With Merkel's Foes in Disarray, Germany Defies the Trump Trend

[masterpanthera_t]

(05-05-2017, 02:27 PM)Dill Wrote: Now if we bring Sam Harris into the picture, is his work more like 1-3 or more like Gabriel's?  I'd say it was more like Gabriel's. He is sharing his personal thoughts on Islam and supporting them with quotations of translated English which, combined with some news media reports, are enough for him to distill the essence of Islam. There is no evidence that he understands Islam or the history of the Middle East beyond what one would find on the Israeli state's websites or Wikislam. He does not understand how texts are read differently through different traditions and in differing historical and cultural contexts.  How would Middle East scholars respond to his website? Would they say his musings advance knowledge of Islam or Middle East history? Who is his audience? I think there is considerable overlap with Gabriel's.

1-3 above are not really suitable for supporting arguments in internet forums. Especially 1 and 2, they presume too much knowledge already. Using them would be "boring."  But Harris' work presumes virtually no knowledge of Islam or Middle Eastern history, and lends itself easily to such purposes.  A smart guy to tell you all about Islam.

I will say this about Harris.  He is very persuasive as an intellectual, and he brings a very rational style of discourse which seems to invite open exploration of ideas.  However, there was a video where he debated Reza Aslan (who I don't find particularly unbiased or open to criticism of his ideas) and he did not seem to have a cogent answer as far as his understanding of the centuries of Islamic cultural evolution with context of scholarship and the factors addressed.  Whenever he reasoned based on the current climate of terrorism and surveys etc. to point to dangerous concepts in the Islamic texts, he seemed to have won the argument. However, anything that delved further into centuries of Islamic history (i.e. internal to Islam and not its "influences" to the outside world), seemed well outside of his expertise. His argument for being wary of Islamic culture, while defensible from the context that he makes it, (such as the polls and the factors that seem to draw a minority to terrorism and other cultural practices which we find abhorrent), doesn't seem to have a depth of understanding of the cultural evolution of the various populations of the Islamic world nor a deep understanding of the sects or whatever sort of denominational differences within. I would say that his arguments are certainly worthwhile to listen, but are certainly not comprehensive in terms of drawing conclusions about the beliefs of more than a billion people.  In this respect, I don't find him to be a scholar on Islamic studies, but a great rational thinker who can articulate the concerns of those outside of Islam in an objective fashion, which can ultimately derive answers from the scholarly community itself.  The question is does he perform an oversimplification, to arrive at his conclusions? If nothing else, the Islamic scholarly community, perhaps among other groups, would be behooved to show that is indeed the case (if it is so).