Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, Melissa Chen: Bringing Enlightenment Values to the Middle East

The co-founders of Ideas Beyond Borders talk about bringing Steven Pinker and John Stuart Mill to an audience dying for them.

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Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, Melissa Chen: Bringing Enlightenment Values to the Middle East

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar and Melissa Chen are the outspoken, courageous co-founders of Ideas Beyond Borders (IBB), a nonprofit that translates books about pluralism, science, civil liberties, and critical thinking like John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now into Arabic and distributes them for free as e-books throughout the Middle East. They've also translated thousands of Wikipedia pages on the same topics and made them available to an audience desperately interested in new ways of thinking about culture, politics, and ideas.

Faisal left Iraq after extremists killed his brother and threatened his life, and Melissa was once a persona non grata in her native Singapore due to free speech activism. Founded in 2017, IBB is also funding underground girls schools in Afghanistan, actively helping Afghans find refuge from the Taliban, and running a campaign against censorship at endbannedbooks.org. Disclosure: I'm on the board of Ideas Beyond Borders.

This Reason Interview podcast was taped live on Monday, May 2, 2022, as part of the Reason Speakeasy series, held monthly in New York City. Go here for podcast and video versions of past events.

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Comments

[Don't look at me!]

Would

[Stuck in California]

Like that'd be ever in question.

[Stuck in California]

wait -- or do you mean Faisal Saeed Al Mutar ? Because if you would there, that'd be less obvious.

[Its_Not_Inevitable]

Wood?

[The Encogitationer]

Would wood and would wood!

Just to fucking piss off the Mullahs, Ayatollahs, and Dictators of the Middle East!

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

While I love Steven Pinker, even as racist and alt-right as he is, I've become very squishy about "bringing enlightenment values" to the middle east. It doesn't work. They don't want them.

[Moonrocks]

They don't want them.

Looking at the west, can you blame them?

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

Grooming young girls into marriage to creepy old men is de rigeur in the Middle East. They've truly enriched our culture!

[The Encogitationer]

That has been the awful human condition for millennia long before Islam.

The Secular West has shrugged off arranged marriage (in culture and for the most part by law) by giving primacy to the faculty of Reason and the concept of Individual Rights while Islam retained arranged marriage, honor killings, forced cliterectomies, and other barbarisms.

[Cal Cetín]

"The Secular West has shrugged off arranged marriage (in culture and for the most part by law) by giving primacy to the faculty of Reason"

Marriage practices based on reason? Western marriage choices may be many things, but reason-based?

And it's not an either/or choice between modern marriage, including adultery, easy divorce, same-sex unions, etc. on the one hand and clitorectomies on the other. I'm sure there's a name for the fallacy of saying "you're either with me or you're with [horrible thing or person]."

[The Encogitationer]

SJWs, Wokeists, and Tankies do not represent The West, neither do NatComs, Religious Rightists, or Alt-Rightists, nor does are present weed crop of intellectual and political leaders nor the worst of our entertainment industry.

Naturally, Westerners should offer what's best about our culture that made us the penacle of freedom, innovation, prosperity, and all good things.

[Nemo Aequalis]

Better them than us. I think we've had all the Enlightenment™ we can stand.

[The Encogitationer]

Maybe you need to get some oil on your brown shirt whenever you get an itch to burn witches.

Fuck Off, Witch-Burning Nazi!

[Ed Grinberg]

Fuck Off, Witch-Burning Nazi!

This is the sort of insightful intellectual commentary I come here for. A real deep thinker.

[The Encogitationer]

If you knew of his past posts, you'd probably agree with me. Even the ideas of Reason and Freedom don't have 100 percent market share and Nemo is one example.

[The Encogitationer]

Islam may be "the world's fastest growing religion," but it is also the world's fastest shrinking religion too.

When new converts see just how much irrationality and evil Islam holds, many quietly back away after just a few years. Many Imams also make futtle attemts to downplay the uglier parts of Islam to keep new converts in the fold and still moque attendance is only a fraction of the number of professed Muslims:

Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain Forum
Topic: Islam: The World's Fastest Shrinking Religion
https://www.councilofexmuslims.com/index.php?topic=15036.0

Ex-Muslim Freethinker Ibn Warraq has also written extensively on this subject:

Islam: Fastest Shrinking Religion in the World
https://robertspencer.org/2015/07/islam-fastest-shrinking-religion-in-the-world

[The Encogitationer]

Islam: Fastest Shrinking Religion in the World (Part 2)
https://robertspencer.org/2015/08/islam-fastest-shrinking-religion-in-the-world-part-2

I might add by the definition of Islamic texts themselves, Islam is the fastest shrinking religion. Islam holds that all of the children of Adam were born in a state of submission to Allah ( the meaning of the word "Islam,",) but many fall away by a process of 'forgetting.'

New followers of Islam are frequently called "reverts" to Islam instead of "converts." Then, of course, when they see what Islam is really like, they "forget" again.

[The Encogitationer]

Also, Steven Pinker is neither racist nor Alt-Right. That whole thing of being of Jewish heritage and sporting an Isro kind of disqualifies him from the Alt-Right crowd with their soupbowl haircuts. 🙂

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

nonprofit that translates books about pluralism, science, civil liberties, and critical thinking

At least two of these ideas are rooted in Whiteness.

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

WHOA WHOA WHOA, REASON, WHITE SUPREMACY MUCH?

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

Ouch, Reason... have you vetted Chen via Fiona?

Ironically, the very woman who helped Yee seek asylum in the States, said in [Chen's] video, “In fact I volunteer personally to escort him on his one-way ticket back, whether he likes it or not”.

She [Chen] reiterated her call to get Yee out of America, stating “being in America is a privilege, not a right”.

[The Encogitationer]

Well, Under U.S. law, people claiming asylum cannot have violated the rights of others and cannot be part of Totalitarian movements such as Nazism or Communism. Whether he just said stupid, terrible things or whether he has actually threatened or molested children does warrant investigation.

[Don't look at me!]

Stole this from the Twitter link above:

“People breaking the law is no excuse for stripping law abiding citizens of their rights”.

[voluntaryist]

A "law abiding citizen" has forfeited their conscience, their right to think for themselves, by following the contradicting, immoral, irrational dictates invented by rulers, to control the ruled, to make some servants of others.

[Uncle Jay]

I'm betting Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, Melissa Chen will be killed by Muslim fundamentalists within 90 days for their "blasphemy."
Any takers?

[Rev. Arthur L. Kuckland]

I will take the over, solely based on the thought that they are only known to reason readers

[The Encogitationer]

I'm never a betting man, but Ibn Warraq, Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Mariyam Namazie, Armin Navabi, and many others have been Ex-Muslims for years.

Granted, they frequently write, speak, and even live under pseudonyms and/or keep 24/7/365 security, some operating in fully- or partially Islamic countries end up arrested, imprisoned, tortured, or murdered, but nevertheless survival is possible.

List of Former Muslims--Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_Muslims

The more freedom-loving people of the U.S. and The West support them, the more prolific and better off Ex-Muslims will be.

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