islam – Wissam Charafeddine

The Center for Inquiry says the Richard Dawkins Award honors a person who publicly represents secularism and rationalism, and CFI says its mission is to advance reason, science, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values. Sam Harris may fit the secular-celebrity part of that profile, but I do not believe he fits the humanist part. With Richard Dawkins set to present him the 2026 award in an online ceremony on April 18, this is exactly the moment to ask whether intellectual sharpness without moral clarity is really what CFI wants to celebrate. (Center for Inquiry)

My objection is not that Harris criticized Hamas. Anyone with a functioning conscience condemns the October 7 atrocities. My objection is that Harris has repeatedly framed Israel’s assault on Gaza not as a political catastrophe with history, occupation, dispossession, and civilian annihilation, but as a civilizational morality play. In January 2024 he described the issue as a “clash of cultures” in which “real civilization” exists “only on one side,” casting the fight as one between jihadists and “ordinary human beings.” That framing does not illuminate reality; it bulldozes it. Palestinians disappear as a people with rights and history and reappear only as background scenery in someone else’s war on barbarism. (Sam Harris)

Worse, Harris did not merely defend Israel’s right to respond. He dismissed the very charge of genocide as “patently false,” mocked it as the “most inept genocide in history,” and called it a “new blood libel.” That is not sober skepticism. That is rhetorical contempt aimed at a grave legal and moral question. Amnesty International concluded in December 2024 that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and Human Rights Watch found extermination and acts of genocide, with conduct and official statements that may amount to genocidal intent. Human Rights Watch also noted that these policies continued after multiple International Court of Justice provisional measures in 2024 ordering protections for Palestinians in Gaza and humanitarian relief, including water, food, electricity, and fuel. A serious thinker did not have to prejudge every legal question to remain decent here. He only had to refrain from sneering at the possibility while Gaza was being destroyed in real time. (Sam Harris)

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, has been one of the clearest international voices naming what much of the West refuses to face: in March 2024 she said the “threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide had been met,” and by July 2025 she described Gaza as “one of the cruellest genocides in modern history.” In the official language I could verify, she and fellow UN experts framed Gaza as an “urgent moral crossroads” whose destruction carries “irreversible consequences for our shared humanity and multilateral order” — which is really another way of describing what many people mean by the fall of Western civilization: a moral collapse dressed up as policy. A civilization that excuses genocide in Gaza, tolerates the bombardment and mass displacement of Lebanon, and joins or blesses illegal attacks on Iran while claiming to defend “order” is not defending law at all; Today’s Western civilization is a performing cruel barbaric empire in a suit and tie. UN experts this month called the attack on Iran “entirely illegal under international law,” warned that the forced displacement in Lebanon “would constitute yet another war crime,” and said this path is pushing the world toward a “moral and legal abyss.” Add to that the fact that Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons, the U.S. intelligence community said in 2025 that Iran was not building one, and Tehran continues to invoke its NPT right to civilian enrichment, while the IAEA has reiterated that armed attacks on nuclear facilities devoted to peaceful purposes violate the UN Charter and that such facilities “must never be attacked.” That is the real indictment: what is collapsing before our eyes is not merely the credibility of Western governments, but the pretense that Western civilization still stands for universal law, equal human dignity, or anything beyond selective morality backed by bombs.

That is why I say Harris is not worthy of this award. I am not arguing that he signed an order or pulled a trigger. I am saying that his public language has functioned as moral cover: it narrows sympathy, launders asymmetry, and trains his audience to treat Palestinian suffering as tragic but secondary—an unfortunate price of civilization defending itself. When a public intellectual responds to mass atrocity by ridiculing genocide warnings rather than reckoning with them, he is not modeling rational courage. He is modeling dogmatic ideological loyalty, and that is the furthest from reason. (Sam Harris)

The problem is broader than Gaza. Harris has spent years insisting that his criticism is only about ideas, not people, yet his own language routinely slips from critique of extremists into sweeping claims about Islam itself. He has written that “Islam is the Mother lode of bad ideas,” described a long struggle between “Western civilization and Islam,” and said “we are perpetually at war” with jihadists while presenting confusion about this as a civilizational failure. In the same period, he claimed the term “Islamophobia” was invented by “Iranian theocrats” to shut down criticism of Islam. That claim is historically shaky at best: the Oxford English Dictionary traces the word to the 1920s in English, and scholarship cited in search results traces French usage to 1910, long before the Iranian Revolution. (Sam Harris)

And here is the deeper problem: Islam is not just a detachable list of propositions floating in a vacuum. Even by Western standards, Britannica describes Islam as a major world religion, and the “Islamic world” as a complex of societies and cultures in which Muslims and their faith have been socially dominant. One of 4 people on Earth are Muslim, and Islam is as diverse as anthropology itself. The United Nations marks an International Day to Combat Islamophobia because anti-Muslim hatred is not imaginary word-policing; it is a real pattern of hostility directed at people and communities. It is stabbed children, and run over women with cars. So yes, ideas must be criticized, and Islam shall be criticized. But when a writer persistently speaks of Islam in civilizational terms and treats anti-Muslim animus as mostly a semantic trick, he helps create the very climate in which human beings are reduced to abstractions. It is the old white supremacist habit of dehumanization, just appearing now with a podcast microphone and a neuroscience résumé. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

The Richard Dawkins Award is supposed to honor secularism, rationalism, and scientific truth. Fine. But secularism without equal human dignity becomes sectarianism for people who pride themselves on not having a sect. Reason that can dissect superstition but cannot recognize mass dehumanization is not moral courage; it is a very polished blind spot. Sam Harris has every right to speak. CFI has every right to honor whom it wishes. But I also have every right to say that giving him this award—during the genocide in Gaza, after his repeated dismissal of genocide claims, and after years of flattening Islam into a near-total explanation of Muslim violence—betrays the humanist values CFI says it stands for. (Center for Inquiry)

If the Richard Dawkins Award is to mean anything, it should go to people who defend reason without abandoning humanity. Sam Harris, in my view, has failed that test. Not because he criticizes religion, but because he does so in a way that too often rationalizes hierarchy, excuses state violence, and treats one population’s fear as tragedy and another population’s destruction as argument. That is more tribalism and less enlightenment (Sam Harris). I would nominate Elen Pappe, Norman Finklestein, or Francesca Albanese herself for defending reason and humanity in the face of the fascist leaning current American dogmatic evangelical zionist administration and Israeli fanatic right government, that is exerting direct pronounced efforts to prohibit even proper language of reason from being used, social media from acting free, and commits a massacre of over 300 journalists in one year to burry reason.

Wissam Charafeddine

CFI Michigan Award Winner of Promotion and Defense of Science, Reason, Free Inquiry & Humanist Values

Islam Yakout Mohamed Mursi

One of the names that I will never forget. My brother from a different mother. A dark-skinned Alexandrian boy from Egypt with an amazing sense of humor, as it is common among Egyptians. Islam had no siblings, and I was his best friend. His family treated him like I am his brother. I was one of them. The kindness and compassion that his parents overflowed with to me were heartwarming .. one of the things which made me who I am today.

Let me talk to you about al-hanan… an Arabic word that translates to a mix of kindness, love, tenderness, kindliness, care, warm-heartedness, and a million other words that cover every bit and piece of those feelings. It translates as language, but it doesn’t translate as an emotion to the West. This word is not translatable to English because it is not about language. Language is there to symbolize something that exists. The famous Arabic poet, Nizar Qabani expresses his yearning to the hanan in his letter poem Five Letters to My Mother:

I am alone.
The smoke of my cigarette is bored,
and even my seat of me is bored
My sorrows are like flocking birds looking for a grain field in season.
I became acquainted with the women of Europe,
I became acquainted with their tired civilization.
I toured India, and I toured China,
I toured the entire oriental world,
and nowhere I found,
a Lady to comb my golden hair.
A Lady that hides for me in her purse a sugar candy.
A lady that dresses me when I am naked,
and lifts me up when I fall.
Mother: I am that boy who sailed,
and still longes to that sugar candy.
So how come or how can I, Mother,
become a father and never grow up.

From the hanan of my parents, to the overwhelming Charafeddine hanan, rooted deeply in the history of our family from Ahlulbait, the family of the Prophet that has been cloaked with tragedies, and manifested in my Grandmother, to the hanan of the parents of my frirends Islam and Firas, to the hanan of the warm salty beach that carresses the white sand softly, to the hanan of the sounds of Azan jumping playfully on the rocks of the mountains of khrofakhan … to the hanan of the oldmen eyes siting at a cafe bench watching us pass by … we were submerged with Hanan.

I never will forget an incident that happened to me when once I went to buy my Mother something from the supermarket. While coming back, I decided to take the side streets among the communal popular old houses. These streets are usually sandy and only lit by the small lamps above the metallic doors. I got a little scared for it was dark. I started running. While I was running, there was a construction metal piece coming out of the ground that hit my feet. It cut me right between my toes. I was bleeding. I dropped the merchandise from the bag. I collected them gently back into the plastic bag while limping on a bleeding foot. In that condition, one of the doors nearby opened. A middle-aged woman came out with thick glasses and Egyptian style hijab. She said: “What is wrong ya Mama?”

The word Mama entered my ears and comforted all my nerves. I didn’t need to speak, and she didn’t wait for an answer after seeing what answered her inquiry. She came to me and looked at my feet, and held my hand and pulled me to her house like a panicking mother. She was talking to me, but I don’t remember what she said anymore. But I remember she gave me a glass of water to drink and she was cleaning my foot from sand and blood, applied antibiotic (red medicine we used to call it), and bandaged it. She offered to call home, but I told her I can just walk home. I left. Never saw her again, nor I know her name. But she gave me another injection of hanan that would last me a lifetime.

The mosque was so close to our house like I mentioned before. Upon hearing from my teacher that praying in the mosque is 24 times better than praying at home, I started rushing to pray in the mosque everytime I hear the Azan. I went to the mosque so much and was the youngest person praying in the mosque, that the Imam visited my father to inquire if there were problems at home that I am fleeing from. My father expressed while laughing that there is nothing wrong at home and that I just loved praying in the mosque.

We learned French and English at the Emirates School in addition to Arabic off course. The French didn’t go well. The teacher gave up and quit. We stopped learning French, but still learned English, rarely used in the U.A.E. at that time.

One of the teachers was really proactive in the school, and she formed the Scholastic Police. She got us hats and scarves. Being the oldest class in the school, and I think I am talking third grade now, we were naturally the Scholastic Police. We were supposed to patrol the school and ensure that students didn’t go to the back of the school during lunch or recess and that they stay in the field. She nominated me as the captain of the police since I was very popular among my class and had good grades, but I refused. I wanted to reserve the right to be a bad boy. Being captian of the police brings too much attention. She appointed Mohamad, a boy whose father is an Emirati Sheik and his mother is a Filipino. Mohamad was the richest kid in school and his father was feared for being a deputy minister so no teacher would get Mohamad mad. Once Mohamad was sick, and we went a field trip to visit his house. It was a huge mansion with unlimited toys. Anyways, soon enough, we were using our positions in the Scholastic Police to allow our friends to go play in the back of the school. Nobody would listen to Captain Mohamad since he really had no real leadership. The whole idea backfired on the teacher, and the Principal canceled the Scholastic Police. We kept the hats and scarves.

Wissam and Mohamad in Emirates School — Me with the shorts, and Mohamad, and you can see his Scholastic Police Scarf

I had an Egyptian classmate called Ayman. Ayman went to buy something from the store with his bike, and a car struck him and he died. We were too young the understand the concept of death, and it was pretty much my first experience with it. The school went into mourning. Teachers were crying, and they played Quran in the school for few days. They were monitoring us to see if any of us are traumatized or deeply affected, but we weren’t. Nevertheless, we were under so much pressure to be deeply affected! Sitting in the field listening to Quran while our heads are down, Islam leans towards me and says: “pretend that you are crying”.

I don’t know how to pretend emotions. It is one of my problems I guess. My face shows what I truly feel. This has caused me so much trouble in life, but I like it. Early trouble is better than late trouble. I really don’t feel the tragedy of death, since it is inevitable. What is 100% predictable, cannot be surprising. I have always, and still do feel that way. The only concern I had was that Ayman borrowed my notebook on his last day of school. I was thinking it is impossible to get it back then. I never tried.

We had nothing in Khorfakan but each other, as friends, to keep ourselves busy and entertained. There was no TV, except one channel that played cartoons for a maximum of one hour a day. There were no electronic games. There was not one single swing in the city or slide. Soccer balls were rare. My father bought me one from Dubai. There was no theater, no gym, no soccer fields, no arcades, no parks, no toy stores, no children clubs. There was nothing but the mountains, the ocean, and your friends. Friends became an integral part of seeing and experiencing life. This became a deep characteristic of me. I had a hard time shed it away later on in life.

We would climb the mountain or play at the beach. We would bike to each other’s houses. The city was safe. We would just leave our bikes on the street, and they would never be stolen. We never needed chains. “Muslims don’t steal”. That is what we thought. We thought that stealing, adultery, murder, and paganism were things before Islam. There was so much trust.

Next time I will tell you when we played with the bomb till it went off on the beach!