RECENTLY I HAD the honour of being interviewed by the incomparable Tom Paine for the best Anglospheric podcast around: Shire Network News. It was about my intellectual journey back to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - in other words, my induction into the great Zionist Conspiracy.

When I was asked to appear on the show, I was delighted. I have been listening to Shire Network News for many months now and the quality of commentary is always excellent. The combination of scrutiny and occasional mockery is superb, but there is no analytical depth sacrificed in whatever subject matter is being discussed. It is very clear that the hosts know that their listeners are intelligent people; there is no oratory or polemic being hurled around anywhere. And as a listener, I certainly have never heard them address me as "You people".

Each SNN show is something truly rare, and I recommend the podcast highly. It's better than what I hear on radio, given that the podcast is a whole lot more fun and educational. How many shows can boast to have interviewed people like Andrew Roberts, Douglas Murray, Mark Steyn, Raphael Israeli, Robert Spencer, Walid Phares... and so on?

Shire Network News. It rocks.

(Oh, and Tom: about my Cosmic-Zionist-Conspiracy-inductee cheque - just why have I not received it yet, hmm?)

ENGLAND . THE YEAR, 2007.

My name is Adil. I have been born and raised among dutiful and obedient Muslims, and I aim to misbehave.

Already I have fallen from grace. I am no longer one of them, a reason sufficient for their delicately-placed wrath to have me consigned, in this world and the next, to the most grievous of penalties; for what else should the reward be for those who behave like me, they would say if they knew, but disgrace in this life? So no matter where I go in the realms of Islam, I am a hidden traitor to my people, a renegade without honour to be executed. And for them to know of my apostasy is to know of their fear.

Still, I will not bow to their etiquette of madness. Now and again I silently walk among the Muslim flock, to observe their incessant bleating and guilty straying, and see how readily they run to the call of their watchful masters, appointees of God who oversee the enjoining of what is good and the forbidding of what is not. And they remind the herd that He is not unmindful of what they do.

Neither am I.

More...

This article has been adapted from a book that Adil is currently writing.

• reject Sharia law, fatwa courts, clerical rule, and state-sanctioned religion in all their forms; oppose all penalties for blasphemy and apostacy, in accordance with Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights;
• eliminate practices, such as female circumcision, honor killing, forced veiling, and forced marriage, that further the oppression of women; protect sexual and gender minorities from persecution and violence;
• reform sectarian education that teaches intolerance and bigotry towards non-Muslims;
• and foster an open public sphere in which all matters may be discussed without coercion or intimidation.

EX-MUSLIMS HAVE a bad rep. In Muslim circles, those ad hominems fly thick and fast when even mere mention is made of their existence. For instance, numerous "progressive" Muslim blogs, while having achieved much respect across the blogosphere, happily take up this more regressive attitude when discussing former Muslims. Alas, many conspiratorial Muslims generally demonise their "fallen" brothers and sisters both in public and in private, as if they were secret agents constantly scheming and plotting away, with each and every one briefed and sent by the devil himself.

But ex-Muslims are people. And most of them are very good, caring people. Many of them have families and friends who remain Muslims, but, of course, still care just as much about them, if not more. And one big reason for ex-Muslims' even deeper empathy with their Muslim families and friends is their worry about what manner of dark alleys the faith will lead them to. Many things can be said about ex-Muslims but at the end of the day, while they may have enduring disputes with central aspects of Islam itself, they are as pro-Muslim as one can get.

One Muslim critique of the ex-Muslim stance is that the primary identity of the latter is de facto negative i.e. apostates go around parading themselves as being not of Islam. For ex-Muslims, it may or may not be true that it is primary (whatever that means), but it is not the whole. The act of renunciation is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to enter the ranks of the enlightened. Being an ex-Muslim is a starting identity, not an end point in itself; it is the undertaking of a journey, the mere contemplation of which invites outright fear for practising Muslims. Those who have intellectually deconverted from Islam tend to do so on grounds that their former faith restricts their outlook on exploring more humanistic, life-affirming identities. As a result, - and here I hijack a tired-sounding cliche - ex-Muslims constitute a mosaic, not a monolith.

For most religions, while defecting from the ranks of believers does demand some price to be suffered by the disaffected individual, it is usually not a very heavy one. In such cases, a decision to abandon the faith tells you little that is significant about the person defecting since the religion itself is relatively non-strict with regards to exit. With Islam, however, the command to stay within the faith is done under pain of death. Ex-Muslims do not have the luxury of fantasising about their prospects of public deconversion, because they do not suffer deluded notions of Islam being inherently peaceful. As a result, the ex-Muslim label conveys something significant about the intellectual courage of someone who has begun a journey under that starting identity.

EARLIER THIS YEAR, I took a train to London for an upcoming conference. As I walked out of Euston station, dusk was settling, and not very many people were about. As London tends to be an infrequent stop for me, I am not intimately familiar with some of its more recognisable locales. However, a friend, who had arrived a day earlier, was feeding me directions via mobile on how to get to my hotel.

I walked past the red buses in front of the station, and as I turned right onto a main road, I felt slightly odd, as if there was something unusually familiar about where I was. I carried walking straight on, as instructed, double-checking with my guide where I was meant to turn next. I let him know I would call him if I ran into any problems in getting there.

Despite the traffic, the atmosphere was relatively peaceful. The arching trees swung gracefully in the cool breeze, and I glanced over to a grand, polished building on my left. As I walked past, something stood out in particular: a circular plaque on the building. I looked closer to read the inscription.

And it was then I truly realised where I was.

The plaque honoured the building’s historic link with the great Charles Dickens, who had once lived within the expanses of the site. And it was this very same plaque that, only some months earlier, had been streaked with flesh and blood.

Memories of 7/7 instantly flooded my mind; I stood only a few feet away from where a crowded red double-decker bus had once been shredded apart in just a few seconds.

ON THE DAY when three planes ploughed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and when United Flight 93 crashed down in Pennsylvania, I experienced intense mortification, shame, and profound anger at my religion and most of its followers; as months went by, these feelings were aggravated further by Muslims’ ridiculous refusals in policing their own. But even though I eventually fell from grace and joined the ranks of unbelievers, my feelings of embarrassment and anger towards the religion and subculture in which I was born and raised have remained. On July 7, 2005, I experienced the same profound surges of shame and anguish, even though I was now an ex-Muslim.

As with 9/11, I am deeply disturbed at the bloodlust that was on display on the morning of 7/7. And I continue to be appalled by the systematic duplicity employed by most Muslims in condemning their own; to utter half-hearted words of outrage at terror attacks while refusing to do so against their perpetrators is the hallmark of moral degeneration. And I am disgusted at Muslims who engage in high condemnation of those non-Muslims calling attention to Muslim atrocities, while refusing to unleash their anger on the Muslim perpetrators of such barbarities. And it sickens me wholly that Muslims go to the indignity of playing upon many non-Muslims’ default ignorance of Islam, by generating an unrelenting barrage of lies, so as to keep the many unsavoury aspects of Islam out of public discussion.

Those Muslims who admire and sympathise with the totalitarian nature of their fellow strident jihadis must be made, nay, forced to learn that it will bring forth nothing but the ravages of personal misery. And the jihadi terrorists must be hunted down, persecuted, and killed without apology.

When I stood in front of that little plaque that day, such were my thoughts as I remembered the innocent community of the dead; I was, and continue to be, filled with shame and anger over what has come to be. I am fiercely proud of my precious England, and woe betides any unlucky Muslim who tries to persuade me I am wrong.

ANTHONY DANIELS, a British doctor and famed writer, once wrote:

Whenever I enter someone’s house, I feel myself irresistibly (perhaps unresistingly would be a more honest way of putting it) drawn to his bookshelves. All flesh is grass, of course, but since Gutenberg at least, all mind is print. And absences from shelves are almost as telling as presences.

A few days ago, I clicked over to Martin Kramer's website, where I saw mention of a new tool called LibraryThing. LT is a rather savvy app that allows you to catalogue online what's on your bookshelves; each book can be assigned under multiple categories if needed, complete with ratings and commentary should one wish to add them.

It's also a tad addictive, surprisingly. I've much more to catalogue (nearly 450 books are online so far, which isn't a lot, really), as well as having to categorise and rate every item properly. Nonetheless, while logging each book, I've experienced the happy side-effect of physically re-organising my books in a much better fashion. I've also been able to identify, after having dredged up some considerable rubbish as well, what I really do need to get rid of once and for all.

What's also surprised me is how much I have of each category of book. I'd long assumed that the type of book I had most of fell under the rubric of evolutionary psychology. But it actually turns out that I have at least twice as many books on militant Islam - and I've not even finished cataloguing those particular shelves yet.

I'm confident that many in the blogosphere will take to LibraryThing quite easily, especially in view of the fact that LT identifies other folks who also catalogue similar books.

I've added a link to the sidebar. Meaning: I like it a lot.

A COMMON SUPPOSITION widespread among intellectuals is that pursuing knowledge in a systematic, scientific manner is the singular hallmark of solid scholarship. There is a very fine reason for this; the frontiers of human understanding are advanced only by modifying or discarding theories that fail to explain reality in favour of those that do. In other words, it takes a theory to beat a theory; if you can’t change ‘em, chuck ‘em. In intellectual circles, such is the high standard against which the quality of scholarship is held, and rightly so.

But not all is joy and sunshine, it seems. With a regularity that is increasingly disturbing, there are those who now come along and say: sod the scientific method.

For these wannabe paradigm-busters, the scientific method, a system which has its roots in the works of medieval scholastics from the lands of Christendom, is terribly old-fashioned and just doesn’t cut it anymore. Not as far as they are concerned, anyway. In a culture of learning in which ideas stem from positional, as opposed to rational, authority, such attitudes, whether brazen or not, will be common. An intellectual comes to be regarded as such through the view that he alone is in possession of some hidden truth, seemingly impervious to the workings of logic, for which he allows only a selected and privileged few the rights of restricted access, but none to scientifically verify. In his vocabulary, verification means not logical assessment with reference to external reality, but simply awe and agreement.

One thing such biased ideas will not be, however, is to be benign in their effects. Extending such “scholarship” to its logical conclusions is likely to bring trouble in its wake. Genuine scientific inquiry, wherever and whenever practiced, is indifferent to issues of shame and honour; this great enterprise is subordinate to no man. But in cultures where the scientific method has been ditched, and where self-styled renegades are the movers and shapers of public discourse, the claims of the elite against its more scientifically-minded members take unconditional priority over such individuals against the elite. Having borders verging on the boundless, scientific inquiry, at some point or another, will pass, undeterred, through the borders of social defection; a high price is paid by those brave souls who dare to go across. Ultimately, however, for society as a whole, the long-term costs of preventing exploration will far outstrip whatever short term-benefits are gained from doing so.

IN THE U.S., as well as Britain, Middle Eastern Studies seems a culture unto itself, a dark vacuum devoid of the light of scientific brilliance. Since the publication of Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient by the late Edward Said, the study of the Middle East has been driven heavily by insidiously shaming scholars into harbouring parochial viewpoints, rather than meticulously analysing the intellectual import of the subjects under scrutiny. Never has an established academic field so widely degenerated into emulating what is meant to be the remote object of its study. And the important, albeit timely, advent of Campus Watch reflects an overwhelming need to readdress such unwarranted bias in an era where silencing critics of Said and his followers has become more widely institutionalised ever since the days when Orientalism was first published.

Said's book was purportedly aimed at "deconstructing" the writings of past and present Orientalists, who served, according to Said, only to justify and advance the New Imperial Order, where Europe’s and America’s mighty armadas moved to subjugate the stupid and hapless Oriental. Orientalism ignited a whole field of “post-colonial studies” which reiterated the standard quasi-Marxist accusations towards Western nations, especially America, for having hijacked the Orient for its own evil ends, thus taking much of the blame for the present pathetic and humiliating state of the Arab world. And yet, in spite of claiming to “deconstruct” Orientalists whose fallacious writings, Said believed, were seen to be always infused with an air of incomparable contempt directed against the Oriental, nowhere did Said introduce a new way of thinking about the Arab world; nowhere did he provide an alternative, superior theory and framework that contained none of the alleged defects of Orientalist theories.

As Martin Kramer has pointed out, Said admitted in the afterword of the 1994 edition of Orientalism that "I have no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are." In other words, Said was not interested in advancing scholarship, but only anti-Western polemical screeds, being mostly content with hurling vitriolic and malicious invective against past and present Orientalists, such as Silvestre de Sacy and Bernard Lewis. Said was not so much a professor who happened to be a militant activist, as he was a militant activist who happened to be a professor.

Despite his Arab heritage, there is also a peculiar condescension towards Arabs and Muslims that weaves its way throughout many of Said’s works. This is disturbing, given that many Arabs and Muslims share much of Said’s conclusions of who is to blame for their mess. And yet for Said to place much of the blame on Western shoulders strongly implies that Arabs and Muslims are inherently incapable of beginning to sort out their societies; that such people are pathetic, downtrodden children, utterly bereft of any capacity for being instrumentally rational, aside from a talent simply for acting to gain attention the way a two-year-old child throws a tantrum to get Mommy's attention.

Surely this is condescension of the worst kind. Despite what the Arab world has been through, no reasonably sane person could believe that Arabs and Muslims are inherently devoid of operating by the Golden Rule: to treat others as you would have them treat you. And yet it is there hidden away, couched beneath Said’s heavy denunciations of the Western “rape” of the Orient. It is, perhaps, not surprising that this is so. In implying such a contemptible viewpoint, whether consciously made or otherwise, Said is forced to necessarily raise the intensity of abuse hurled against his Western targets in order to obscure the obvious insinuation made within. This also acts as a useful relief mechanism for assuaging such pent-up guilt from such condescension by releasing it elsewhere, much of it at the usual suspect, the West. This, incidentally, is quite common practice among quasi-Marxist interpretations of history. Indeed, for Said to remain above the inconvenience of having what he asserts being subject to scientific cross-checking, he expounded on areas outside the realms of falsifiability, casting dark conspiratorial aspersions on those who would disagree with him, in a manner that is as blasé as it is tendentious. As Lee Smith has written:

The problem, as I came to believe while rereading his books and keeping up with his columns, was that while my interest in Arab culture had partly been inspired by Said, his work generally tended to discourage readers from conducting their own research. He dismissed authors of any opinion he disagreed with. To him, they were -- to use the once-neutral phrase he had turned into an insult -- Orientalists, and all too often they were just straight-out racists.

[...] Orientalism is essential reading for anyone interested in the meeting of the West and the Orient, but its canonical status, and frequent tone of condescension, convinced far too many readers they had an explanation at hand and needed to go no further.

Said's writings, and those of his acolytes, have received rebuttals in the past, of which among the most notable are by Bernard Lewis and Keith Windschuttle. More recently, Ibn Warraq of the Institution of the Secularisation of Islamic Society (ISIS), has also joined the fray. Ibn Warraq, an ex-Muslim who is no stranger to defecting from established conventional wisdom having written and edited some excellent books on the origins of Islam, has now turned his attention towards the Saidian polemicists and penned a rather exhaustive essay decrying the pretensions of Edward Said towards harbouring any conceptions of intellectual scholarship.

Ibn Warraq’s dissection of Orientalism is a masterfully written, albeit long, catalogue of Said’s errors and misconceptions. Indeed, one of the most absurd charges made by Said was one levelled against Bernard Lewis. In an essay, Lewis had discussed the etymological root of the classical Arabic term thawra [revolution] as follows:

“The root th-w-r in Classical Arabic meant to rise up (e.g. of a camel), to be stirred or excited, and hence, especially in Maghribi usage, to rebel. It is often used in the context of establishing a petty, independent sovereignty; thus, for example, the so-called party kings who ruled in eleventh century Spain after the break-up of the Caliphate of Cordova are called thuwwar (sing. tha’ir).”

Said responded thus:

“Lewis’s association of thawra with a camel rising and generally with excitement (and not with a struggle on behalf of values) hints much more broadly than is usual for him that the Arab is scarcely more than a neurotic sexual being. Each of the words or phrases he uses to describe revolution is tinged with sexuality: stirred, excited, rising up. But for the most part it is a ‘bad’ sexuality he ascribes to the Arab. In the end, since Arabs are really not equipped for serious action, their sexual excitement is no more noble than a camel’s rising up. Instead of revolution there is sedition, setting up a petty sovereignty, and more excitement, which is as much as saying that instead of copulation the Arab can only achieve foreplay, masturbation, coitus interruptus. These, I think, are Lewis’s implications ....”

To which Ibn Warraq has this to say:

"Can any rational person have drawn any conclusion which even remotely resembled that of Edward Said’s from Lewis’s scholarly discussion of Classical Arabic etymology? Were I to indulge in some prurient psycho-biography, much in fashion, I would be tempted to ask, “What guilty sexual anguish is Said trying to cover up? Just what did they do to him at his Cairo English prep school?”. Lewis’s concise and elegant reply to Said’s conclusions is to quote the Duke of Wellington: “If you believe that, you can believe anything”."

And it certainly does not end there. Ibn Warraq’s essay is full of delightful rejoinders at Said’s expense. In reading this piece, one recalls the apt words of Stephen Schwartz on Said's book:

"Said's Orientalism, a ridiculous imposture from its first page to its last, is now a standard text in Anglo-American universities, but reads like the product of a rather dense college student who has just discovered Marxism; there can be no more telling condemnation of the present state of the American academy than the ascendancy of Said.”

Indeed. As in life, as in death: may he be long remembered as thus.

(This post is an edited version of an article that I originally wrote for Winds of Change.NET, on 16/01/03)

"THE TABULA OF human nature was never rasa and it is now being read”. Thus wrote William Hamilton, who ranks among the greatest of Charles Darwin’s intellectual heirs. Decades later, Darwinian psychology emerged in the wake of many stellar contributions by evolutionary biologists, forged upon the insights into natural selection's sculpting of the human mind, arguably evolution's most intricate creation. The intellectual pursuit of human nature is a journey into a book full of wonders, a journey that spans a whole world and millions of years in time.

What is the nature of our human nature? This fascinating question has echoed through the centuries, encountering the best of mankind’s deep reflections in some, and the worst sorts of ostracism in others. Surely it is no accident that wherever genuine inquiry into seeking out the elusive answer has met with suppression, that portion of mankind has walked in the long, dark shadows accompanying immense human suffering of the most terrible kind.

Thanks to a new science of the mind, evolutionary psychology, the key to understanding ourselves is now increasingly less mysterious. The fleeting surface experiences of our daily lives all depend on a hidden universal human nature that has extraordinarily deep roots, stretching back into the uncharted mists of time. Human nature is not genetically predetermined; to think otherwise gratuitously trivialises the very essence of the Darwinian argument. We know that the fixed rules underlying our psychological mechanisms, which are embedded deeply within us, can, and do, generate a virtually infinite number of behavioural outcomes, simply through changes in the contexts and environments in which our psychological mechanisms operate. The vast array of behaviours, both the familiar and the peculiar, of our fellow humans throughout recorded history, whether current, recent, or ancient, is the greatest occurring natural experiment testifying in favour of the deep facultative spirit of our human nature.

Darwinian psychology is psychology that takes Darwin seriously. All of culture and psychology, I venture to say, is biology. Live organisms, which psychologists focus their studies on, are biological machines and so accordingly conform to biological principles. Given that the unifying principle in all of biology is the principle of evolution by natural selection, it follows that the behaviour of living organisms must be explicable in terms of evolution by natural selection. This is a potent idea, for it carries with it the seeds of immense explanatory power. Just as with evolutionary biology, among the many charms of adopting a Darwinian inquiry into the intricacies of the human mind is not in just simply appreciating the blend of adaptive sophistication and substandard improvisation present in its very structure, but also in understanding the deep-seated context in which both forms exist and operate. This Darwinian psychology is the broad canvas under which I intend to situate this blog.

SAGES WHO SEE whole universes within grains of sand are not of this world, indeed not of any universe. But of all of the animal kingdoms flung far and wide across our planet, only one species strives to edge closer to that elusive reverie. That peculiar creature is us. Homo sapiens sapiens has, increasingly of late, made notable progress towards the ranks of the fabled sages, even if the destination remains beyond us all.

One does not need to be an all-seeing sage to appreciate that in our era, humans have made profound progress in witnessing the generation and application of critical thought. Innovation runs deep in the blood of humanity, less in some parts of the world than others, but we stand as universal witnesses to the fact that those who dare to climb the highest of summits of knowledge do not possess some elusive genetic superiority over other humans, but a core feature of the individual psyche common to all humans but less pronounced in other species: a trait arising from the unusually exaggerated evolutionary development of the prefrontal cortex, which harbours and regulates a quality we may call willpower.

Once upon a time, a small step on the moon was a giant leap for mankind. Our incomparable curiosity compels many of us to explore the vast depths of space; our inquisitive nature drives us to investigate the spectacular intricacies of the microscopic world. Ever since the dawn of civilisation, our universe seemingly shudders from the assaults in our unrelenting quest to seek familiarity with the inexorable laws of nature, wherever they are yet to be found.

We now know a little more about the universe we call our home. For a start, its boundaries extend far beyond what we could ever hope to imagine, and does not revolve around us humans alone. It does not shudder at our questions, and yet does not remain entirely insoluble, yielding up a few of its secrets to us only when we have earned the right to finally know. We earn this right only by devoting meticulous efforts into constructing a language that is truly worthy of communicating with our vast home. This language has been gradually and painstakingly crafted, through our humble but relentless endeavours, over the past several centuries. It is called science.

The purpose of science is not so much to predict or control as it is to explain, elucidate, and illuminate the mysteries of our home. An eagle makes its own flight possible not through first controlling and overcoming the forces of the air, but by exploiting existing air currents to its advantage. Similarly, science does not subjugate the object of its study, but looks alive to its peculiarities and seeks to understand them, using them to derive the larger context and framework of which they are a feature. Exceptions to the rule can shed as much insight, if not more, into the general explanatory framework as any compliant datapoint.

If the pursuit of understanding and insight were a religion, then as humans we are rapidly becoming the gods of our universe. We can now more than ever before reap the fruits of the scrupulous construct of the ongoing scientific enterprise. For we live in an age of science, and we are a lucky people.