113onate. These people think only in religious terms,
and you know this because of your conversations
with Orthodox Jewish rabbis and others. To believe
that you’re going to blow up everyone around you
and go straight to paradise on a one- way ticket re-
quires 100 percent certainty. If we can seed even
1 percent doubt, we may stop that suicide bomber.
The third benefi t is that the fatwa reassures the
mainstream. There are others in society who look
at Muslims today and think: Why aren’t you con-
demning the Islamic State? Why did you so vocally
condemn Gaza but you don’t condemn the Is-
lamic State? Do you secretly sympathize with its
members?Harris I completely agree, and we need fatwas by the
thousands on that front. Another thing I think we
should discuss is the tension between honestly
confronting the problems of conservative Islam,
Islamism, and jihadism and feeding the narrative
that “the West is at war with Islam.” I admit that I
have often contributed to this narrative myself, and
rather explicitly. Of course, whenever I worry out
loud about “the prob lem of Islam,” I’m talking
about a more or less literal (you would say “vac-
uous”) reading of the Qur’an and ahadith. And
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