Huff Post: by Scott Stephens.
Dawkins’ views on religion are by now extremely well-known, to the point of cultural saturation thanks to the media’s fixation with him. Dawkins makes for good copy — that’s why journalists love him. But the dogmatic assertions and withering dismissals that made Dawkins a media-darling, and “The God Delusion” an international bestseller, lend themselves particularly well to the anarchic medium of Twitter, where his unjustifiable claims can shrug off any residual requirement for justification.
The chink in the amour of Dawkins’s rhetorical brilliance and aggression — as his critics have long pointed out — is his theological illiteracy, but he now seems to have fully embraced a brazen ignorance of anything beyond the basest (mis)understanding of religious belief, as though being thus ignorant was intellectually virtuous or the self-evident manifestation of a superior mind. Take, for instance, his smug quip: “Haven’t read Koran so couldn’t quote chapter & verse like I can for Bible. But often say Islam greatest force for evil today.” And again: “Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur’an. You don’t have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about nazism.”
But acknowledging the history and profound humanism of the Islamic tradition — the belief that the realisation of goodness, beauty and peace on earth is indissociable from the true worship of God — is not a way of side-stepping the actual evil so often committed in the name of Islam. It is, rather, the only way of grasping where the real struggle lies today: not between devout Muslims and the sneering secularism of Dawkins and his atheist confreres, but between those supremacist idolaters who have arrogated to themselves the authority to speak in the name of God, and those Muslims who humbly remain on al-sirat al-mustaqim, the righteous path. In other words, the real struggle today lies within Islam itself. And as Khaled Abou El Fadl has repeatedly demonstrated, the resources for self-criticism inherent to Islam are far more radical, and efficacious, than anything on offer from the imperious pseudo-humanism of the militant atheists. As he writes in “The Great Theft“:
Editor’s note: Probably? Still not sure whether God is or isn’t. You could do better Mr. Dawkins