How to Change a Muslim’s Mind: Final letter to Sam Harris

Episode Description
In this episode, we share an audio reading of T A Ahmed’s latest essay—a direct letter to Sam Harris exploring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the framing of Islam, and the delicate art of changing minds.
Building on a previous critique of Harris’s rhetoric, this piece examines why blunt-force logic and aggressive attacks on faith rarely succeed in persuading those who most need to hear the message. Drawing on his own profound journey from a devout Muslim in Pakistan to an atheist, Ahmed reflects on how a quiet, uncoerced introduction to Richard Dawkins' evolutionary biology opened the door to a new worldview—and why harsh rhetoric often forces believers to simply bolt their doors and defend their homes.
Key themes explored in this episode:

• The Architecture of Belief: Why coercion fails, and how true intellectual change requires a "quiet oscillation" between an old worldview and a new horizon.
• The God Delusion Warning: How aggressive rhetoric against religion can inadvertently push moderates away and undercut a thinker's most unifying, powerful work (such as Harris's Waking Up app).
• Gandhi as a Model for Persuasion: A look back at how Mahatma Gandhi navigated the hyper-partisan violence of the 1947 Partition by remaining non-partisan, refusing to equate a religion with its violent fringe, and consistently appealing to the highest ideals of both Hindus and Muslims.

Listen in for a thoughtful exploration of how we might build bridges, rather than burn them, during today's most fractured and traumatizing conflicts.

The New Frontier Post. Venturing forth into new realms of knowledge. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

How to change a Muslim's mind. In this third and final letter to the public intellectual, Sam Harris, the author, Taimur Ahmed, explores why unvarnished truth rarely changes minds. Drawing inspiration from Gandhi, we explore an alt. A version of this article was first published by The Friday Times by T.A. Ahmed. Dear Sam, in my first letter, I challenged your analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Specifically, how your thought experiment extends grace to Israel, but not to the Palestinians. Your position, no debate with critics of Israel, seems partisan, not justified by the arguments you present. In my second letter, I critiqued how you sometimes frame Islam as a regressive monolith. You are essentially promoting one interpretation of Islam, that of the mullahs and jihadists, as the only interpretation of Islam. I believe this to be carelessness on your part, as I know you see good in some of Islam's traditions and interpretations, including Sufism. But that carelessness turns off moderates and reformers by dismissing their non-literal and liberal interpretations as non-existent or unimportant. For reform, the non-literal interpretations are essential. The vast majority of Muslims aren't going to drop their religion and become secular humanists, no matter how hard you hit them with logic, but they can be persuaded to interpret their religion differently. So today's letter is about persuasion and how to do this important work. Some in the waking up community, on reading my last letter to you, said that it's not your job to persuade or reform Islam. I disagree and believe you can and should persuade all religions and peoples to be better, including Muslims. You can help. Certainly you and Richard Dawkins helped this Muslim. I grew up in Pakistan believing in a personal, conscious God, in Allah, yet ultimately changed my mind. I share my story as a case study, and also as an explanation of why I'm writing to you in such a way, why I feel a deep connection with you. How to change a Muslim's mind. I grew up as a pretty devout Muslim. I prayed, read the Quran, fasted, and believed in a personal God who listened to my prayers and delivered small miracles, like returning a lost kite. At 14, I remember arguing with my atheist uncle, fiercely defending God, a conscious being that existed in a literal sense. Yet by my early twenties, I had decided that while there was mystery and awe, no consciousness was counting my sins and good deeds. Several factors drove this shift, including my relatively comfortable upper middle class life, where I didn't need to join a madrasa just to put food in my stomach, and the fact that both my parents were academic types with lots of books in the house. But perhaps the most significant factor was the same uncle I argued with quietly, handing me books on evolutionary theory by Richard Dawkins. There was no lecture, no scolding about how irrational my religious beliefs were. Just books shared with no expectation, no questions or interrogations afterward. Dawkins wrote with such passion and clarity, laying bare the grandeur of reality, that I fell in love with evolution. I was left in awe of deep time, and how immense complexity could arise from the simple process of natural selection. I'm still enthralled by evolution and write about it. Without my even realizing it, this uncoerced, alternate worldview, anchored in evolutionary theory and science generally, began casting a shadow over my belief in a conscious creator. Naturalistic explanations could be, I discovered, ever more marvelous than supernatural ones. While I would later study philosophy and approach the question of God's existence more directly at the University of Toronto, Dawkins and the natural world first surprised me and drew me in. They laid the groundwork for me to adopt a radical new perspective, one best articulated by Einstein. I do not believe in a personal God. It is sufficient for me to stand in awe of the structure of the universe. This remains my belief today. Becoming an atheist was an amazing journey of the mind. It was like taking the red pill in the matrix and waking up to a whole new world that no one else could see. I might have been the only teenager in Pakistan who managed to get his hands on Dawkins and evolutionary theory. How those books changed my life. What good luck. What intense grappless with nihilism, and what loneliness. Bertrand Russell, Eystein, Dawkins, and you, Sam Harris. You understood me when no one else did. You were one of my atheist buddies whom I hung out with inside the covers of books. Belief is a home. You cannot be evicted. Coercion, blunt force logic, aggressive attacks on faith only compels the believer to bolt the doors and throw stones from the windows at the attacker. You can scream and shout at them all you want, tell them their current home is a shambles, and that a better home exists over the hill, but they will not come out when they feel under attack. Instead of attacking their home, their worldview. Leave a little cookie outside the door. A book on evolution, perhaps? Or a book that speaks of their religion in a new, more liberal light. Ask the inhabitant to come out and play. Take them around and show them other vistas. Make them feel they can always return home. Over weeks and months, if you have any luck, a vista far different from the one they currently inhabit will finally strike a chord. They'll want to come out, explore, and imagine inhabiting a new worldview. It is this very process, a quiet oscillation between the old home and a new horizon, that allows one to accept the possibility of a radical new place to live. Slowly, it's possible to construct a new home, a new belief, that is radically different from the old. Only after lingering in both, after living in the tension of two worlds, can one finally leave the old behind. You ultimately discover that the choice you made was never really a choice at all. You simply realize this is the only home for me. That at least was how it happened for me. How not to change a Muslim's mind. In my twenties, a full-blown atheist, I read Dawkins' The God Delusion and found that it vindicated my Einsteinian worldview. I thought it made total sense and wished everyone would read it. Having experienced Islamic extremism in Pakistan firsthand, I hoped more Muslims would question some of the worst aspects of their faith, which all seemed rooted in the false belief in a conscious, all-powerful being, commanding them to do irrational, terrible things. But now, in my fifties, my desire for unvarnished truth is tempered with a desire to actually change hearts and minds, to persuade and to unite. Truth is not the only virtue, and it often competes with other virtues. One can and should still strive for truth, but truth has to be spoken carefully, gently, lovingly, sometimes tangentially, sometimes even silence is needed. And so, in middle age, I have mixed feelings about Dawkins' the God delusion. While it resonated deeply with a quiet underground of doubters like me, it failed to persuade most theists. Indeed, it may have closed the door on moderate Muslims who might have otherwise read Dawkins' books on evolution. In other words, I suspect that had I read The God Delusion before climbing Mount Improbable, The Blind Watchmaker, or The Ancestor's Tale, I might have been turned off by Dawkins and not read the books on evolution, or read them with suspicion so that the alternate world of evolution and science may never have come about. I think I heard Dawkins, who remains a hero of mine, say at one of his talks that he made a choice. He wasn't going for persuasion. He was simply truth-seeking, dismantling false belief with blunt force logic. I understand that impulse and respect it. I just don't know if it's helpful, especially in today's hyperpartisan environment. Indeed, it's likely harmful. The God delusion warning. Harsh rhetoric can undercut work that persuades. If Dawkins opened the door for me to stand, like Einstein, in awe of the universe without a personal God, you, Sam, opened the door to an equally compelling inner universe through your meditation app, Waking Up. You brought me full circle to a deep appreciation of all religions, including the Islamic traditions featured on your app. As such, you and Dawkins serve as the bookends to my journey so far. However, your current rhetoric on Islam and Palestinians mirrors Dawkins' approach in the God delusion. Even if you have logic on your side, blunt force fails to reach the audience that most needs persuasion. Just as the God delusion overshadowed Dawkins' most powerful writing on evolution, your harsh tone threatens to undercut your own greatest work. As you yourself have noted, waking up is perhaps your most important contribution. It is a masterful gateway to secular humanism and demonstrates a profound synthesis between secularism and certain religious practices. Yet, by speaking carelessly about Islam as a monolith, you risk closing the door to that synthesis for millions of Muslims who might otherwise have discovered your app. A role model for persuasion for hyperpartisan times. If you want to foster reform and persuade, look to Gandhi and the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, a conflict that rivals Israel-Palestine in its complexity and generational trauma. Gandhi would have loved your waking up app. He would have wholeheartedly embraced its synthesis of spiritual teachings from many traditions. He was a model of religious integration, drawing on Buddhist ethics, Jain nonviolence, Christian service, and enlightenment human rights. Where you and Gandhi would part ways is on your stance regarding Israel and Palestine, how you speak of Islam, and how your rhetoric inadvertently burns bridges rather than builds them. While he's known for nonviolent protest, what he cared about even more, and what he was assassinated for, was the unity of the two communities of his home, Hindus and Muslims. Even in the political storm of partition, Gandhi held tight to the belief that religions, including Islam, have good to offer when interpreted liberally rather than literally. He could genuinely exhort Muslims and Hindus to their better selves while he criticized, and he did so in a non-partisan way. As I shared in the very first post on my Substack dedicated to Gandhi and Dr. King, he maintained this stance even in the hyperpartisan environment of December 1946, when the great Mahatma was often heckled by both Hindus and Muslims. According to Ramachandra Guha's two-volume biography, here is what Gandhi said at one of his prayer meetings. No religion was without its blemishes. Islam had forgotten its ideals and taken to violence. Christians very often forgot that their master asked them to love their enemies. While, as the status of untouchables showed, in Hinduism too, diabolical wrong has been perpetrated in the name of religion. Notice how he doesn't fixate on one community's worst impulse and make it a litmus test for which side he's going to be on. Unlike you, Gandhi did not equate Islam with its most literalist, violent fringe. Instead, he held it up as an ideal to strive for. He deeply admired Islam's egalitarian nature, particularly in contrast to the rigid hierarchies of his own traditions' caste system, observing, the spirit of brotherhood is manifested in no other religion as it is in Islam. He frequently pushed back against those who painted the faith as inherently violent, stating unequivocally, I do regard Islam to be a religion of peace in the same sense as Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism are. By emphasizing these noble qualities, Gandhi gave Muslims a reason to live up to their own highest ideals rather than pushing them into a defensive, reactionary corner. His non-literal interpretation of religion extended to Judaism as well. He advised his close Jewish friends and the broader public that the promised land was not a literal territory to be occupied, but lay within. When communal violence peaked in 1947, he undertook grueling fasts in Calcutta and Delhi, putting his own body on the line to physically break the cycle of violence. He was so effective that Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, famously wrote, In the Punjab, we have 55,000 soldiers and large-scale rioting on our hands. In Bengal, our forces consist of one man and there is no rioting. May I be allowed to pay my tribute to the one man boundary force? This is the kind of leader we need today. Someone who will put himself on the line to unite people. I know it's a lot to ask, but we can at least aspire and do what little we can. I desperately wish Palestinians would completely renounce violence and adopt Gandhi's sustained, highly disciplined, nonviolent protest. I know it's been tried in some measure and hasn't delivered much for Palestinians. But violence, which has been tried endlessly, has an even worse track record. Albert Einstein, the man who perfectly encapsulates my own worldview, called Gandhi his supreme moral compass, likely because Gandhi extended love and empathy even when his own life was on the line. I believe there is a message in this for Israelis who are traumatized and rightly fear for their lives. If Gandhi could remain fearless, nonpartisan, and build bridges during the cataclysm of partition, a rupture of biblical proportions, we can do so now for Israel and Palestine. With love, T. A. Ahmed.