Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet
I unfollowed Dawkin’s after his bootlicking praise of Geert Wilder’s “Obsession”, to me he has gone entirely off the rails by uncritically parroting one religion’s agitprop against another; it seems to be that he wants to become one of “Clash of Civilizations” crowd.
Unfortunately, too, many who responded to Dawkins’ tweet did no more than prove his point. By arguing for all that Islam had historically accomplished for science and technology, they were however unwittingly drawing attention to the great knowledge gap between the modern West and modern Muslims, or at least the modern Muslim-majority world, which is another reason to return to his tweet.
“What have you done recently for us?” Dawkins seemed to be asking. If the answer is nothing, does that mean Muslims don’t matter? (To justify the alienation, oppression, or killing of a person, you must first dehumanize him.) And you can do all kinds of things to folks who don’t matter. But Dawkins was not quite as clever as he supposed. Writing for The Guardian, Nesrine Malik proposed that if we:
insert pretty much any other group of people instead of “Muslims” and the statement would be true.
Malik addressed Dawkins directly:
You are comparing a specialised academic institution to an arbitrarily chosen group of people. Go on. Try it. All the world’s Chinese, all the world’s Indians, all the world’s lefthanded people, all the world’s cyclists.
It might make sense for Dawkins to think he can opine on the contributions of a civilization—though Trinity College would demand you have a degree in a subject before dismissing it altogether. It makes sense too for a scientist to think science is fair ground for such a fatwa. Though Dawkins would do his fans and foes a favor by taking this prospect of a multipolar world more seriously. Nobel Prizes are a largely Western affair. Most rankings, judgments and pronouncements on the “best of” this or the “worst of” that are absent Muslim considerations—all the more grating since one of four people in the world are Muslim.