The fragility argument

Two claims are travelling together here, and the join is where the argument fails. The first is that Muslims react badly to criticism. The second is that this tells you something about whether Islam is true. The second does not follow from the first, and it would not follow if the first were established beyond dispute.

The inference does not work

Test the form of the argument on anything else. A biologist who loses his temper at a critic of evolution has told you about his manners. He has told you nothing about the descent of species. Adherents’ behaviour is evidence about adherents. Nobody applies this standard elsewhere, and the polemicist does not apply it to himself: the same discourse that calls Islam fragile also calls the Qur’an “crap” and does not expect the courtesy it demands.

The premise is weaker than it looks

The tradition being described as unable to withstand scrutiny is the one that produced kalam, an entire discipline of theological disputation conducted in public. Al-Ghazali attacked the philosophers in writing; Ibn Rushd answered him in writing; the argument ran across generations and both books survive because Muslims copied them. The science of hadith exists so that any student can audit the chain behind any claim and reject what fails. A tradition that builds an apparatus for auditing its own transmission is not a tradition organised around not being looked at.

This site is the same point in miniature. Every entry reproduces the objection first, in the objector’s words, and then answers it. That is not the behaviour of something fragile.

On “submission”

Islam does mean submission, and the word is offered here as though it were a confession extracted under pressure. It is on the tin. What is being submitted to is God, and every system of thought asks submission to something: to evidence, to reason, to the conclusions one’s method yields. The polemic mistakes a doctrine’s name for an admission of guilt.

What is left

Underneath the argument sits a real observation: some Muslims answer questions with hostility. That is true, and it is their failing, and it damages the faith they think they are protecting. It is also the exact failing on display in a discourse that calls a billion people’s scripture rubbish and then complains of arrogance.

The argument as constructed requires that believers’ conduct be evidence about the belief. Adopt that standard and nothing anyone has ever held survives contact with its worst adherent, including this objection.