When the Atheist Aims at a Shadow

وَلَا تَقۡفُ مَا لَيۡسَ لَكَ بِهِۦ عِلۡمٌۚ إِنَّ ٱلسَّمۡعَ وَٱلۡبَصَرَ وَٱلۡفُؤَادَ كُلُّ أُوْلَـٰٓئِكَ كَانَ عَنۡهُ مَسۡـُٔولٗا "And do not pursue that of which you have no knowledge. Indeed, the hearing, the sight, and the heart — about all those one will be questioned." Al-Isra · 17:36

أَفَلَا يَتَدَبَّرُونَ ٱلۡقُرۡءَانَۚ وَلَوۡ كَانَ مِنۡ عِندِ غَيۡرِ ٱللَّهِ لَوَجَدُواْ فِيهِ ٱخۡتِلَٰفٗا كَثِيرٗا "Will they not, then, ponder the Qur'an? Had it been from any other than God, they would surely have found in it many a contradiction." An-Nisa · 4:82

I. Introduction: The Target He Never Hits

For two decades, Richard Dawkins — Oxford ethologist, author of The God Delusion, and the elder statesman of the so-called New Atheism — has declared Islam “the greatest force for evil in the world today.” He has compared Islam to cancer. He has lamented the replacement of Easter chocolate eggs with Ramadan promotions. He has told his audiences that he prefers Christianity to Islam, calling himself a “cultural Christian.” And he has repeatedly invoked specific examples — the stoning of adulterers, the execution of apostates, the death penalty for homosexuals in Brunei, female genital cutting in parts of Africa, child marriage, hostility to women — as evidence that the religion is irredeemably hostile to reason, dignity, and human flourishing.

These are serious charges. They demand a serious answer.

But before we offer one, we must notice something that almost no one notices: in the entire body of Dawkins’s polemic against Islam, he has aimed his bow at a target that is not, in fact, the Qur’an. He has read English summaries of Islam. He has watched footage of mobs in Kabul and Riyadh. He has cited the practices of theocratic regimes. He has quoted, on occasion, this or that fragment supplied to him by Sam Harris or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But on his own admission, he has never sat down with the Arabic Qur’an and worked through its text on the text’s own terms. His targets — almost without exception — are not Qur’anic verses at all. They are accumulations of later tradition: the hadith literature compiled two to three centuries after the Prophet; the rulings of medieval jurists in Baghdad, Cordoba, Bukhara; the political-legal codifications of empires that called themselves Islamic; and the conduct of populations that often cannot quote three verses of the very book they are presumed to embody.

This essay is not a defence of every act done in Islam’s name. Nor is it an appeal to “moderate” Muslims who feel embarrassed by the conduct of “extremists.” It is something more elementary. It is a request that the critic of the Qur’an actually engage with the Qur’an. And it is, more importantly, an invitation to consider that the very critique Dawkins makes — of clerical authority, of inherited dogma, of religious texts being smuggled past the bar of reason, of pious cruelty justified by tradition — is a critique the Qur’an itself, repeatedly, unmistakably, and ferociously, also makes.

Properly understood, the Qur’an is not Dawkins’s adversary. The clerical structure he attacks is. And on that structure, the Qur’an’s verdict is harsher than his.

II. The Categorical Error: Mistaking the Tradition for the Text

Begin with the most concrete example. In 2019, when the Sultanate of Brunei announced it would enforce death by stoning for homosexual acts — a law it placed under moratorium weeks later, after international outcry — Dawkins fired off the following tweet: “To obey Allah’s command as written in the Quran.” He repeated the formula — as written in the Quran — with confidence, as one might cite a chemistry formula.

The Qur’an, however, does not legislate death for homosexual acts. It does not legislate stoning for any sexual offence at all. The single verse that prescribes a penalty for zinā (sexual transgression outside marriage) reads:

ٱلزَّانِيَةُ وَٱلزَّانِي فَٱجۡلِدُواْ كُلَّ وَٰحِدٖ مِّنۡهُمَا مِاْئَةَ جَلۡدَةٖۖ وَلَا تَأۡخُذۡكُم بِهِمَا رَأۡفَةٞ فِي دِينِ ٱللَّهِ إِن كُنتُمۡ تُؤۡمِنُونَ بِٱللَّهِ وَٱلۡيَوۡمِ ٱلۡأٓخِرِۖ "The fornicatress and the fornicator — flog each one of them with a hundred stripes. And let no pity for them seize you in God's religion, if you believe in God and the Last Day." An-Nur · 24:2

One hundred lashes. Not stoning. Not execution. And applied to fornicator and fornicatress equally, in a single, unambiguous instruction.

Where, then, does the stoning come from? It comes from the hadith — the corpus of reports about what the Prophet supposedly said or did, compiled by Bukhārī (d. 870 CE), Muslim (d. 875 CE), and others two and a half centuries after his death. It comes from a famously embarrassing tradition in which the early community is said to have once possessed a “verse of stoning” that was then conveniently eaten by a goat before the canonical Qur’an was finalized. The very community that transmitted this story understood that there was a contradiction between what their text said and what their judges did — and rather than abandon the practice, they invented a mythology to preserve it.

This is the pattern. Once you learn to see it, you cannot un-see it.

Consider apostasy. Dawkins routinely invokes the death penalty for leaving Islam as proof of the religion’s tyranny. But what does the Qur’an actually say?

لَآ إِكۡرَاهَ فِي ٱلدِّينِۖ قَد تَّبَيَّنَ ٱلرُّشۡدُ مِنَ ٱلۡغَيِّۚ "There is no compulsion in religion. The right path has been made clear from the wrong." Al-Baqarah · 2:256

وَقُلِ ٱلۡحَقُّ مِن رَّبِّكُمۡۖ فَمَن شَآءَ فَلۡيُؤۡمِن وَمَن شَآءَ فَلۡيَكۡفُرۡۚ "And say: The truth is from your Lord. So whoever wills, let him believe; and whoever wills, let him disbelieve." Al-Kahf · 18:29

وَلَوۡ شَآءَ رَبُّكَ لَأٓمَنَ مَن فِي ٱلۡأَرۡضِ كُلُّهُمۡ جَمِيعًاۚ أَفَأَنتَ تُكۡرِهُ ٱلنَّاسَ حَتَّىٰ يَكُونُواْ مُؤۡمِنِينَ "If your Lord had willed, all those on earth would have believed, every one of them together. Will you then compel mankind, against their will, to believe?" Yunus · 10:99

The Qur’an mentions apostates several times. It speaks of God’s displeasure with them. It speaks of their punishment in the next world. It does not anywhere — not in a single verse — prescribe an earthly penalty for the act of changing one’s belief. The death penalty for apostasy is a hadith ruling, derived from a single short report (“whoever changes his religion, kill him”) whose chain of transmission depends on a lone narrator and whose plain reading contradicts the explicit Qur’anic principle of lā ikrāha fī’d-dīn — no compulsion in religion. Even within the classical tradition, dissenting voices (Ibrāhīm al-Nakhaʿī, Sufyān al-Thawrī, and in modern times Hashim Kamali, Taha Jabir al-Alwani, Mahmud Shaltut) have argued that the hadith refers to political treason in a wartime context, not to private conscience.

Continue down the list. Female genital cutting? Not in the Qur’an. Music as forbidden? Not in the Qur’an. The death penalty for blasphemy? Not in the Qur’an. The veiling of the face? Not in the Qur’an, which prescribes modesty and a head-covering (khimār) drawn over the bosom (24:31), but says nothing of the niqāb or burqa. The detailed segregation of men and women, the prohibition of women driving, women’s testimony being half of men’s in all contexts (the Qur’an restricts it to commercial contracts: 2:282), the prohibition on women travelling without a male guardian, the specific number and method of daily prayers, the wedding rituals, the dietary nuances beyond pork and intoxicants — none of this is the Qur’an. All of it is the accretion of fiqh (jurisprudence), sunna (tradition), and culture, layered over centuries by scholars who confused their context for their God.

When Dawkins denounces these things, he is right to denounce them. Many of them are barbarous. But he is denouncing the wrong book. He is attacking a fortress built on a foundation he has never examined, and assuming the fortress and the foundation are the same.

III. The Qur’an’s Charter for Reason — Against Dawkins’s Caricature of “Faith”

The central charge in Dawkins’s God Delusion is that faith is, by definition, belief in the absence of evidence — or worse, in defiance of evidence. “Faith is the great cop-out,” he writes, “the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.” On this view, religion and reason are not merely separate magisteria; they are enemies.

Whatever one says of other scriptures, this charge collapses the moment one opens the Qur’an. The Qur’an is, on its surface, the most reason-saturated sacred text in world literature. Approximately three-quarters of its surahs invoke faculties of intellect, reflection, observation, and proof. The Arabic root ʿ-q-l (intellect, reason) appears roughly 49 times in verbal form. The root f-k-r (think, reflect) appears 18 times. The root l-b-b (the kernel of the mind, the discerning faculty) appears 16 times. The root ʿ-l-m (knowledge) and its derivatives appear more than 850 times. The Qur’an is, statistically, an argument for thinking, not against it.

Consider how the text confronts its opponents:

قُلۡ هَاتُواْ بُرۡهَٰنَكُمۡ إِن كُنتُمۡ صَٰدِقِينَ "Bring your proof, if you are truthful." Al-Baqarah · 2:111

أَمِ ٱتَّخَذُواْ مِن دُونِهِۦٓ ءَالِهَةٗۖ قُلۡ هَاتُواْ بُرۡهَٰنَكُمۡۖ هَٰذَا ذِكۡرُ مَن مَّعِيَ وَذِكۡرُ مَن قَبۡلِيۚ بَلۡ أَكۡثَرُهُمۡ لَا يَعۡلَمُونَ ٱلۡحَقَّۖ فَهُم مُّعۡرِضُونَ "Or have they taken gods besides Him? Say: Bring your proof. This is a reminder for those with me and a reminder for those before me. But most of them do not know the truth, and so they turn away." Al-Anbiya · 21:24

قُلۡ أَرَءَيۡتُمۡ إِن كَانَ مِنۡ عِندِ ٱللَّهِ ثُمَّ كَفَرۡتُم بِهِۦ مَنۡ أَضَلُّ مِمَّنۡ هُوَ فِي شِقَاقِۭ بَعِيدٖ "Say: Have you considered: if this Qur'an is from God and you disbelieve in it — who is more astray than one who is in extreme dissension?" Fussilat · 41:52

The Qur’an does not ask its hearers to believe and then think. It asks them to think and therefore believe. It accuses its opponents not of insufficient piety but of insufficient reflection:

أَفَلَا يَتَدَبَّرُونَ ٱلۡقُرۡءَانَ أَمۡ عَلَىٰ قُلُوبٍ أَقۡفَالُهَآ "Do they not contemplate the Qur'an, or are there locks upon their hearts?" Muhammad · 47:24

هُوَ ٱلَّذِي جَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلَّيۡلَ لِتَسۡكُنُواْ فِيهِ وَٱلنَّهَارَ مُبۡصِرًاۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَأٓيَٰتٖ لِّقَوۡمٖ يَسۡمَعُونَ "It is He who has made the night for you to rest in, and the day to see by. Surely in this are signs for a people who hear." Yunus · 10:67

وَسَخَّرَ لَكُمُ ٱلَّيۡلَ وَٱلنَّهَارَ وَٱلشَّمۡسَ وَٱلۡقَمَرَۖ وَٱلنُّجُومُ مُسَخَّرَٰتُۢ بِأَمۡرِهِۦٓۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَأٓيَٰتٖ لِّقَوۡمٖ يَعۡقِلُونَ "And He has subjected for you the night and the day, the sun and the moon; and the stars are subjected by His command. Surely in this are signs for a people who reason." An-Nahl · 16:12

When the Qur’an narrates the patriarch Abraham’s discovery of God, it does not depict him as receiving a revelation. It depicts him as a reasoner:

فَلَمَّا جَنَّ عَلَيۡهِ ٱلَّيۡلُ رَءَا كَوۡكَبٗاۖ قَالَ هَٰذَا رَبِّيۖ فَلَمَّآ أَفَلَ قَالَ لَآ أُحِبُّ ٱلۡأٓفِلِينَ فَلَمَّا رَءَا ٱلۡقَمَرَ بَازِغٗا قَالَ هَٰذَا رَبِّيۖ فَلَمَّآ أَفَلَ قَالَ لَئِن لَّمۡ يَهۡدِنِي رَبِّي لَأَكُونَنَّ مِنَ ٱلۡقَوۡمِ ٱلضَّآلِّينَ فَلَمَّا رَءَا ٱلشَّمۡسَ بَازِغَةٗ قَالَ هَٰذَا رَبِّي هَٰذَآ أَكۡبَرُۖ فَلَمَّآ أَفَلَتۡ قَالَ يَٰقَوۡمِ إِنِّي بَرِيٓءٞ مِّمَّا تُشۡرِكُونَ "When the night grew dark over him, he saw a star. He said, 'This is my Lord!' But when it set, he said, 'I love not those that set.' Then when he saw the moon rising, he said, 'This is my Lord!' But when it too set, he said, 'If my Lord does not guide me, I shall surely be among those who go astray.' Then when he saw the sun rising in splendour, he said, 'This is my Lord! This is the greatest!' But when it too set, he said, 'O my people, I am free from your associating partners with God.'" Al-An'am · 6:76–78

This is, on the page, an account of someone arriving at monotheism by eliminative reasoning: observation, hypothesis, falsification, revised hypothesis. It is the procedure of the natural philosopher dressed in narrative form. The Qur’an presents this not as an embarrassment to be hidden but as the paradigmatic model of religious cognition.

Dawkins’s claim that faith means epistemic surrender may or may not be a fair description of the Athanasian Creed, the Augustinian doctrine of credo ut intelligam, or popular Christian fideism. It is, as a description of the Qur’an, simply false. The Qur’anic word for belief, īmān, derives from a root meaning to trust on the basis of recognition. It is closer to the medical patient’s trust in a competent physician — established by evidence of training and outcome — than to the leap-into-the-dark Kierkegaard imagined.

IV. The Qur’an’s War on Blind Imitation — Which Is Also Dawkins’s War

Here is the deepest irony in Dawkins’s anti-Islamic polemic. The single rhetorical weapon he wields most often against believers — the charge that they have inherited their religion uncritically from parents, communities, and authorities, never having examined it for themselves — is exactly the charge the Qur’an wields against its opponents.

The classical term for this vice is taqlīd: the blind imitation of one’s forebears. The word itself is post-Qur’anic — but the thing it names is one of the Qur’an’s most persistent targets, and the text returns to it again and again, with an intensity bordering on rage:

وَإِذَا قِيلَ لَهُمُ ٱتَّبِعُواْ مَآ أَنزَلَ ٱللَّهُ قَالُواْ بَلۡ نَتَّبِعُ مَآ أَلۡفَيۡنَا عَلَيۡهِ ءَابَآءَنَآۚ أَوَلَوۡ كَانَ ءَابَآؤُهُمۡ لَا يَعۡقِلُونَ شَيۡـٔٗا وَلَا يَهۡتَدُونَ "And when it is said to them, 'Follow what God has sent down,' they say, 'Nay, we follow what we found our fathers doing.' What! Even though their fathers had no understanding of anything, nor were they guided?" Al-Baqarah · 2:170

وَإِذَا قِيلَ لَهُمۡ تَعَالَوۡاْ إِلَىٰ مَآ أَنزَلَ ٱللَّهُ وَإِلَى ٱلرَّسُولِ قَالُواْ حَسۡبُنَا مَا وَجَدۡنَا عَلَيۡهِ ءَابَآءَنَآۚ أَوَلَوۡ كَانَ ءَابَآؤُهُمۡ لَا يَعۡلَمُونَ شَيۡـٔٗا وَلَا يَهۡتَدُونَ "When it is said to them, 'Come to what God has revealed and to the Messenger,' they say, 'Sufficient for us is what we found our fathers practising.' Even though their fathers knew nothing and were not guided?" Al-Ma'idah · 5:104

وَكَذَٰلِكَ مَآ أَرۡسَلۡنَا مِن قَبۡلِكَ فِي قَرۡيَةٖ مِّن نَّذِيرٍ إِلَّا قَالَ مُتۡرَفُوهَآ إِنَّا وَجَدۡنَآ ءَابَآءَنَا عَلَىٰٓ أُمَّةٖ وَإِنَّا عَلَىٰٓ ءَاثَٰرِهِم مُّقۡتَدُونَ قَٰلَ أَوَلَوۡ جِئۡتُكُم بِأَهۡدَىٰ مِمَّا وَجَدتُّمۡ عَلَيۡهِ ءَابَآءَكُمۡۖ قَالُوٓاْ إِنَّا بِمَآ أُرۡسِلۡتُم بِهِۦ كَٰفِرُونَ "In like manner We sent no warner to any town before you, but its luxurious ones said: We found our fathers following a religion, and we are walking in their footsteps. The warner said: What — even if I bring you better guidance than that which you found your fathers following? They said: We disbelieve in that with which you have been sent." Az-Zukhruf · 43:23–24

If Dawkins were a man of intellectual self-awareness, he would notice that the Qur’an’s polemic against inherited religion sounds startlingly like his own. The Qur’an’s complaint is not that people believe too much; it is that they have stopped thinking and substituted ancestral conformity for examined conviction. The book demands of every hearer what Dawkins demands of every viewer: stop pretending the question is settled by the fact that your parents settled it. Examine. Reason. Verify.

This is precisely why a Qur’an-only reader of the text occupies a paradoxical position relative to Dawkins. The Qur’an-only reader has done exactly what Dawkins says religious people refuse to do: he has set aside the inherited apparatus — Bukhārī, Muslim, the four Sunni schools, the Twelver Shīʿa chain, the Ashʿarī kalām, the mystical orders, the village mullah, the family expectation — and gone back to the text itself. He has applied a hermeneutic of suspicion to taqlīd. He has refused to mistake what his fathers did for what God said.

When such a reader is then told by Dawkins that he is a victim of inherited brain-virus indoctrination, the charge does not so much wound him as bewilder him. The reader is not a Muʿtazilite, not a Salafi, not a Sufi, not an Ashʿarī, not a Hanafī, not an Imāmī. He is a reader of one Book. And the Book itself told him to be.

V. The “Who Designed the Designer?” Move

Dawkins’s most famous philosophical move, repeated like a refrain throughout The God Delusion, is the regress argument: any God complex enough to design a complex universe must be at least as complex as that universe, and therefore must himself require a designer. To posit God as the explanation of complexity is to explain the explicandum with something that requires the same explanation. The regress is vicious. Therefore the explanation fails.

Mathematician John Lennox of Oxford (Dawkins’s own university) has responded to this argument with a precision that is worth recounting. The argument, Lennox notes, smuggles in a premise the theist has never granted: that God is a complex, contingent being of the same order as a designed universe. The classical theist position — held in Christianity by Aquinas, in Islam by al-Ghazālī and al-Rāzī, in Judaism by Maimonides, and (more importantly for our purposes) embedded in the Qur’an itself — is that the necessary being is not a contingent, composite, designed thing. It is precisely what terminates the regress, the only thing of which the question “who made it?” cannot intelligibly be asked, because to be of a kind that could be made is to be a created thing and therefore not God in the relevant sense.

To ask “who designed the designer?” is to mistake the conclusion for one more step in the chain. It is to imagine that the theist has posited a very large contingent thing and called it God, when the theist has in fact posited the only kind of thing that could be uncaused: a self-existent, non-composite, necessary reality.

The Qur’an articulates this with a directness that has no equal in any scripture:

أَمۡ خُلِقُواْ مِنۡ غَيۡرِ شَيۡءٍ أَمۡ هُمُ ٱلۡخَٰلِقُونَ أَمۡ خَلَقُواْ ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ وَٱلۡأَرۡضَۚ بَل لَّا يُوقِنُونَ "Or were they created of nothing, or are they themselves the creators? Or did they create the heavens and the earth? Nay, but they have no certainty." At-Tur · 52:35–36

Three logically exhaustive options are placed before the reader. Either the universe (and you within it) came from nothing — which is incoherent, since nothing has no causal powers. Or you created yourselves — which is impossible, since to create oneself one would have to exist before one existed. Or there is a Creator who is not himself a created thing. The verse does not argue for God; it argues that the alternatives to God are self-refuting. The reasoning is six centuries older than Aquinas’s Third Way and reaches the same conclusion in three lines.

Dawkins’s regress argument works only against a god whom no serious theology has ever proposed: a god who is just a very big designed creature. It does not touch the Qur’anic conception of al-Wājib al-Wujūd, the Necessary Existent, whose entire definition is the thing whose nonexistence is impossible. To attack this conception, Dawkins would have to engage with the contingency argument on its actual terms. He has, to date, refused to.

VI. Science and the Qur’an — Without the Embarrassment

A whole industry of Muslim popular apologetics — iʿjāz ʿilmī or “scientific miracles” literature — has, for half a century now, claimed that the Qur’an contains anticipations of embryology, plate tectonics, the Big Bang, black holes, and so on. This literature has been, frankly, an intellectual disaster. It cherry-picks verses, retro-fits them with modern meanings the original Arabic does not bear, and embarrasses the text by yoking it to a transient stage of scientific theory that will, like all such stages, be revised.

This essay will not defend that literature. The Qur’an does not need it.

What the Qur’an actually does — and this is far more interesting — is to repeatedly direct attention to the natural world as the locus of evidence for God’s existence and unity. It does so without offering mechanistic claims, without anatomizing the heart or the embryo, without inserting itself into the technical disputes of natural philosophy. It says, with remarkable restraint:

سَنُرِيهِمۡ ءَايَٰتِنَا فِي ٱلۡأٓفَاقِ وَفِيٓ أَنفُسِهِمۡ حَتَّىٰ يَتَبَيَّنَ لَهُمۡ أَنَّهُ ٱلۡحَقُّۗ "We shall show them Our signs on the horizons, and within themselves, until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth." Fussilat · 41:53

إِنَّ فِي خَلۡقِ ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ وَٱلۡأَرۡضِ وَٱخۡتِلَٰفِ ٱلَّيۡلِ وَٱلنَّهَارِ وَٱلۡفُلۡكِ ٱلَّتِي تَجۡرِي فِي ٱلۡبَحۡرِ بِمَا يَنفَعُ ٱلنَّاسَ وَمَآ أَنزَلَ ٱللَّهُ مِنَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ مِن مَّآءٖ فَأَحۡيَا بِهِ ٱلۡأَرۡضَ بَعۡدَ مَوۡتِهَا وَبَثَّ فِيهَا مِن كُلِّ دَآبَّةٖ وَتَصۡرِيفِ ٱلرِّيَٰحِ وَٱلسَّحَابِ ٱلۡمُسَخَّرِ بَيۡنَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ وَٱلۡأَرۡضِ لَأٓيَٰتٖ لِّقَوۡمٖ يَعۡقِلُونَ "In the creation of the heavens and the earth, in the alternation of night and day, in the ships that sail the sea with what profits humankind, in the water that God sends down from the sky giving life to the earth after its death, in His scattering abroad on it all manner of crawling creature, in the disposition of the winds, and the clouds compelled between heaven and earth — surely there are signs for a people who reason." Al-Baqarah · 2:164

The Qur’an’s relationship to the natural world is not that of a textbook competing with science. It is that of a sustained invitation to look at the world and ask what kind of reality could produce such order, such beauty, such intelligibility. Dawkins, oddly enough, agrees with the premise. His own writing on biology is celebrated precisely because it conveys awe at the natural world. The disagreement is not over whether nature is wonder-inducing. It is over whether the wonder terminates in itself or points beyond itself.

That is a real philosophical disagreement. It is not the disagreement Dawkins thinks he is having with Muslim apologists who chase phantom anticipations of relativity in Surah 70.

What the Qur’an does not contain is, equally, instructive. It does not contain the geocentric cosmology of pre-modern astronomy. It does not contain a flat earth. It does not contain the four humours, the bodily seat of intelligence in the heart-as-pump, or any of the technical claims of ancient Near Eastern medicine. It does not contain a global flood eliminating all life. It does not contain Joshua’s stopping of the sun. It does not contain biblical chronology. It is, on the level of natural-philosophical claims, conspicuously minimalist — a minimalism that the iʿjāz literature has been frantically working against for fifty years, and that the Qur’an itself, read plainly, recommends.

If the New Atheist wants to refute the Qur’an scientifically, he must identify a verse that asserts an empirical claim incompatible with established science. The list of such verses, after honest reading, is remarkably short. The list of verses the hadith claims and the popular preacher repeats is, by contrast, very long. Once again: the New Atheist’s actual target is the tradition, not the text.

VII. On Morality, Violence, and “Islam Is the Greatest Force for Evil”

The most morally serious charge Dawkins makes is the charge of harm. Islamic regimes oppress women, execute gay men, persecute minorities, conduct terror in the name of God. None of this is in doubt. The question is what the charge entails for the Qur’an as a text.

Here we must be ruthlessly careful in our levels of analysis. There are at least four distinct things being conflated in the standard polemic:

1. The Qur’an as text — what it says, in Arabic, read in its own internal coherence.
2. The hadith and sira — reports about the Prophet’s conduct, compiled two centuries later, with chains of transmission of varying reliability and a documented history of forgery.
3. The classical fiqh — the juristic rulings of medieval scholars, embedded in their political-economic context.
4. Contemporary Muslim conduct — the behaviour of some two billion people across 50 nation-states, ranging from village imams to Salafi militants to liberal academics to atheist-leaning cultural Muslims.

To indict (1) by pointing at (4) is the logical structure of saying: I have seen people do violence in the name of medicine; therefore medicine is the greatest force for evil. The argument is so plainly fallacious when stated in the abstract that one wonders how it survives in concrete form. It survives because Dawkins’s audience already feels the conclusion to be true and does not press the reasoning.

The Qur’an itself — and this is what the New Atheist will not engage with — articulates a moral framework that is anything but the war-on-the-world it is accused of being:

مِنۡ أَجۡلِ ذَٰلِكَ كَتَبۡنَا عَلَىٰ بَنِيٓ إِسۡرَـٰٓءِيلَ أَنَّهُۥ مَن قَتَلَ نَفۡسَۢا بِغَيۡرِ نَفۡسٍ أَوۡ فَسَادٖ فِي ٱلۡأَرۡضِ فَكَأَنَّمَا قَتَلَ ٱلنَّاسَ جَمِيعٗا وَمَنۡ أَحۡيَاهَا فَكَأَنَّمَآ أَحۡيَا ٱلنَّاسَ جَمِيعٗاۚ "For this reason We prescribed for the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul, unless for a soul or for corruption done in the land, it is as if he had killed all mankind. And whoever saves one — it is as if he had saved all mankind." Al-Ma'idah · 5:32

لَّا يَنۡهَىٰكُمُ ٱللَّهُ عَنِ ٱلَّذِينَ لَمۡ يُقَٰتِلُوكُمۡ فِي ٱلدِّينِ وَلَمۡ يُخۡرِجُوكُم مِّن دِيَٰرِكُمۡ أَن تَبَرُّوهُمۡ وَتُقۡسِطُوٓاْ إِلَيۡهِمۡۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ يُحِبُّ ٱلۡمُقۡسِطِينَ "God does not forbid you from those who do not fight you because of religion and do not expel you from your homes, that you should deal kindly and justly with them. Indeed, God loves those who act justly." Al-Mumtahanah · 60:8

يَـٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلنَّاسُ إِنَّا خَلَقۡنَٰكُم مِّن ذَكَرٖ وَأُنثَىٰ وَجَعَلۡنَٰكُمۡ شُعُوبٗا وَقَبَآئِلَ لِتَعَارَفُوٓاْۚ إِنَّ أَكۡرَمَكُمۡ عِندَ ٱللَّهِ أَتۡقَىٰكُمۡۚ "O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you into peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of God is the most righteous of you." Al-Hujurat · 49:13

ٱدۡفَعۡ بِٱلَّتِي هِيَ أَحۡسَنُ فَإِذَا ٱلَّذِي بَيۡنَكَ وَبَيۡنَهُۥ عَدَٰوَةٞ كَأَنَّهُۥ وَلِيٌّ حَمِيمٞ "Repel evil with that which is better, then behold, the one between you and him there was enmity will become as a devoted friend." Fussilat · 41:34

وَلَا يَجۡرِمَنَّكُمۡ شَنَـَٔانُ قَوۡمٍ عَلَىٰٓ أَلَّا تَعۡدِلُواْۚ ٱعۡدِلُواْ هُوَ أَقۡرَبُ لِلتَّقۡوَىٰۖ "And do not let the hatred of a people prevent you from being just. Be just — that is closer to righteousness." Al-Ma'idah · 5:8

Read against this, the verses that Dawkins-style polemic invariably extracts — “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191), “fight them until there is no fitna” (2:193) — are verses given in the explicit context of an active military campaign in which the early community is defending itself against expulsion and assassination. They are verses about combat against combatants, conditioned on the cessation of hostility (“but if they cease, then God is Forgiving and Merciful” — 2:192), and bounded by the universal prohibition on aggression (“and do not transgress; indeed, God does not love the transgressors” — 2:190). They are, in other words, ordinary jus-in-bello provisions of a kind found in any normative ethical system that recognizes the right of self-defence.

The contrast with the hadith-derived and jurist-elaborated edifice of jihad-as-perpetual-offensive-obligation, of dhimmi disabilities, of the binary of dar al-Islam and dar al-harb — none of which is in the Qur’an in those terms — is sharp. Dawkins attacks the jurists’ framework. He should attack the jurists. He has the wrong defendant in the dock.

VIII. The Qur’an-Only Position: Why the Critic Cannot Reach It

The position this essay has been articulating — that the Qur’an must be read on its own terms, distinct from the later traditional apparatus that has often misrepresented it — is not a polemical convenience. It is the methodological position the Qur’an itself prescribes for its readers.

The Qur’an describes itself as mubīn — clear, self-evidencing — at least a dozen times. It describes itself as tafṣīl kulli shayʼ — the detailing of all things (12:111). It describes itself as tibyānan li-kulli shayʼ — a clarification of all things (16:89). It commands the Prophet to follow nothing else:

ٱتَّبِعۡ مَآ أُوحِيَ إِلَيۡكَ مِن رَّبِّكَۖ لَآ إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا هُوَۖ "Follow what has been revealed to you from your Lord; there is no god but He." Al-An'am · 6:106

قُلۡ إِنَّمَآ أَتَّبِعُ مَا يُوحَىٰٓ إِلَيَّ مِن رَّبِّيۚ "Say: I follow only what is revealed to me from my Lord." Al-A'raf · 7:203

قُل لَّآ أَقُولُ لَكُمۡ عِندِي خَزَآئِنُ ٱللَّهِ وَلَآ أَعۡلَمُ ٱلۡغَيۡبَ وَلَآ أَقُولُ لَكُمۡ إِنِّي مَلَكٌۖ إِنۡ أَتَّبِعُ إِلَّا مَا يُوحَىٰٓ إِلَيَّۚ "Say: I do not say to you that I possess the treasures of God, nor that I know the unseen; nor do I say to you that I am an angel. I only follow what is revealed to me." Al-An'am · 6:50

It explicitly warns against accepting any other source of religious authority parallel to itself:

تِلۡكَ ءَايَٰتُ ٱللَّهِ نَتۡلُوهَا عَلَيۡكَ بِٱلۡحَقِّۖ فَبِأَيِّ حَدِيثِۭ بَعۡدَ ٱللَّهِ وَءَايَٰتِهِۦ يُؤۡمِنُونَ "These are the signs of God which We recite to you in truth. So in what discourse (ḥadīth) after God and His signs will they believe?" Al-Jathiyah · 45:6

أَفَغَيۡرَ ٱللَّهِ أَبۡتَغِي حَكَمٗا وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِيٓ أَنزَلَ إِلَيۡكُمُ ٱلۡكِتَٰبَ مُفَصَّلٗاۚ "Shall I seek other than God as a judge, when it is He who has sent down to you the Book, explained in detail?" Al-An'am · 6:114

أَوَلَمۡ يَكۡفِهِمۡ أَنَّآ أَنزَلۡنَا عَلَيۡكَ ٱلۡكِتَٰبَ يُتۡلَىٰ عَلَيۡهِمۡۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَرَحۡمَةٗ وَذِكۡرَىٰ لِقَوۡمٖ يُؤۡمِنُونَ "Are they not satisfied that We have sent down to you the Book which is recited to them? Surely in that is a mercy and a reminder for a people who believe." Al-Ankabut · 29:51

A Qur’an-only believer is not a sectarian innovation. He is a reader who has done what the text itself commanded. And he is, for that reason, the least available target for Dawkins’s most cutting argument. He has not inherited his religion uncritically from his fathers. He has not accepted the authority of medieval jurists because his ethnic community accepted them. He has not consented to a body of forged or dubious hadith on the say-so of an imam he never interrogated. He has stripped the inherited apparatus back to the foundational document and asked it to speak for itself.

When Dawkins denounces religious authoritarianism, the Qur’an-only believer agrees. When Dawkins denounces clerical privilege, the Qur’an-only believer agrees — and notes that the Qur’an itself calls priests and monks who consume people’s wealth in falsehood the agents of injustice (9:34). When Dawkins denounces blind obedience to tradition, the Qur’an-only believer agrees, and quotes 2:170. When Dawkins denounces stoning, apostasy executions, female mutilation, the silencing of women, and the persecution of religious minorities — the Qur’an-only believer agrees, and notes that none of these practices is mandated by the Qur’an, and that several are mandated against by it.

The disagreement that remains is the genuine one: whether the universe is the work of a Creator, and whether the Qur’an is His communication. That is a worthy disagreement. It is the one the New Atheist almost never gets to, because he is too busy fighting the village mullah he has never met.

IX. An Invitation, Not a Conclusion

This essay has not attempted to prove that the Qur’an is true. It has attempted something more modest and, I think, more honest: to clear the ground of misdirected attack so that the real question can be seen.

To Professor Dawkins, and to the very large audience that has trusted his characterization of Islam: the door of genuine engagement remains open. But the conditions of entry are not negotiable. They are:

1. Read the Qur’an. Not summaries, not Sam Harris’s footnotes, not selected memes circulated by ex-Muslim activists. Read it, in a serious translation (Abdel Haleem, Arberry, or Jones is a start), cover to cover, with the intellectual honesty you bring to a peer-reviewed paper.

2. Distinguish what is in the Qur’an from what is not. When you wish to criticize stoning, apostasy laws, FGM, niqāb requirements, child marriage, or any of the other practices you justly find repugnant, locate them in the corpus from which they actually derive. The hadith literature is fair game. The classical fiqh is fair game. The conduct of theocratic states is fair game. Attribution to the Qur’an, where the Qur’an does not say it, is intellectual fraud — and you have insisted, in every other domain of your work, on the standards of attribution.

3. Engage the Qur’an’s actual epistemology. Its repeated demand for evidence, its hostility to inherited dogma, its insistence on reason, its explicit appeal to the natural world as the site of God’s signs — these are the text’s actual claims, and they overlap, oddly enough, with much of what you say a sound epistemology should look like.

4. Confront the contingency argument as it is actually formulated, not as a strawman about a “designed designer.” If the regress terminates in a necessary being whose definition entails non-contingency, you must address the argument at that point. Otherwise you have not engaged the argument; you have engaged a parody.

5. Allow that the Muslim you are talking to may not be the Muslim you imagined. A Qur’an-only reader is not what your stereotype expects. He may agree with you about most of what you find offensive in inherited tradition. He may disagree with you about the existence of God. Honour the disagreement at the level it actually occurs.

What is asked, in short, is the application to the Qur’an of the standards Dawkins applies, rightly, to every other subject. No special pleading. No exemptions. But also no caricatures, no displaced targets, and no conflation of accumulated centuries of clerical mischief with the document at the centre of it all.

The Qur’an, on its own behalf, has only one request of the critic. It is the request the text places in the mouth of God:

قُلۡ هَاتُواْ بُرۡهَٰنَكُمۡ إِن كُنتُمۡ صَٰدِقِينَ "Bring your proof, if you are truthful." Al-Baqarah · 2:111

It does not ask to be believed. It asks to be read. To do less than that, and yet to denounce, is not science. It is not reason. It is, in the precise sense the Qur’an itself diagnoses, the inherited noise of the unexamined fathers — taqlīd by another name.

The Qur’an’s quarrel is with that noise. So, supposedly, is Richard Dawkins’s. It is past time the two of them met.

A Note on Sources

This essay draws on the Qur’an in its Arabic text, with translations adapted from M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford World’s Classics), A.J. Arberry (The Koran Interpreted), and Alan Jones (The Qur’an: A New Translation), cross-checked against the Arabic. Citations to Dawkins draw on The God Delusion (Bantam, 2006), his public statements documented on his foundation’s website, his BBC and LBC interviews of 2014–2024, and his posts of 2014–2019 on X (then Twitter), archived at Wikipedia’s “Views of Richard Dawkins.” Demographic figures follow the Pew Research Center’s global religious landscape update of June 2025, which puts the world’s Muslim population at roughly two billion. On the gap between Qur’anic prescription and classical fiqh on stoning and apostasy, see the work of Mohammad Hashim Kamali (The Right to Life, Security, Privacy and Ownership in Islam), Taha Jabir al-Alwani (Apostasy in Islam: A Historical and Scriptural Analysis), and the relevant entries in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. On the philosophical inadequacy of Dawkins’s regress argument, see John Lennox, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Lion, 2009), and the Qur’anic articulations developed by Hamza Tzortzis, The Divine Reality (FB Publishing, 2019). The Qur’an-only methodological position is articulated in the writings of Edip Yuksel, Kassim Ahmad, and the international “Qur’an Alone” network, though the present essay’s specific synthesis and engagement with Dawkins is the author’s own.