Conflicted S4 E2: The Mind of a Fundamentalist

Speakers: Thomas Small & Aimen Dean

Thomas: Dear listener, welcome back to Conflicted. Thomas Small here. Aimen’s here too.

Aimen: Hello, Thomas. How are you?

Thomas: I'm doing great. Now, we've always said that there's a strange kind of parallel to our lives, haven't we?

I was once a novice monk, obsessed with religion. My friends say, I still am. And you, well, you joined Al-Qaeda. There's a kind of radical religiosity in common there, certainly a radical streak to both of those life paths, isn't there?

Aimen: Indeed. You joined the monastery. I joined the monstrosity. So-

Thomas: Well, we've both been attracted by different kinds of fundamentalism, and today we're going to dig into the reasons why.

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Why does recruitment and radicalization thrive? What's the psychology behind it? And why are religious people like you and me Aimen, so often prone to radicalization? Let's find out.

Aimen, before we get into the weeds here (and this conversation certainly will become weedy), let's talk a little bit about-

Aimen: Oh, weed. I'm smoking the weed, man. Okay, sorry.

Thomas: Okay. That's terrible. That was just terrible. What do you think? This is Joe Rogan. This isn't Joe Rogan. We don't smoke weed on this podcast.

Aimen: Okay, okay. I was just kidding.

Thomas: Let's talk a little bit about terminology. What do we actually mean by radical Islamism? By radical Islamist?

Aimen, you go first. Fundamentalism. This word, fundamentalism. How do you respond to this word? I think it's a little bit problematic.

Aimen: I think for me, fundamentalism or Islamic fundamentalism to be more precise is all about the pursuit of purity in the society, purity in one's self, in terms of following to the letter, the literal meanings of the scripture. That's what it means.

Thomas: The trouble that I have with that word fundamentalism is that it comes from a very specific historical and cultural context, namely American Protestantism. So, in the late 19th century as American Protestant theology in general had liberalised thanks to modern science, Darwinian Evolution, things like this, a group of Protestants in America rejected all of that modern theology and wanted to return to what they called the fundaments of the religion, the Bible, basically, which they interpreted literally.

But by calling those protestants who were going back to the scriptures, fundamentalists, and then applying that word fundamentalism to Muslims, it's a problem because in theory, at least, all Muslims believe in the fundamentals of their faith, the Usul of the religion, the basics of Islam.

So, we can't say that some Muslims are fundamentalists and others aren't. All Muslims from that point of view, are fundamentalists, surely.

Aimen: Not necessarily, Thomas. Actually, the fundamentalists in the Muslim world, in the Arabic context are called Usulis, or are called Salafis. So, Usuli means someone who's going back to the basics of the faith, the Usul.

Thomas: A bit like fundamentalism and Protestantism.

Aimen: Exactly. It's exactly the same word. The foundations, the fundamental, basically we're talking about the foundations.

So, the word Usul, is either basically the origins, the word Usul is like the origins. So, I'm an originalist, if I want to really translate the literal meaning of Usuli.

Also at the same time, there is the word Salafist, which means I am following the early generations teachings. That's what it means.

Thomas: But which Muslims would say that they don't base their faith on both the origins, the Quran and the Hadith, the Sunna of the prophet to some extent, or follow the teachings as laid down by the early generations of Muslims. All Muslims say that.

So, what value is there in calling them fundamentalists? As I say, a term taken from a Christian context where some Christians were literally saying, the Bible is not inherent, the Bible is not the word of God. Modern science has to dictate how we think about these things.

Aimen: Okay. I will tell you what is the difference, the fundamental difference between Muslims who claim to be, “Well, I follow the Usul, I follow the teachings of the early generations, therefore, I am Usuli. I am Salafist.”

But then the Salafist and the fundamentalists, the Usulis, they will come and say “No, no, no, no, no. We're not talking about the, you tell me, I follow the Quran. No. Do you follow the Quran according to the interpretations of the early generations? Do you follow it according to the literal meaning of the word?

Because if you tell me that there are major differences between what is the literal meaning and the allegorical meaning of the Quran, then I tell you no, we have big differences. You are not a Usuli. You are not a fundamentalist. You are someone who would seek a different interpretation.”

Thomas: That's interesting. I think maybe literalist then is the right word.

Aimen: Yes.

Thomas: What about radicalism? This is another terminology. We talk about Islamic radicals. I also find this word to be a bit problematic because it suggests that any position that deviates from some vaguely defined “moderate position, moderate consensus” is bad, is deviant.

So, who is to define what that moderate consensus is, and therefore who is to define who a radical is?

Aimen: For me, a radical is someone who would take the literal interpretations and meanings of the Quran and the Hadith, and then try to apply them on everyday life in the acts of worship as well, on the acts of transactions. We talked about it before, Thomas, Islam is divided into transactions and worship.

And part of the transactions is the governance. So, when a radical stands in defiance of the governor or the government of the day and try to say, you are not ruling according to the literal meanings of the Quran and the Sunnah, therefore you are an apostate. You have deviated, you have innovated these rules. Therefore, you are no longer a proper Muslim ruler, therefore, I have the right to rebel against you. That is what radicalism in my opinion.

Thomas: I see. So, once again, that comes back to this idea of literalism, and I'm glad that we're sort of focusing on this dimension of the issue because we're going to be doing a few episodes coming up on various figures in Islamic history whom current Islamic radicals draw on in the story they tell themselves about Islamic history and the sort of voices that they feel that they're emulating, that they particularly esteem.

And one thing that that sort of distinguishes all of these people is their devotion to literalism, to the simple literal interpretation of the texts. Interesting, because the literal interpretation of the text is not always easy to determine.

But let's not get too bogged down here. We're going to come back to all these issues I would like to talk about in terms of Islamic radicalization, why does it happen?

We talked about in the earlier episode the conflicts, the instability of the Middle Eastern region, home to so many Muslim majority nations, of course.

So, one causal factor obviously in radicalization is political, sociopolitical. Why does radicalism happen socio-politically, Aimen.

Aimen: There are multiple factors, Thomas, and I think I will need to be as brief as possible in condensing these factors together. The first factor, Thomas, for me, was always the absence of justice in any society will lead to the existence of radicalism and fundamentalism.

Thomas: The absence of justice, meaning the presence of injustice.

Aimen: Absolutely. I mean, and sometime I like the word absence of justice because it has disappeared completely. With injustice, you can say there is an element of justice and injustice, but the absence of justice altogether, it is no longer there.

I mean, you have a society that is so unjust on multiple levels, on the economic level, on the political level, on the balance of power between people. The fact that the society has become so stratified that the distance between the top and the bottom is just so much.

And that breeds resentment, and that breeds the searching of the souls for many people as to how to balance things. You see, in the Quran, there is a verse in the Quran, which says “Wawa Da’aal Meezan” and he set the balance of everything, the balance.

I mean, there has to be some semblance of balance in terms of justice, the scales of justice need to be somewhat balanced in a society. And I always remember the words of the Muslim philosopher, Ibn Taymiyyah, who is the idol of the fundamentalists in terms of him being the most quoted philosopher for the jihadist and the fundamentalist and the extremist movements throughout the Muslim world.

What he said himself is illuminating. He said that God grants victory, prosperity, and longevity to the nation that implement justice, even if they were non-Muslims. And he bestows nothing but defeat, misery and poverty on the nation that pursues injustice.

Thomas: But when we're talking about the Muslim world and all the many countries of the Muslim world, most of which have produced members of jihadist groups, are we saying that all of those countries, to some extent, are unjust, at least in the eyes of the Islamists?

Aimen: Indeed, in their eyes, injustice takes lots of forms. And one of the forms of injustice is not implementing the rules of Sharia as they were stipulated in the Quran and the Sunna.

Thomas: I see. This is a very specific interpretation of what injustice is. So, to be just, is to implement the Sharia. Any country that has adopted a secular form of the law is by that very reason, unjust.

Aimen: Oh, yes. I mean, if you see the writings of jihadist and fundamentalist writers, they always say that to rule by none other than Sharia is an act of shirk, blasphemy.

And God says in the Quran that shirk is a form of injustice. So, it's a bit of theological mental gymnastics here, but that's how they literally basically interpret that ruling by other than the rules of Sharia is injustice.

Thomas: It's a reminder, Aimen, that we are talking about a religious phenomenon here, because religious people often interpret things differently from non-religious people.

When you started talking about injustice, my mind immediately went to Egypt in the days of Mubarak, the great corruption, the huge economic inequality, the prisons full of activists, full of opponents of the regime, et cetera. So, actual injustice that was actually being felt by the citizens of Egypt.

But now you're talking about someone who might be living in a well-ordered modern society, one in which there is actually justice being met, but he thinks it's unjust. He's interpreting that situation as unjust.

Aimen: Yeah. There are two parallel lines here. First of all, those who live in unjust societies, they would say that what happens in the literal world, in the economic and political world is a direct result of abandoning Sharia and therefore one injustice breeding another.

Those who live in just and ordered societies, or at least societies where you can achieve some sort of a secular justice and your rights are protected such as France or Germany or the UK, they would say that “No, no, no, no, no. Even if your rights are protected in the literal sense, however, the rights of God are violated.”

And therefore, this is how fundamentalists and extremists who live in western societies that are ordered and that you can still have a semblance of rights and you can still get legal rights, they still argue that God's rights are violated.

Thomas: But I'm thinking more of well-ordered societies in the Muslim world, societies like Malaysia, Oman, in the past, to some extent, Tunisia. Places where, fine, there were elements of corruption and inequality as there are everywhere, frankly, but in general, you could live a life of dignity, and in general, the government was looking after your welfare.

So, some Muslims e even in those societies, might be convinced that they were in fact, living in an unjust society if the society wasn't governed according to their understanding of Sharia law.

Aimen: Remember that the first person who the accusation of not ruling according to the rules of the Quran and to the Sharia of God, was Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth caliph of Islam, the son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad, his own cousin, the first boy to convert to Islam, was accused of not ruling according to the fundamental laws of God.

And when the Khawarij, the first fundamentalist zealot movement in Islam, the first breakaway movement emerged, what did they say to Ali ibn Abi Talib? They said to him, “Inil-hukm illa lillah.” This is a verse in the Quran that, sovereignty belongs to God.

So, do you know how he replied to them? He said, it's a word of truth, but with a false motive behind it, because Ali here is saying that this is a false thinking that the rule of God should be used to actually upend societies and to actually rebel against societies and to actually rebel against the status quo.

Thomas: Well, there's a very interesting conversation to be had here about whether religion is rightly revolutionary or rightly reactionary. Does religion overturn society or does it underpin stability? Because the truth is in history, it has done both regularly.

Aimen: Absolutely.

Thomas: But bringing it back down to earth into the present day, I mean, I'm seeing now when we're talking about injustice, perceived or real, injustice, a changing world in which inequality grows.

I would imagine that the sense of the traditional social contract within Muslim societies is gone, leading to a kind of identity crisis amongst a lot of Muslims. They don't really know who they are.

Am I an Arab? Am I Saudi? Am I from my tribe? Am I a Lutheri? Am I a Muslim? Am I Western, if I speak English and I went to a Western university? Am I western? Am I eastern? What the hell am I? That identity crisis is surely a factor in the radicalization process.

Aimen: Actually, Thomas, I've witnessed a lot of recruitment by these groups when they target young Muslims, especially in societies that are far more secular than let's say Saudi Arabia or Roman or Iraq or whatever, and they say to them, “Look, there is only one identity, Islam.

Don't tell me that you are a British Muslim. No, there is no British Muslim here, there is Muslim only. Don't tell me that you are a Pakistani Muslim. No, Pakistan is a artificial creation. There is only one Muslim.”

So, this is now where the sense of solidarity, the Muslim solidarity is the second in the most important aspect of fundamentalism and the path towards fundamentalism, the Muslim solidarity, which basically is between you and me, a myth. It never existed.

Thomas: It may not have existed, in fact, Aimen. And obviously, it didn't. History is full of wars between Muslims and conflicts between Muslims.

Aimen: Exactly.

Thomas: But it has always existed as an ideal within Islam. The Ummah is ultimately meant to be the true source of the believer's identity. Isn't that right? Aren't the fundamentalists right about this?

Aimen: Between you and me, I'll tell you something, for me personally, I believe that the Ummah exists in the Ibaadat, which is the acts of worship. We come together for the fasting, we come together for the Hajj, we come together for the prayers, but that's it.

However, the Ummah doesn't exist in the Mu’amalat, which is the other part of Islam, the transactional Islam, the political Islam, the practical Islam where we come together as separate communities to govern ourselves according to our local cultural cultures and traditions and realities on the ground.

This is why the confusion happened. I thank God for that. I'm no longer confused. I know where the Ummah exists and where it doesn't exist, and I know that there are two Islams, the Islams of the worship and the Islam of the transactions.

Thomas: And that's very clear. I'm glad that you bring this up because as these episodes will proceed, I will be pushing back a little bit on your sort of rather tidy interpretation of what Islam is, because I feel that one of the problems that Muslims today face is that to some extent, at least the Islamist interpretation of Islam and Islamic history is not incorrect.

And that at some point, for sure, Muslims thought that there needed to be one Ummah for both sides of that divide. And it is the modern world that has forced a rethink, and that's problematic.

We'll talk about that more. Going back to the question of identity crisis, who am I? The thing is Islam becomes the solution to that question. As you said, I am a Muslim.

Aimen: Yes.

Thomas: And given a total question like that, who am I? A total question. What is my identity? A totalitarian solution is offered. You are totally a Muslim.

The thing is, though, Aimen, that doesn't apply to you, and that doesn't apply to me. I mean, we both are pious, we're both religious people, and we both are negotiating this question of who am I in this modern context? And yet we have not adopted a totalitarian identity in that way.

And so, when we come back from the break, I'd like to discuss the psychology of religious fundamentalism. This psychology, as I said at the beginning, that to some extent you and I share.

And so, we can hopefully open up a little bit about what it means to be a religious person today, a serious and committed religious person in the context of modernity, clashing identities, and constant ceaseless, socio-cultural change. We'll be back.

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We're back. We're talking about fundamentalism in religion, literalism, radicalism. And we're going to talk now more about the psychological dimension of that question.

I mean, you and I, Aimen, we’re religious guys. We've both flirted with and to some extent been attracted to call it fundamentalism, call it radicalism, call it extreme piety in the past.

And whereas most studies of this topic are done from the outside, usually by psychologists, observing fundamentalists and fundamentalism as objects of research, really, hopefully in the rest of this episode, you and I can talk a little bit more subjectively, a bit more personally about how we experience this form of religiosity.

And before we get going, Aimen, I want to make clear that we're not talking about the psychopaths in terrorist organisations. That's a whole different kind of psychology.

Obviously, the world is full of sadists, psychotic men who do not have consciences, who get weird sadistic, sometimes psychosexual pleasure from causing other people harm. These are the criminal elements in society. These are people looking for any excuse whatsoever to exercise their thirst for violence.

We're not talking about those characters. We're talking, frankly, Aimen, about Islamists more like you when you were an Islamist. So, these are pious people committed to Islam, intelligent people. They're trying to be sincere. They're trying to live their faith authentically, and they find themselves attracted to these more extreme interpretations of the religion. That's what we're talking about.

Aimen: Oh, I totally agree, Thomas. Actually, I have both the pleasure and the mis-pleasure of encountering both of these categories in their hundreds. I met so many of the psychopaths, as well as I have met so many of the well-meaning people who the adage, the path to hell is paved with good intention, applies to them, to the letter, including myself.

Thomas: As a convert to orthodox Christianity, I encounter people like that as well, both let's say, slightly more sadistic types. Right now, especially in the United States, a lot of people who track radical right wing are very reactionary in their sensibilities, very full of anger towards the status quo. And sometimes just sort of rather fetishizing militant, let's say thuggery.

And of course, the Russian situation animates a lot of this. A lot of these people are being attracted to orthodox Christianity in America as converts. It's very worrying for the church at the moment.

Aimen: Indeed.

Thomas: But I also meet people who were more like me when I was a teenager, and in my early 20s, I suppose some people might say intelligent, looking for the truth behind the religion that I was raised in, it hadn't offered me a huge amount of spiritual sustenance as a child, but which nonetheless planted a seed in me that I wanted to see grow, et cetera.

And I ended up adopting a form of that religion, orthodox Christianity, and especially monastic orthodox Christianity that people around me at the time thought was very radical and very weird.

So, I definitely know what you're talking about. I know these different kinds of characters, and we're talking about the latter character, the pious, intelligent, well-intentioned person who ends up, as you say, paving a pathway to hell.

Aimen: Yeah.

Thomas: So, for example, you mentioned earlier the need for purity, impurity, it’s like an OCD tendency.

Aimen: Yeah. If we examine the mind of someone who is attracted through good intentions to fundamentalists and radical ideologies, we will find that there is a pursuit of purity there. I'm talking here from a Muslim point of view, okay?

Thomas: Oh, and a Christian point of view, I promise you.

Aimen: Yeah. So, what happen is that you will see a young Muslim going around and saying, “Well, I'm going to the mosque. I'm memorising the Quran, I am practising Islam according to the letter, praying the five times.

But what am I seeing around me? I'm seeing a mosque, next to it there is a bank lending with interest, in open defiance to God's laws. I see next to it a nightclub with loud music, and I see next to it a hotel serving alcohol. So, I start to rebel against these problems.”

And psychologically, it really wreaks havoc on the mind of this one who is seeking purity.

Thomas: Yeah. I think in modern psychological terms, this need for purity tracks with what's called OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. And people with OCD or on the OCD spectrum, they definitely see the world in terms of purity, impurity.

They try to exercise control over their space to maintain purity, if they can. They favour conformity. They don't really like the dissonance of heterogeneity in any given situation.

And from what I understand, the underlying emotional kind of tenor of OCD, the underlying negative emotion is anger.

Aimen: Yes.

Thomas: It's a need for control. A kind of repressed anger that manifests as a pursuit of righteousness, of self-righteousness. I think that must track with not just your own personality, Aimen, to some extent when you were young, but fellow Islamists at that time.

Aimen: And I was OCD when I was young, I mean, I'm not going to pretend I wasn't. But the reality is that these people, they want to have ordered societies, safe societies, but societies that are governed according to the rules of Sharia as they understand them to be pure, utopian almost, and they want to have the exact punishment of God against those who transgress against God's laws.

And funny enough, I remember they were not exactly … when I was young, and I'm looking around all my friends and those who were seeking the same truth and the same piety that I was seeking, I never noticed that they wanted to go after the financially corrupt. They didn't want to go after those who were stealing or embezzling or doing financial crime. I didn't see them going and protesting against banks.

But if they see a woman who is just uncovering her face, they will go after her straightaway. So, for them, it wasn't the financial crime against Islam, both of them, it was the moral crimes.

Thomas: Yeah. That's especially sexual. That's a very important aspect. I think the OCD tendency or this kind of suppressed rage, this desire to control the self and its reactions is particularly upset by the presence of erotic stimulation, because the erotic is the thing that is very hard, especially in a young man to control. And so, you resent the object that is preventing you from controlling yourself.

Aimen: Exactly.

Thomas: Now, in preparation for this episode, I was reading a book, The Fundamentalist Mindset, it's called, edited by a psychologist, Charles Strozier. And I found this in it, and I thought it was interesting. 

He says, “The fundamentalist mindset whenever it occurs is composed of distinct characteristics, including (here we go, Aimen), dualistic thinking, paranoia and rage in a group context, an apocalyptic orientation that incorporates distinct perspectives on time, death and violence, a relationship to charismatic leadership and a totalized conversion experience.”

I think that's a pretty succinct list. I certainly remember having that conversion experience. It was a psychological experience of — it's difficult to express when you're 18 and you're reading books to some extent, history books, to some extent, theology books, to some extent, books of metaphysics or mysticism. And your mind is really illuminated by the experience.

And you feel this rush of zeal, this rush of conviction, this sense of destiny of the self. And you look around at the world around you, and you condemn it mercilessly. You think, in comparison to the light in my mind, this world outside is dark. And I must, well, in my case, leave it behind and go to a monastery.

In other people's cases, and often in Islam today, it's, I've got to change it. I've got to reform it. I've got to attack it if it won't be changed and reformed.

So, that conversion experience that is part of a dualistic, paranoid way of thinking that leads to rage, that is a very powerful kind of description of what's going on inside of, well, frankly, people like we were when we were young men.

Aimen: And that's why people like us, and especially within the Muslim world, were so easily seduced by the power of eschatology, apocalyptic prophecies that were given to them by clever clerics and radical preachers who were telling them the end is near, that the time of the apocalypse, that the time of the end battles and the epic struggles is upon us.

And that if you are not an instrument of God, then you are an instrument of the devil. That if you are not participating in the cleansing of Islam and the whole Ummah from the filth of the West and the East, and from the ideologies that have corrupted Islam, if you don't participate in this, then you are one of the losers, and you'll be condemned to hell.

Which one you choose, the path of piety and heaven or the path of deviancy and hell? So, it's a choice.

Thomas: I'm glad you brought up hell, Aimen, because we've been talking about rage, but there's another emotion, another very negative emotion underlying a lot of this, which is fear.

Aimen: Fear. Absolutely.

Thomas: I came across this quote; this is a combination of a couple of Hadith. The prophet said, “If only you knew what I know, you would laugh little and weep much.” And he was asked, “Oh, messenger of God, what have you seen?” He said, “I have seen paradise and hell.”

And I think this sense that life is meant to be spent in a state of fear, mourning, fearful, weeping at the possibility of being condemned to hell because of your sin, is very strong in nascent religious fundamentalist sort of mentalities.

Aimen: I remember when I was young, we used to have these lectures being recorded on cassettes. It used to be called, The Traumance of Purgatory, that's one lecture. Another lecture on a cassette was called The Description of Hell and it's eternal Traumance.

It's like, I'm listening to this when I'm 10 and 11 and 12, for God's sake, why am I listening to this? Just to feel the fear, the fear of God being literally being put into us in order to be pious people, but also pious people who are full of fear are driven to do sometime unspeakable things in order to escape what they believe to be the hell that is awaiting them.

And what we will do, we will go and seek the ultimate sacrifice, the martyrdom, the jihad, the struggle to cleanse Islam, but in the sense itself, also cleanse ourselves, because martyrdom basically is a cleansing act.

Thomas: I know this thirst for self-destruction, this thirst for purity, maximum purity through maximum self-destruction, self … if I destroy myself, then I will be maximally pure.

I'm sure psychologists would suggest that there was something quite pernicious in play here. Something like what they call weak identity formation.

So, people who for whatever reason, traumas in their childhood, perhaps elements of economic instability, economic insecurity, possibly psychological abuse, maybe in this fear, shame kind of dynamic from the religious culture that they're in, they don't build strong identities, strong senses of identity.

We talked about identity problems in a socio-cultural context before. Am I an Arab? Am I a Muslim? What am I? But in a psychological way, as individuals, sometimes people really don't feel like strong cells. And this thirst for death, I think can manifest from that.

But another thing is that when you don't have a strong sense of self in that way, when you can't trust that there's a solid centre there and you're more at the whims of emotional and ideological or mental whimsy, you can often lose sight of other people as selves as well. You treat them as what psychologists call part objects.

Aimen: Dehumanising. You dehumanise them.

Thomas: You lack the capacity to imagine the inner world of other people, you know?

Aimen: Yes.

Thomas: And as you say, yes, you have faced their humanity. This is a big issue. I can remember as a 19-year-old, 20, my God, I must have been an insufferable asshole. In fact, I probably still am.

Aimen: Both, both you and I.

Thomas: I don't know how people put up with me. But I can imagine secretly sort of assuming that I had to be either the devil or the Messiah, let's say. I had to either be a great genius of religious destiny or a very evil villain. I couldn't be in the middle.

And I can remember myself kind of casting my eyes out across a crowd of people in great detached condemnation of them. Like they didn't really matter because they weren't, let's say, up to my level.

I mean, it's with great shame that I confess this to you, Aimen. But it was definitely part of the mix of my young adult mind, which I repent of now. And I hope that the Lord forgive me and will purify me of all this madness.

Aimen: You know what, Thomas, when I left Bosnia after 14 months of participating in the conflict there, I was in the jihad there. When I left Bosnia, and I was, I remember in the market in Istanbul, and I just left the trauma and the traumatic experience of the war behind me. But I was looking at the people.

I spent 14 months defending the defenceless. I felt part of God's army, part of God's plan, grand design for lslam. And I was looking at the people passing, going here and there, buying, selling busy with lira here and lira there, a dollar here, and a dollar there.

And I was looking at them and I'm thinking, what pathetic people, I was 17 at the time, what pathetic people, you are running after the dirt and the filth of this world. You're running after things that are so insignificant, so mundane, you are not aware of the higher transcending place that we've been to. And you really treat all of this crowd with such disdain and discontent.

Thomas: Well, I'm glad that you know what I was talking about then. I definitely know what you're talking about now. It's really shameful. And it tracks with what I was saying before about suppressed anger, leading to self-righteousness. And a capacity to judge others mercilessly.

Now, as a Christian, I find that particularly disgusting, that I was doing that given what Jesus says about not judging others. And I don't want to create a kind of Christianity Islam binary, because as we've been discussing, in fact, both religions have a lot in common.

They both manifest the full range of religious psychology from fear to joy, to supercilious judgmentalness, to selfless humility, to quiet piety, to firebrand zealotry. So, they're all there.

But as we move now towards our series of episodes on various figures from Muslim history, from let's say the literalist end of Muslim history, figures like Ahmed Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Taymiyyah and others. I will be pressing you a bit because sometimes when I read their life stories and read what they said, there is an edge to them that is not very Christian, and that might be a little bit particularly Islamic.

And it's something about forgiveness, and it's something about the idea of not judging others.

Aimen: Actually, we have already talked about another fundamental difference between Christianity and Islam that is far more striking, I would say, in this episode. You see, we said about the two sides of Islam, the ritual and the transactional. While in Christianity, there's only the ritual.

Why I'm bringing the question of transactional? Because under transactional Islam, you have all the laws pertaining to retribution, because retribution is an essential part of justice in Islam that without retribution, there will be no balance. He set the balance of all things. And without retribution, there will be no balance.

And therefore, retribution might be, I don't know, might be missing in Christianity, but it is a fundamental part in Islam. This is where the fundamental difference comes.

Thomas: Oh, my dear friend and brother, it just hurts my heart because it makes me think, “Oh my God, the whole point about Christianity, is that retribution has been transcended by unimaginable mercy.” Oh, gosh.

Aimen: You see, and that's why in Islam, the Quran says, “And in retribution, life is guaranteed.”

Thomas: Well, my goodness, this has been interesting. Dear listener, I hope you've stuck with us through this very wandering episode of Conflicted. We're really just chatting like the old friends that we are.

Aimen: Indeed.

Thomas: Trying to get to the heart of these difficult questions. I've enjoyed it. Next episode, we're going to start talking about the figures from Islamic history, the Literalist figures that are highly praised and highly regarded by modern Islamic radicals.

Beginning with a figure from the eighth and ninth centuries AD, very early in the history of Islam, a figure who has given his name to one of the four schools of Law of Islam, a really Titanic figure in the history of Hadith, in the history of Islamic jurisprudence and in the history of Islamic spirituality, Ahmed Ibn Hanbal.

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I promise you; it's really going to tell a great story. Aimen, are you looking forward to it?

Aimen: Oh indeed, definitely.

Thomas: So, dear listeners, we'll see you then.

A reminder that you can follow the show over on Facebook and Twitter at MH Conflicted. And for a deeper dive into all the subjects we talk about here on Conflicted, head over to Facebook and search Conflicted Podcast Discussion Group. There you will find other fans of the show engaging in heated debates, enlightening conversations, and just generally geeking out over Conflicted related topics.

Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Harry Stott. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley.