Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz’s Book About Islam is Available Today in the U.S.

Atheist Sam Harris and Muslim Maajid Nawaz have written a book discussing the Islamic faith in the form of a conversation between the two. That also includes Nawaz correcting misconceptions about the faith held by Harris, who wasn’t raised in it.

It’s called Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue:

Their publishers at Harvard University Press wouldn’t give me permission to post an excerpt, but I had the chance to read it and it’s fascinating for people who want to see an extended version of the discussion that famously took place last year on Real Time with Bill Maher (the one that had Ben Affleck shouting “Racist!”).

This is the sort of civilized debate that never happens on television. People make mistakes. They’re corrected. They figure out where they overlap in their thinking. They discuss the best ways forward.

It’s a book that people like Reza Aslan and Glenn Greenwald could never write because they have a blind spot when it comes to ideological problems with Islam.

If people do have criticisms of the book, I’d love to hear them. But the negative reviews on places like Amazon seem to be written by people offended by the very idea of the book, not people who have read it and have any intelligent rebuttals to it.