, why are you asking me to make this public declaration?”
Shadi, I don’t want to interrupt you. I just want to finish by saying, so I remember when I was trying to write the book, this book on Islam and Slavery, I decided to write, and I remember I was in Turkey that summer. It was a summer of 2017, and there was the Charlottesville protests, and it was about the statute of Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville, the University of Virginia. He was the founder of University of Virginia, and he’s of course the guy who wrote, “We believe all men are created equal,” et cetera, et cetera, “With certain unalienable rights, the life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.” And yet, here’s a guy who owns slaves, who had children with a female slave of his, et cetera. And all these other significant number of the founding fathers.
And then I remember watching Donald Trump speak about this, and he summarized this with succinctness only he could. He says, “George Washington had slaves. You’re going to take down statues of George Washington?” And then you just think about the what it would require for the American polity to disassociate itself from George Washington, just the sheer top anemical challenge of change names of everything, and yet that’s the logical conclusion. If you think slavery is a gross and intrinsic evil throughout space and time, somebody who is complicit in that is complicit with evil and they’re not a qualified moral role model. They’re not qualified to give us leadership or advice or anything.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I like what you said, and I want to bring us back to that statement which I think is so important, I’d love to key in on is this is a universal human problem, which is that every movement, every political movement, every religious movement has heroes and those heroes have flaws. And how do we wrestle with those historical moments? And the clip from Tucker Carlson, which I’d love to play real quick here, captures that in a punchy way that only dear, dear, good American citizen Tucker Carlson can capture. So let’s play that clip and then I want to dig into that because it’s a question that haunts me as a Christian as well. How do we deal with the sins of our past? So let’s play that clip.
Tucker Carlson:
President said more attention than it will likely get. Yesterday, a mob tore down a Civil War soldier’s memorial in Durham, North Carolina. Police stood idly by and liberals across the country applauded it. “Which statues are next?” The President asked today, “George Washington? Thomas Jefferson?” That’s not a joke. Suddenly it’s a serious question. Thomas Jefferson indisputably was a great man. He was the author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the University of Virginia, and maybe most importantly, the greatest thinker in American political history. All of us live in his shadow.
Unfortunately, however, Jefferson was also a slave holder. That’s real. It’s a moral taint. We ought to remember it, but the fanatics on the left, it means that Jefferson must be purged from public memory forever. The demands are already coming that we do that. In 2015, students at the University of Missouri demanded the removal of a Jefferson statue. Two years ago on CNN, anchor Ashleigh Banfield suggested the Jefferson Memorial in Washington might have to go. Needless to say, there is literally no limit when you start thinking like this. Last year, hundreds of activists in New York demanded the statue of Theodore Roosevelt to the American Natural History Museum be dismantled. They argued that Roosevelt was a racist. That’s the standard. Nobody is safe. Watch out Abraham Lincoln. You’re next.
Now, to be clear, as if it’s necessary, slavery is evil. If you believe in the rights of the individual, it’s actually hard to think of anything worse than slavery. But let’s be honest, up until 150 years ago when a group of brave Americans fought and died to finally put an end to it, slavery was the rule rather than the exception around the world and had been for thousands of years, sadly. Plato owned slaves. So did Muhammad, peace be upon him. Many African tribes held slaves and sold them. The Aztecs did too. Before he liberated Latin America, Simon Bolivar owned slaves. Slave holding was so common among the North American Indians that the Cherokee brought their slaves with them on the Trail of Tears, and it wasn’t something they learned from the European settlers. Indians were holding and trading slaves when Christopher Columbus arrived, and by the way, he owned slaves too.
Now, none of this is a defense of the atrocity of human bondage. It is an atrocity. The point, however, is that if we’re going to judge the past by the standards of the present, if we’re going to reduce a person’s life to the single worst thing he ever participated in, we had better be prepared for the consequences of that, and here’s why. 41 of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence held slaves. James Madison, the father of the Constitution, had a plantation full of slaves. George Mason, the father of the Bill of Rights also owned slaves unfortunately, but does that make what they wrote illegitimate?If these men were simply racist villains and that’s all they were, then the society they created is as evil as they were. There’s no reason to respect its traditions or uphold its laws.
Jonathan Brown:
So I think you have the slavery conundrum framed here. And by the way, it’s good because in a Muslim session like a meeting, you should have someone say, “Call God’s peace and blessings down upon the Prophet Muhammad.” And so Tucker did that for us, so that’s good. Our [ ] is acceptable as a Muslim learning session.
Shadi Hamid:
I was surprised by that, and I chuckled a bit and I assume he was being ironic, but I wasn’t entirely sure.
Jonathan Brown:
Who knows? He’s surprising sometimes. Thought what’s fascinating is actually, he doesn’t really address the question. He does a bait and switch because what he says, I can’t remember if he was in that. I’m fairly sure it’s in that segment. What he says is, he says “Slavery is evil.” He says, “In fact, if you believe in individual rights, there’s not much worse than slavery.” But then he says, “Slavery’s a moral taint.” So on one hand you have a statement that says it’s an evil basically throughout space and time, there’s not much worse than it. On the other hand, when it’s associated with Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, it’s a taint. It takes the luster off a little bit. That is a bait and switch. You can’t have both these things.
So imagine if you say something is evil and someone is complicit in it. Imagine cannibalism or something or human sacrifice or child sacrifice or something. You wouldn’t have somebody do child sacrifice and then be like, “But they’re a great man. They’re a great person.” So actually, he does not have a way of dealing with this. Either you say, “This is evil throughout space and time, and we’re going to act on that. We’re going to say, someone who’s complicit in this or who defends it is disqualified morally, or we’re going to say that it’s actually not a disqualifying evil throughout space. And essentially we’re going to have to reduce the level of evil that we’re giving it in a real transhistorical sense.”
Similarly, something Matthew, you said earlier, you said, “We have heroes, but they have flaws.” Yeah, a flaw is they make a bad decision. Maybe they’re a great president, but they’re not the best father, or something like that. Being okay with slavery does not qualify as a flaw in our moral sentiments today.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I guess what you’re saying is it’s not a mistake, it’s not a whoopsie to be a slave holder.
Jonathan Brown:
Yeah, it’s a serious problem. And then it’s interesting because another person who’s tried to deal with this, a right-leaning person recently is Bill Maher on his show when he talks about, I guess some historian wrote op-ed about presentism. And one thing I like about Bill Maher is that although he’s incredibly Islamophobic and hates religion, I don’t agree with him on that, is that he really does intellectually engage with things in a way that very few other people do. And so he talks about this idea of presentism and the idea that we’re holding the past to the standards of the present, but his way of dealing with that is that he sees it as absurd because it’s like us looking back at our childhood and blaming ourselves something we did when we were 10 or when we were 15 or something like that.
Look, everybody makes mistakes. We can’t hate our past selves for what we did. The problem is that’s not how we view our pasts, right? If you’re a Christian or if you’re a Muslim, or if you are an American or whatever, and in theory, all these different traditions who view their past, either in terms of scripture or some storehouse of wisdom as having really strong authority over our present, your past is not infancy. Your past is not childhood. Your past is in fact, the best time. We’re living in a degenerate era compared to the time of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad or the time when Jesus was in the world. We’re living in a shadow of a great era, and we look back to that past to instruct us. We don’t see it as something that we can forgive ourselves for.
Shadi Hamid:
So a couple of things I want to touch on here. There’s a lot. Maybe the first thing is that in hearing this, I feel like my own apologetic instincts are coming out, and let me just give voice to them as an example of what probably many Muslims would say in response to this discussion. They’d probably, as I’m about to right now, make a certain set of clarifications that the prophet wasn’t… So in the Quran, and you can talk more about this if you’d like, Jonathan, the Quran encourages the freeing of slaves. There are really incredible and overwhelming incentives for the manumission of slaves. And some scholars argue that through that kind of natural progression and organic development, you’ll have less and less slaves over time so that the Quran and the prophets example, it implants an ethical premise that leads to the emancipation of slaves. That’s one interpretation, and I think it’s one that a lot of Muslims will gravitate towards because it allows them to resolve the conundrum.
I think there’s also major differences between not forbidding slavery and actively supporting it. So that’s where it gets a little bit tricky because in many of these cases, whether it’s the Prophet Muhammad, Jesus Christ, apostle Paul, they wouldn’t have enthusiastically supported or encouraged slavery to my knowledge, and I should just mention a couple examples just in fairness to all of our faith, so we can be somewhat ecumenical. I did mention earlier that Jesus did not forbid slavery. The apostles included slave owners, and Paul instructed slaves in scripture in the New Testament, quote, unquote, “to be submissive to their masters and to obey them as you would Christ.” Saint Augustine offered various justifications for slavery tied to the concept of original sin. For a significant period of time, a Catholic Church was a leading slave owner. Catholic theorists in the natural law tradition did spend many, many centuries finding justifications for slavery, so on and so forth. So I just want to be clear that we do have these various shades of either not condemning, but that’s maybe not the same as enthusiastically supporting. But still, if you’re seeing slavery as the pinnacle of sin, these distinctions presumably won’t matter.
You have to condemn something if it is one of the greatest sins in human history, and that’s where maybe it’s not about flaws because for example, we as Muslims don’t believe the prophet is capable of major error or sin on theological matters. Scholars debate whether he can have more minor flaws and be capable of just some more ordinary things like that. But when it comes to major sins, we as Muslims don’t believe that the prophet is capable of committing major sins, and presumably Christians would say something similar about the apostles. I just wanted to put that out there and feel free, Jonathan, to react to any of that.
Jonathan Brown:
Again, my way of resolving, I call it the slavery conundrum. So the slavery conundrum is a conundrum we create for ourselves in let’s say modern global western society where you basically have three axioms that none of which can be rejected, but all of which cannot be held together at the same time. It’s impossible. So the first is slavery is a gross and intrinsic evil across space and time. Slavery was wrong 2000 years ago. Slavery was wrong in Arabia. Slavery was wrong in South America. Anything called slavery is evil throughout space and time, it doesn’t matter. Two, all slavery is slavery. There’s no good slavery, “Yeah, it’s not that bad. It was okay. It was more like being a servant.” I mean, again, just imagine going into a cocktail party and someone’s talking about slavery and you’re like, “Yeah, but it wasn’t that bad. His owner was a really nice guy and he treated him very well and stuff.” I mean, just imagine what would happen in that situation.
So the second slave axiom is, all slavery is slavery. The third is that our past has some kind of moral or religious authority over us, or legal authority over us. We are beholden to our past and we want to be beholden to our past. We want to look to it as an authority, and you can’t have these three things. Either you say that for, and you’ll see biblical commentary even today, we’ll say that slavery in the Old Testament was not like a American plantation slavery. It was more like servants and stuff like that. It wasn’t that severe. So in that case, they’re getting out of it by saying, “Not all slavery is slavery,” so you’re violating the second axiom.
You could say, “Well, back then it was okay,” that would be violating the first axiom. Or you could say, “Take down all the statues. We don’t care. Get rid of them all. We should not be honoring slave owners and get rid of the third axiom,” which is to say… And this is by the way, basically what William Lloyd Garrison, a famous 19th century American abolitionist who’s most active in the 1830s, and he had a journal called The Liberator. He said about the Bible, “If it’s between slavery and the Bible, the Bible has to go.” But it’s interesting that in The Liberator, in one issue, he’s talking about George Washington having slaves, and he says, “Well, yeah. But we don’t really think he meant it. He didn’t really believe in this,” so he actually has an orthodoxy. He might be religiously willing to disassociate himself with his tradition, but he politically can’t.
He can’t go against the kind of patron saint or whatever, the founder of our polity which is interesting. And by the way, in case you have any ideas about George Washington, there’s a book that came out a few years ago called, Never Caught, about the Washingtons had a female slave who ran away when they were in Philadelphia, and they spent the rest of their lives hunting her down. They were not like, “Oh, it’s okay. We don’t really like slavery anyway, so it’s good. God bless her.” Uh-huh. They, it’s called Never Caught, about a slave named Ona Judge. I recommend reading it. So I think that we have these axioms that we’re committed to, and very few of us are willing to make the sacrifice to actually make them coherent. And I’m not saying that… I mean, I’m Muslim. I refuse to say that what my revelation and what my prophet allowed is evil throughout space and time. I won’t say that. It would make me not Muslim, but other people are not as comfortable with this.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So Jonathan, we want to encourage people to read the book itself, but if you would give us a little bit of preview of how you, yourself wrestle with this conundrum and how do you emerge out and make sense of all this.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. So what’s the resolution basically?
Jonathan Brown:
Yeah.
Shadi Hamid:
Give it to us.
Jonathan Brown:
I feel like we just skipped the whole podcast and went to the resolution, but no big deal.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, no. It’s just I think Christians have their own ways of wrestling with these kinds of things, but I’m genuinely curious.
Jonathan Brown:
I mean, it’s really interesting because you can see Muslims in the 20th and 21st centuries essentially doing the same thing that Christians in the 19th and early 20th century were doing. It’s like they’re following the same script, and it’s not because their copycats. It’s like this is structurally what you have to do if you’re presented with a revealed source that you look to as guidance from God and that is clashing with something that you are contending in the present isn’t evil. The process is going to be the same. So what’s really interesting is to look at the debates that happen in the US between founding fathers, for example, there’s one of the founding fathers, Benjamin Rush was a committed abolitionist, so he is very anti-slavery. He’s the signatory of one of the Declaration of Independence, et cetera, and he has this exchange of letters with this southern slave owner, and the slave owner is like, “Look, the Bible allows slavery.”
And Benjamin Rush says, “Well, okay. It’s in the Old Testament, but Jesus came, he was this force of liberation and sets us on the trajectory to end this. Yeah, he didn’t say it’s wrong because if he had, it would’ve been too disruptive and to cause too much strife or something.” And the slave owner’s like, “Okay. You’re telling me that the son of God comes to earth, Jesus, the guy who never makes any waves, and he didn’t just say, “Hey, slavery’s wrong. Maybe you can’t get rid of it right now, but it’s morally evil.” So you’re basically saying the Son of God on Earth doesn’t have the courage of his convictions to say, this thing is wrong?”
There’s no answer to that. Similarly, you can engage in what Shadi suggesting, which again is a Christian response and a Muslim response which is essentially what’s called trajectory hermeneutics, which is to say that, let’s say the Quran or the Bible doesn’t say slavery’s evil, get rid of it. But it puts us on a trajectory towards that. It sets up a system of values or priorities that eventually will allow us to realize if it’s feasible. The problem with that is it allows us to make sense of moral progress. What it doesn’t do is explain how God could ever have allowed something that’s evil, so the problem isn’t us talking about how it’s good not to have slaves or how we should end slavery. That’s a theological and hermeneutic discussion that Muslims and Christians have been able to have amongst themselves very productively which can be a separate topic, but that’s not the issue.
The issue is, if slavery is an evil across space and time, why did God allow it even in the Old Testament? It’s not good enough to say Jesus came and fulfilled the law and was a new law that replaced the law of the Old Testament, et cetera. If you believe the Old Testament is the word of God or revealed wisdom, how did God ever allow that if it was an evil across space and time? And there’s no answer to that except either to say it was okay back then, or it wasn’t as bad as the slavery that you think is really bad in America, or a conclusion a lot of Christians came to, “The Old Testament is not the actual word of God. It’s not actually the timeless wisdom and revealed teachings of God to mankind. It’s something that was revealed to a specific people at a specific time in their own words, with their own worldview, and is not actually binding on people in other times and places.”
Shadi Hamid:
So would those options, which answer would you… I mean, in some sense, this is the challenge. I mean, I have a sense of where you land on this, but maybe just spell it out a little bit more of-
Jonathan Brown:
Yeah. So I can’t tell if Matthew is about to combust or is-
Matthew Kaemingk:
I’m doing my best here.
Jonathan Brown:
… mellow about this. It’s like, “I don’t know. Let’s see where this guy’s going.” I don’t know. I don’t want to foreclose on Christian responses. I’m giving my take on them. And by the way, the reason I’m even bringing them up is because it’s actually a common script. Their approach is shared between Muslim and Christians. There might be a little tweaking here and there, but I think they’re fairly similar.
Shadi Hamid:
… so a fun fact on this point for people, one of the great Muslim theologians of the 20th century, someone who I’ve written about in my work, Rashid Riḍa actually drew very directly from Western arguments where he basically said that the Quran couldn’t have, expressedly forbid slavery because doing that would potentially lead to civil strife and chaos because slavery was so interwoven in the fabric of these pre-modern societies. And he used the American Civil War as an illustration that even in the West trying to prematurely abolish slavery can lead to civil strife on a massive scale, which is just absolutely fascinating to me.
Jonathan Brown:
Yeah. It’s interesting because I don’t want to say if the civil war was a good thing or bad thing, I’m not going to get into that. But it is interesting that I’ve read that with the money that was spent on this, the Northern war effort, they could have literally bought all, essentially compensated the entire southern economy for its slave economy, which is interesting.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So earlier, for those who are just listening and not watching on YouTube, I was sending a variety of nonverbal cues that I was getting uncomfortable or had something to say, and Jonathan very, very thoughtfully saw that. So I do have a number of smaller quibbles with what each of you have said about Christianity and slavery, and I don’t want to get lost in the quibbles about this or that, but more this broader discussion about guilt and how we think about the failures of people who are very important to us. And I guess, to just interject on the Christianity side, as a Christian, my faith does not hang on whether or not Abraham was a good guy or David was a good guy, or Peter or Paul, were good guys. My faith hangs on whether or not Jesus was a good guy. And so the Bible itself is filled with stories about the failures of these people, Abraham lying and being a coward.
In one story, Peter, once again, being a coward and lying. The scripture itself is filled with the moral failures of our heroes, king David committing adultery and murder, and we sing his Psalms. It really does hang much more on the person of Jesus. So what’s interesting to me in this conversation is how there are so many similarities between Islam and Christianity wrestling with this issue, but there’s also some really important differences. For example, our understanding of scripture itself, that one, that scripture comes directly, it is the speech of God and the other, that many human beings wrote the Bible over centuries in very different contexts, in exile and in kingdoms, and throughout the Roman Empire. So you have this wild diversity in the Bible of writers who are themselves flawed and finite, and that’s a different kind of holy text to wrestle with. That makes the conversation a little bit different, I think.
And so anyways, just my own little reflection on, there are moments when I listen to the two of you talking where I completely identify with the moral wrestling that you are having with the legacy of Muhammad, and then there are parts where I just can’t identify at all. So for example, the fact that Abraham had slaves, that doesn’t bother me at all. That doesn’t create a moral crisis for me because my faith doesn’t hang on him being perfect. And then to make the larger thing of this discussion about the moral standing of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln and these other figures, what I’m thinking about in terms of our culture today is, what is this longing for our heroes to be morally pure? What is this longing that they have to, or they will be canceled? What’s going on in our political culture that we long for this level of purity from these people, that it is so scandalizing that they had a different moral vision from us?
It seems that something different has happened over the last 20 years. That it has a feeling of a desire for a heightened level of moral purity. For me, I love David’s Psalms. Those are very important poetry and prayer to me, and I can enjoy those things knowing that he did some abominable things. But it seems that our American culture today can’t abide that, and I’m just wondering, I’d love to hear your reflections on what is it about our political culture today that we cannot abide moral diversity or development today?
Jonathan Brown:
So I think you’re correct. There are really important differences between Muslim approach and a Christian approach to some of these questions. For example, in the Islamic tradition, profits are morally upstanding. So the story of David and Bathsheba is not acceptable from the point of view of the vast majority of Muslim theologians. On the other hand, I would say that you say your faith doesn’t hang on Abraham being a good guy, okay. But what about the law? So the law that’s revealed to Moses is divine guidance. I think even from a Christian perspective, you could say it’s superseded divine guidance. It’s divine guidance that is later superseded with the coming of Christ, but that law allows slavery and tells the Israelites to take slaves and it allows the Israelites to have slave concubines, et cetera. And again, I really don’t like trying to trigger crises of faith in other people, so-
Matthew Kaemingk:
No, that’s fine.
Jonathan Brown:
… I’m not trying to do that, but I won’t push this-
Matthew Kaemingk:
No, do it.
Jonathan Brown:
… I will just say that-
Matthew Kaemingk:
I’m a seminary professor, so I’m used to these kinds of dialogues. You’re not triggering me [inaudible 00:43:39].
Jonathan Brown:
… I would say that… Just so funny, the other day my kids watched the Don’t Tase Me Bro clip when I was having to go back and tell them about the Don’t Tase Me Bro. So I think that my contention, and I’m not Christian so I’m not going to push this. I would just say, what I’ve noted is that I think that there are more weeds to wrestle with and get out of on this than a lot of the Christian explanations suggest. The other thing I think it’s interesting you mentioned is this notion of a quest for purity or a demand of purity in our current age, and I think that is certainly the case. And I know Shadi and I are almost certainly on the same page in this.
I hope I’m not implicating him in this, but I mean, when you’re saying that a movie that came out 10 years ago didn’t hold up well and it can’t be watched now, maybe you’re being a little puritanical about demands on the past. On the other hand, I would say that when people say, “I will not look up to someone who thought slavery was fine,” that’s not being too demanding. I mean, again, it is a fixed point of inquiry in our discourse today that slavery is a trans historical gross, intrinsic, moral evil. So saying that I don’t want to respect or venerate someone who engaged in that, even if they did other things that were good, that’s not, I think, a outlandish claim or outlandish demand.
Shadi Hamid:
But Jonathan, it seems that no one’s really willing to take that premise to its logical conclusion because if they really believe that you can’t take moral advice from anyone who was complicit in slavery or didn’t condemn it even, then you would have to basically remove the entire history of human existence before, as you said, circa 1700, so you would lose every single philosophical and religious tradition. So I would wonder if they have the courage of their own convictions.
Jonathan Brown:
Yeah. So it’s interesting you say that when this happened, I can’t remember… Oh, it was when the Charlottesville thing was happening. I have so many screenshots from that time because you just get this incredible display of every possible point that could be made in this debate. There was this one guy who is a black intellectual activist, and he had this tweets or memes or something, and it was racists. And they’re saying, “Oh, so we’re going to get rid of the statue of George Washington,” and then black people respond, “Yes,” and then the racists are like, “Dot, dot, dot. We don’t know how to respond.”
So there are some people, and I mean, think about this from a Marxist march of history towards some kind of perfection, Shadi. There’s no problem with getting rid of our past. Our past is just a parade of failures that we’re marching towards a more perfect future in theory, so we have no attachment to the past. So there are people who, from a variety of social justice activist, leftist perspectives, and I’m not trying to lump all that together and dismiss it. I’m just trying to, for the sake convenience, I think are actually quite willing to pay that price, would do it happily to get rid of all the statues in all this heritage.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So Jonathan, in the modern moral imagination, moral progress is possible, potentially even inevitable. I’m curious, as a Muslim, what are your thoughts or feelings in terms of moral history? Do you think moral progress is possible or is happening, or is inevitable?
Jonathan Brown:
So, I mean, this is a point I wanted to get into actually when we were talking earlier because when you say, “What is the solution to the slavery conundrum?” What I would say is, and, again, I say this, if someone wants to go and get me in trouble, I’m going to say, I relate to my religious beliefs. I refuse to condemn my prophet and my scripture. And if somebody wants to say, “Jonathan Brown is a bad person for that,” then I guess I’m guilty as charged, right? I’m not going to say that the Quran allows something evil, and the prophet did something moral evil. I will not say that. So, in terms of those three axioms, I would actually disagree with the first two. I would say, one, slavery is not a gross intrinsic evil throughout space and time. And part of the reason you can say that is because not all slavery is slavery. I don’t think that all things that we call in history slavery are actually the same, and that they deserve the same moral judgment. I think that some of them are a lot less severe than others.
There could be certain things like the way that a field hand is treated in Georgia, getting whipped and raped and all this stuff like that. Yeah, I’d say that is a gross, intrinsic moral evil throughout space and time, and I think that if that’s done to anybody in history, that’s evil. But I don’t think that all slavery throughout human history, things that we call slavery today, in the past, can be labeled with that moral judgment. Then, here’s the second problem, right? “Okay, Professor Brown,” you say. “I’m a Muslim, or I’m a Christian, and I feel in my gut that slavery is wrong.” There’s a lot of Muslims, Shadi’s probably met these people. They’ll say things like, “If you tell me that the prophet had slaves or that he allowed slavery, I won’t be Muslim anymore.” For them, the moral certainty of the evil of slavery is fixed, and any other commitment they make has to fit with that. So, that’s the immovable point. And any faith commitment or confession they make has to accept passive tailor to that.
“So, how do you explain, if you’re telling me slavery’s not a gross and intrinsic evil throughout space in time, explain to me how I feel such certainty that it is?” And that gets to the question of moral progress. How is it that, us three, right? I’m going to guess that all three of us, when we watch 12 Years a Slave or Roots or Amistad, when that guy’s saying, “Give us us free,” all of us are probably, our eyes, were pouring water, okay? And we’re not heroes for this. We’re just Americans in good moral standing, who’ve been raised well in our society. So, if you’re having that reaction, how can you then go and say that this in the past was not evil? Your moral conviction today is testimony to the evil in the past, to the evil of slavery in the past.
So, my answer to this is just because something is felt to be in our gut to be a profound, real, moral evil, doesn’t make it that morally true throughout history. That a lot of our moral certainties, although we feel that they have to be true for everybody in history, that’s simply not the case. I always discuss it with my students, which is, I would contend, and I don’t know if you guys disagree with me, the two things that will turn your stomach, not just you say, “This is bad,” not just you say, “I disapprove, it’s wrong,” but really make you sick. Slavery and pedophilia. Am I right?
Shadi Hamid:
That’s fair, I think.
Jonathan Brown:
Okay, if I say, “Hey guys, a guy down the street was brutally murdered two weeks ago. Somebody took his body, chopped it up and spread it on the lawn, you’d be like, “Oh, yeah, that’s messed up.” But I don’t feel anything, right? I mean, murder’s wrong, but, I don’t know. If then you told me a guy on my street, a 50-year-old guy had sex with a six-year-old, I actually feel something in my stomach. Or you say someone had a slave, “There’s a slave chained up in his house.” But here’s the thing. All societies in human history have considered murder wrong. Most societies in human history, the vast majority, did not consider slavery wrong, and would not consider a 50-year-old guy having sex with, getting married to a let’s say a six or seven-year-old. This was actually totally fine.
Even saying that freaks me out. But it’s true. Saint Augustine, his fiancée was 12. He was in his thirties. So, this was complete, and that’s not even a big deal. The prophet Muhammad married a nine-year-old, and his critics, people who literally sat around looking for things to criticize him for, especially in his sex life, didn’t criticize him for that. No one criticized him for that until the very late 19th century. Do you understand my point, right?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah.
Jonathan Brown:
So, it is interesting that the two things that make us morally sick to our stomachs are two things that were actually relatively uncontroversial until the very recent past.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay. So, there’s a lot there. So, I think that one thing that you’re saying is that our deepest moral intuitions and convictions can be wrong, just to put it bluntly. We can be wrong about the things that we feel most deeply and resolutely, which has I think profound implications if it is in fact true.
Jonathan Brown:
Okay, I don’t want to say they’re wrong. They’re right in our time, right?
Shadi Hamid:
Yes.
Jonathan Brown:
So, when I say I don’t want my daughter to get married when she’s nine, I’m not wrong in saying that. That’s actually completely correct in our society, because she has to go to school, and she’s probably immature, and she to has to go to med school and all these other things, and blah, blah, blah, right? Or if I say, “I don’t think we should have slaves in our time,” that’s totally correct. It’s totally unnecessary. It is not chance that humans started to come to a new conclusion about the immorality of slavery at the same time that they had discovered that you can use fossil fuels to create steam to move stuff, and you don’t need animals and humans to move stuff anymore. That’s not coincidence. Even Aristotle says in his politics, “There’ll be slavery until looms,” the things that weave cloth, “until looms move themselves,” which actually is the case. That’s basically what happened. So, these moral intuitions are not wrong now.
Shadi Hamid:
They’re contingent. They’re historically contingent.
Jonathan Brown:
Yes. But the intensity with which we feel them makes us just assume it has to be the case that these are true for all human beings. They’re biological reactions we have, that all humans have to have. That’s why we’re disgusted by the fact that previous people didn’t have them, and we’re mystified, because we don’t understand how thinking, sentient, moral, competent moral thinkers and spiritual reasoners could not have these reactions. There’s something wrong with them, in the past.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. So, there’s two points I want to make and then I want to get Matt’s thoughts on this. So, I think one way of dealing with this, and various theologians have made this point, probably the most prominent is Khaled Abou El Fadl, is that if you see something in scripture that provokes this gut reaction, this sense that we can’t reconcile our moral convictions to scripture or revealed text. That we can suspend judgment, that we actually give up hope in finding a resolution, and have faith that, in the end, presuming we believe in God, God will give us clarity as to what was ultimately right and wrong, and until that moment of final judgment, we can issue, I think, what he calls a faith-based objection, which is to acknowledge our discomfort, but then say that it can’t have a resolution. So, maybe that’s one way of resolving, and probably in some ways that’s what I would lean towards, a more sophisticated version of shrugging one’s shoulders. I know that’s not an available option for everyone.
The other point I want to make, and Matt, this is more relevant to you, but I think it brings us back to some of these bigger questions. With Christian scripture, with the Christian tradition, traditions matter to different degrees, and perhaps in the Christian context, it’s less central than the discursive Islamic tradition, but still. So, if we’re talking about, let’s say 1700 years, there is the New Testament. There is the example of Christ. There is his word made flesh, and people who are committing themselves to that for many, many centuries. I just would want to hear more from a Christian perspective.
How do you make sense of the fact that all of the great Christian thinkers who are faithful to Christ were not able to see this flaw? Which is, and I know that your faith only hangs on Christ, but presumably people who follow Christ are doing so for what they consider to be legitimate reasons, and they’re not coming to the same big, definitive conclusions that you are. And I’m just curious how you would grapple with that. And maybe, related to that, I mean, why didn’t Christ himself expressly condemn and forbid slavery? Because that is the question that was posed to Benjamin Rush, and I’m actually not sure what the answer to that could possibly be, because unlike the prophet Muhammad, if Christ is divine, if he is God, son of God, and has this kind of definitive sovereignty and authority, presumably there would be no obstacle to him proclaiming this in a clear way, but he did not.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, yeah. Wonderful questions. I think that one thing to say is, I think to your first point, it actually speaks to what I was thinking and feeling a lot listening to Jonathan, was I don’t feel a sense of urgency to resolve this moral conundrum with quite the level of intensity, because there are so many of these questions. Why did God allow slavery? Why does God allow war? Why does God allow pain or suffering? If God is omnipotent, God could have done all of these things. So, my faith is filled with mystery, and questions that God has decided not to give me the resolution to. So I’m not so haunted by the things my forefathers have done, and that’s what was going on with this contemporary desire for moral purity.
So, I think, yeah, this is too broad of a statement, but I think that in general, the Christian imagination might make space for more moral mystery than the Islamic moral imagination. And I’d be interested to hear your reflections on that, but the moral messiness of life, and the sense that I hang on the goodness and holiness of God, and that God is steadfast in God’s love and justice and mercy. And mysteriously, God continues to work with morally flawed human beings and cultures throughout time and history, because God is gracious. And I don’t know why God does not come and immediately set everything right, right now or in 1800 America, or in the year 100 in Rome. I don’t know why God is not making those things, and in the Christian tradition, we have this word Maranatha, which means, come Jesus quickly. Come quickly, stop this.
And so, we have to live with this mystery of, why do we live in this time of God’s patience? God is being patient with evil and injustice and violence, and that is a mysterious question, but we rest in knowing that God is good and just and is wise. So, that may be an intellectual cop-out. So, that might be just unacceptable in the academy, to say, “Well, it’s mysterious.” But that’s my initial thing. In terms of why Jesus didn’t condemn slavery outright, or why Abraham didn’t, or David or Paul, I think that what I would say is Jesus did not condemn the Roman Empire for wars of aggression. He did not condemn the gladiatory games. He did not condemn prostitution. He did not condemn a wide variety of moral evils. And part of that is that he’s within a moral universe of first century Judaism, which already knew a lot of things about what God wanted. And so, these things, he didn’t have to state prostitution as wrong, because in the Jewish moral imagination, that was well understood.
I think what’s notable about ancient Israelite culture is how restrained any kind of engagement with slavery was. I think that’s what’s historically notable. That’s what’s curious. That’s what causes me to question, how is it that slavery was so restricted in ancient Israelite culture? Why did that happen? Where did that come from? Because it was so prevalent everywhere. I find that more morally interesting. That seems to me to be the problem to wrestle with. And then, finally, I don’t see the Bible as a universal rule book where I read a verse and understand that to be a universal rule. I see the Bible to be a complex patchwork of poetry and stories and laws and teachings, to a very diverse network of peoples over a thousand years. And they have very different moral questions that different books and different verses are interacting with. And so, I see that, if I want to understand what is a, quote unquote, “biblical understanding” of politics, I’m going to get a lot of different insights.
And my task is not to grab onto one verse or another, but to put them in conversation with one another. To say, “Okay, I see this is being said over here, but I also see this is being said.” And so, for me, the fact that the very first thing that the people of Israel learn about God, their very first encounter with God, is that he hates their slavery and wants to save them from it. That he hears their cry, and he responds and he liberates them. That’s the first thing they learn about God. And that’s the thing that they rehearse throughout their history, is, “God saved us from slavery.” And whenever moral questions come up, it’s always the same thing. It’s treat the widow and the foreigner like yourselves, because you yourselves were slaves in Egypt. So, the whole Israelite morality is built off this understanding that God liberated you, so you should liberate others. You should have this community that is a just and liberating force, because of who your God is. So, yeah. I mean, those are just some of my reflections, and I welcome pushback on these kinds of things, but those are some of the things I’m thinking about.
Jonathan Brown:
I mean, I would say, so, a couple of things I wanted to mention responding to that, also building on our earlier discussion, which is, when we think about moral progress, I think one of the really important things to ask ourselves is, what is the source of morality? We, especially I think in the United States, it’s interesting, we tend to be very actually high-minded about morality, in the sense that we have this expectation that there’s these moral truths out there that we’re accessing and discovering and committing ourselves to. And we talk about things like custom and moral relativism with, they’re sort of disdained ideas. Moral relativism is kind of lazy, it’s cowardly. It’s not a conviction. And yet I think that, for me, it’s very clear, and this is actually the general position of Muslim scholars historically. Almost all human morality is customary. It’s based on custom. So, God gives us certain rules. Don’t steal, don’t fornicate, don’t eat pork, right? And everything else is customary. It’s just, do you tip or not? Does the husband help cook dinner or not? Does the husband change diapers or not?
This is all customary. When you’re parking, a guy comes in front-ways and back-ways in the parking space, who gets it? This is all custom. So, morality is dictated by custom, and that’s not a bad thing. When you have a customary moral conviction, that’s a real moral conviction. So, if I see somebody yelling at somebody on the street or treating them badly, and I’m disgusted by that and I go and intervene, that’s based on custom, but that’s a moral reality. That has legal reality, if we’re in a court. That has moral reality. And yet, so much of this is actually technological and economic. I mean, one example I like to give students is the idea of cleanliness.
So, if you come across somebody who smells, they’re really dirty, they smell, they have horrible BO. There’s almost this moral revulsion at this. This is a dirty person. They’re not really well-behaved. But the idea that you can smell good and can shower every day or twice a day or whatever, and have access to hot water and soap, this is entirely economic and technological reality. This is no moral element to it. And yet, the prophet Muhammad, these guys bathe once a week, maybe. Once a week maybe, and then maybe more than once a week. But they probably, the companions of the prophet, the people, the disciples of Jesus, probably did not smell that good. We would be shocked by their environment.
And so, I think we have to think about a lot of custom. If so much of our morality is actually custom, and so much of custom is actually shaped by technology and economic and economics, then we have to understand that can change. And that doesn’t mean that it’s not meaningful. It doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful. It just means that our morality is not constantly just accessing these different moral truths. Actually, our morality is much more contextual and defined by historical contingencies like economic resources and technology.
The second thing I wanted to say, in response to what Matthew was saying, is it’s interesting that what the first people who start to organize and express abolitionist sentiments are, first of all, they’re Quakers in 1689, 1690 in Pennsylvania. And they are 100% religiously motivated. So, it’s very interesting that you have a religious tradition, in this case, Christianity, which never had any problem with slavery. Yet the first real motions of abolitionism and moral objections of slavery come from people in whom that objection is 100% religiously motivated. Christian religiously motivated. And there’s two things. There’s one important thing to keep in mind here. The people who in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and even someone a little bit earlier like Bartolomé de las Casas in the Caribbean, in Spain, who start to really criticize slavery, morally criticize it. They do so because of their direct experience with the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas. There is something that, Atlantic slave trade and slave trade in the Americas is something that is so violent and so grotesque that it really shocked people. It shocked people. Someone like De Las Casas or British or French Christians in the late 16 hundreds, early 17 hundreds, who in their own countries were not troubled by slavery. It was, it was not a big deal. But when they see the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the plantations, slavery in the Caribbean specifically, it shocks them. And that when you see these Quakers and then later abolitionists in the, or 17 hundreds in the US and Britain, it’s almost all, what is it called? Non-conformists. So basically different Protestant puritan groups who see their objection to slavery as an expression of their love for their fellow man and the unacceptability of how fellow human beings are being treated like this. So it’s interesting to think about that, that people’s motivations to their kind of opposition to slavery, their moral objection can come out of that same ethos and that same tradition that had previously essentially approved of this.
But what changes is the level of violence and degradation. And similarly, the justification, most slavery in human history, the vast majority of slavery in human history is not justified racially. It’s not justified based on how you look or what your hair is like, right? It’s based on you’re just someone from, not our group that we captured. We don’t care what you look like, right? The idea that you’re saying these people are enslaved because of how they look and because of where they come from, also really discuss some of these early abolitionist figures and especially kind of enlightenment people like Condorcet and Voltaire.
In the case of Islam what’s very interesting, again, a tradition that never declared slavery morally wrong. Interestingly, and I write this in my book, Muslim scholars could not say slavery was morally wrong because the Quran allowed it. If the Quran allows it can’t be morally evil. What they did say very clearly, however, in the pre-modern period is slavery is harmful. Why is it harmful? It’s harmful because it prevents someone from having control over their own decisions. It prevents someone from enjoying the fruits of their own labor. But what they said is that harm is superseded by the property rights of the owner.
So that’s why they said it’s allowed. The property rights of the owner supersede the harm that’s done to the person. But freeing slaves, and I think Shadi mentioned this, freeing slaves is an obsession in the Quran, the precedent of the prophet Muhammad and Islamic law, the incentives to free slaves, the encouragement to free slaves, the legal obligation of free slaves comes up over and over and over again. So what’s interesting is when Muslims start to kind of become morally convinced of abolition as Christians had in the Americas and the British kind of in American Atlantic world in the 17 hundreds, 18 hundreds, they also start to express that through their religious tradition like the Quranic and prophetic mandate to free slaves. So in both cases, a tradition that allows slavery can also become an engine for emancipation.
Shadi Hamid:
That’s a really great point, and it does bring us a little bit back to the role that custom plays. And I just want to un-spool that a little bit more because our customary morality in America today is changing rapidly or seems to be changing rapidly. And if we kind of zero in or out beyond the question of slavery, these debates are applicable to any number of other moral and ethical dilemmas that things that would’ve been seen as morally acceptable or tolerable, in good company, just, I don’t know, 10 years ago or 12 years ago, are now seen as something approaching evil. Just to give an obvious example, I mean, president Barack Obama did not support gay marriage in his, when he became president. That only happened later on. That wasn’t too long ago. And now the thought that someone as supposedly liberal and progressive as Obama seemed to be wouldn’t have this kind of intuitive moral knowledge.
It does sort of make, I think a lot of people wonder. And then with new developments around gender identity and so forth, I think we’re going to keep on seeing examples of how standards of moral progress keep on changing and much more rapidly than they used to because of technological advances, social media, the way that things spread very quickly in the zeitgeist, almost like a sort of contagion. So ideas spread very fast, which means that morality can shift very fast. And I’m curious how this fits into your kind of theory of customary morality, because if you’re saying that custom is important and that it’s legitimate and that in some sense we should be deferential towards it, can we also say that we as Americans should be deferential to the new customary morality that is emerging just in the last 10 to 15 years? Or is there a moral case for resisting it?
Jonathan Brown:
I can answer, but also I don’t want to shut out Matthew. He’s not in combustion phase. He’s in thoughtful phase, but maybe he wants to participate.
Shadi Hamid:
Yes
Matthew Kaemingk:
I look more relaxed. Yeah.
Shadi Hamid:
Well, Matt, on this point, I’d be curious what you’d say to this.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I think this goes back to my question about moral progress, and do we believe in that? And in general, it does not disturb me that our culture shifts morally. I think that’s to be expected. What worries me is a belief in moral progress. I’m not very convinced. I think that every age has its pet virtues and its pet vices, and I don’t feel comfortable saying that today we are more moral than France in 1700 or Kenya in 700. I think that human beings, as a Christian, I believe that human beings are sinful and rebellious and flawed. They are also graced with and given a conscience. And so I think what I worry about is the sense that we need to purify our history because we are morally superior rather than we have some level of reverence for the fact that there might be moral wisdom from the past or from cultures other than our own.
So I get concerned when we are locked into a singular custom. This group of people at this age is morally superior to every other, as opposed to having a sort of moral curiosity and a moral humility to learn from other cultures. And other times, I think that’s particularly important because I know with great conviction that my sons and my grandsons will look back at my life, and there will be things that they wish I would’ve done differently, but hopefully there will be some things that they miss and they would love for that virtue to come alive again in American life.
And so I just wanted to dig in on that little piece there that I do have concerns about the current cultural milieu that believes that it has progressed because I see a culture filled with consumerism, individualism, selfishness and the scourge of abortion to me is terrible. And so I don’t think that we are this morally evolved, incredible society in that kind of way. And I hear those kinds of notes in our culture today, and that concerns me as opposed to a sort of moral humility and curiosity from other cultures and customs. That’s what I get worried about.
Jonathan Brown:
There’s this Onion like headline maybe in the early 2010s where it’s like Kim Jong Un is, of course, I support gay marriage. I’m not a monster. But I think the problem is there is the kind of absolute moral absolutism that people engage in, which is really bizarre because I don’t understand progressive mindsets. I can understand a progressive mindset that says that’s sort of more humble, kind of like what Matthew was talking about, where we might have different views in the next couple years, but that would make me very merciful towards people in who didn’t share that view. Because what I’m basically saying is I’m going to think I was wrong in a week. So I really like, but you have the opposite. You have this in absolute moral certainty about the latest moral conclusion. To the extent that anybody who doesn’t share it has to be condemned. Absolutely.
Which doesn’t make any sense to me because we are all going to have to absolutely condemn ourselves for this certainty in another year that doesn’t make any sense to me, that’s getting an new iPhone and be like, this is it. This is the best. It’s not going to get any better than this, and then there’s going to be another iPhone. You know what I mean? So I think that the importance of manners and I, and the concept in Islamic civilization and Arabic is Eda, it means not just manners in the sort of mundane sense, but the concept of manners, the concept that you have ways of interacting with each other that allow us to live together despite disagreement is very important, and I always think of this line in Lawrence of Arabia where King Feisal, prince Feisal, Alec Guinness says, for Lawrence, compassion isn’t, mercy isn’t an obsession for me, it’s merely good manners.
You may decide which of the two is more reliable. Good manners are reliable. One of the problems, I think, with the kind of social justice, and I don’t say that in a dismissive way or a kind of pejorative way with social justice, zeitgeist, is that, it is absolutist in an almost comical way where you can’t, I can’t be on the same, I can’t be in the same podcast as Shadi because Shadi did X. So Shadi once said X about, I’m not going to get into the hummus. Shadi knows what I’m talking about. Okay. Shadi made a statement about hummus. I don’t want to get into it. There are people who say, I should not be on the same platform as Shadi because of the hummus statement. Right? Wait, but if you take that,
Shadi Hamid:
Wait.. Are you, I just want a point of clarification. Are you serious that there are actually people because of the hummus tweet, which is actually a real tweet that I wrote, and some people really didn’t like it. This is not just something that Jonathan is joking about, but I’m curious if there are actually people who see that as morally disqualifying.
Jonathan Brown:
I mean, you want me to name names?
Matthew Kaemingk:
That’s a joke. That’s a joke.
Shadi Hamid:
No, no don’t need names
Jonathan Brown:
No I think there are. I actually think that, I think there are for the hummus thing, but let’s take it. Let’s one level closer to politics. Just one level. One, one ratchet down.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Oh okay, but for the outsiders, guys, what is the horrible thing that Shadi had to say about hummus? What is this?
Jonathan Brown:
I can’t I’m not going to say it.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Shadi, What? Own it. Own it, sir. Say it out loud.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay. It wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. I happened. I was on vacation. I happened to go to an Israeli restaurant in Amsterdam, and I thought their hummus was very good, and I didn’t think a lot about the political implications of what I would say, but I made a comment, and I almost wanted to say it, to kind of say, well, Arab, we Arabs, we shouldn’t, should be better. We shouldn’t be shown up by Israeli restaurants on our original food, but let’s be honest, Israeli restaurants do make really good hummus. Something of that effect. And it wasn’t well thought out, obviously.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Okay.
Jonathan Brown:
All I know is Shadi is the guy who invented, in my book the phrase RIP my mentions, RIP my mention. But my point is that if you can’t, like it’s manners that allow us to interact with one another. I’m a professor. I’m not any smarter than a lot of other people in our society, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s pretty clear to me that we have very divergent customary moralities in our society. And one of the problems is that both sides, or if there’s more than one side, every side seems to think that everybody in the country should have to abide by its sense of morality. And they’re not taking advantage of a federated system that is partially designed to have a diversity of views coincide with, coexist with one another, right? In an administrative and legal level. So I think people, it’s a sense of not necessarily humility.
I think humility is important, Matthew, but I can be dead certain that abortion is wrong. I can be dead certain that homosexuality is wrong, but it’s manners. It’s a sense of etiquette and politeness and commitment to certain gestures in public life and a certain willingness to sit down and break bread with literally sometimes just share a meal with someone who I disagree with strongly. That allows us to coexist. And if we go around always expressing every one of our moral certainties in the most strident way, and demanding that everybody around us either accept that or go to hell, we can’t live with one another. You can maybe in a homogenous society, but not in one that’s very diverse like ours.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So Jonathan by God’s providence, you have brought us to the core question of this podcast, which is how we live together with deep difference. And that is, and I think there is much more to be done in political theory and political theology around manners and custom. And I think you’re absolutely right. It’s more than just humility. It’s because you can have a real conviction that you’re unwilling to apologize for, but being willing to, you could use the word forbearance, that you’re willing to bear difference in your presence, difference that is deep, that is right up in your face, that’s difficult. And that is something that Muslim moral philosophers have looked at, Christian moral philosophers have looked at. And I think what we’re seeing in our contemporary American political culture is a lack of political manners.
I mean, to put it in that way, that the sort of basic understanding of forbearance and willing to break bread and sit down and have these deep convictions and talk with one another. And in a way, this conversation has to do with actually historical manners. Being a person who’s willing to forbear and sit with our ancestors and have a moral conversation with them, rather than simply tearing them down or burning them, we have to recognize these human beings. They are fellow humans, they are our brothers and sisters, and we still have to break bread with them and acknowledge that they’re not moral aliens. They’re not completely other than us.
Our times and histories are contingent, and we could be connected to that. So I’m sure we got a lot more to talk about here, but I do know we got to wrap this up a little. Shadi, do you have something else? But I just want to say thank you so much, Jonathan for digging in and Shadi and I try to tackle difficult subjects in our own writing and our conversations. And while there’s more disagreement to be explored here, I just really appreciate the courage and the care that you have in tackling these kinds of conversations. And it’s a rare thing in the Modern Academy, and I know you’ve taken a lot of hits for that, and it’s noteworthy, and I’m grateful you made time for us today.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, Amen to that. And I’ll just say that I hope that this episode can be a kind of model of how to talk about a very difficult topic. I wasn’t sure exactly how it would go. I don’t think it’s common in mainstream podcast to have such a deep dive around slavery, religion, and moral progress. We did it, and I think it is doable, and we wouldn’t have been able to do that without Jonathan Brown. So thanks again, Jonathan, for being a part of us and joining us. I thought it was fascinating. And to our listeners, I hope you all enjoyed it too. So thanks for listening to ‘Zealots at the gate’ dear listeners, if you like what you heard today with Jonathan, like this is one of the episodes where we would really love to get your feedback and see how you react to the various points and questions. Oh, is that, well,
Jonathan Brown:
No, no. You guys can have the feedback. You can share positive feedback with me.
Shadi Hamid:
Sure. Okay.
Jonathan Brown:
But don’t share the negative feedback.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah.
Shadi Hamid:
Deal. Deal. And if you like this episode, check out our other episodes and check out our host Comment magazine at comment.org. You can also find us on Twitter at my handle, Shadi Hamid and Matthew Kaemingk. First name, last name, note the Dutch spelling. And you can also use the hashtag Zealotspod. We do regularly check that. And you can also send us an email at Zealots at comment.org. So please do feel free to reach out. We would love to hear from you.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Our thanks as well to our sponsor, Fuller Seminary’s, Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life. Friends, Zealots at the Gate is hosted by Comment Magazine. It is produced by the wonderful Miss Allie Crummy audience strategy by Matt Crummy and editorial direction by Anne Snyder. I am Matthew Kaemingk.
Shadi Hamid:
And I’m Shadi Hamid. Thanks for joining us, everyone. Thanks, guys.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Bye.
