Click here for the second of three letters
Dear Sam,
In my first letter, I challenged your analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically, how your “thought experiment” extends grace to Israel but not to the Palestinians. In my second letter, I critiqued your framing of Islam as a regressive monolith. You are essentially promoting one interpretation of Islam—that of the mullahs and jihadists—as the only and correct interpretation of Islam.
Having covered the what of your arguments, I now want to address the how and the why. Are you aiming to humanise and reform Israeli and Palestinian societies, or are you content with dismissing one side as inherently and unchangeably genocidal? Even if you believe that Palestinians are in far more urgent need of reform than Israelis, a blunt-force approach is destined to fail. Persuasion is notoriously difficult; unvarnished truth might win debates in academia, but it rarely changes minds in the real world—especially in the realm of religion.
So, how do you persuade someone to moderate or change their religious beliefs? To answer that, I offer myself as a case study: someone who grew up in Pakistan believing in a personal, conscious God—in Allah—yet ultimately changed his mind.
How to change a Muslim’s mind
I grew up as a pretty devout Muslim. I prayed, read the Quran, fasted, and believed in a personal God who listened to my prayers and delivered small miracles—like returning a lost kite. At fifteen, I remember arguing with my atheist uncle, fiercely defending God—a conscious being that existed in a literal sense. Yet, by my late teens, I had decided that while there was mystery and awe, there was no consciousness counting my sins and good deeds.
Several factors drove this shift, but perhaps the most significant was the same uncle I argued with quietly handing me books on evolutionary theory by Richard Dawkins. There was no lecture—from my uncle or in the books—about how my religious beliefs were logically flawed.
Dawkins wrote with such passion and clarity, laying bare the “grandeur of reality,” that I fell in love with evolution. I was left in awe of “deep time” and how immense complexity could arise from the simple process of natural selection. I’m still enthralled by evolution and write about it.
Without my even realising it, this uncoerced, alternate worldview, anchored in evolutionary theory and science generally—the same uncle gave me books that explained Einstein’s relativity and Quantum Physics to the layman—began casting a shadow over my belief in a conscious creator.
While I would later study philosophy and approach the question of God’s existence more directly at the University of Toronto, it was Dawkins and the natural world that first surprised and embraced me. They lay the groundwork for me to adopt a radical new perspective, one best articulated by Einstein: “I do not believe in a personal God. It is sufficient for me to stand in awe of the structure of the universe.” This remains my belief today.
How not to change a Muslim’s mind
In my twenties, I read Dawkins’ The God Delusion and found that it vindicated my Einsteinian worldview. I thought it made sense. Having experienced Islamic extremism in Pakistan firsthand, I hoped more Muslims would question some of the worst—most dogmatic—aspects of their faith.
Unlike you, Gandhi did not equate Islam with its most literalist, violent fringe – instead, he held it up as an ideal to strive for, giving Muslims a reason to live up to their own highest ideals rather than pushing them into a defensive, reactionary corner
But now, in my 50s, my desire for unvarnished truth is tempered with a desire to persuade, to soothe fears and anxiety, to unite, to heal. All this can still be done while speaking truthfully. But truth has to be spoken carefully, gently, lovingly, sometimes tangentially. Sometimes even silence is needed.
And so, in middle age, I have mixed feelings about Dawkins’ The God Delusion. While it resonated with a quiet underground of doubters like me, it failed to persuade most theists. Indeed, it may have closed the door on moderate Muslims who might have otherwise read Dawkins’s books on evolution. In other words, I suspect that had I read God Delusion before Climbing Mount Improbable, The Blind Watchmaker, or The Ancestor's Tale, I might have been turned off by Dawkins and not read the books on evolution, or read them with suspicion so that the alternate world of evolution and science may never have come about.
The God Delusion warning: Harsh rhetoric can undercut profound work that persuades
If Dawkins opened the door for me to stand, like Einstein, in awe of the universe with no personal God, you helped open the door to an equally compelling and mystifying inner universe via your meditation app, Waking Up. In a way, you brought me full circle, back to a deep appreciation of all religions, including Islam and many other traditions featured on your app. As such, you and Dawkins hold a special place in my heart; a kind of bookends to my journey so far.
In a way, your rhetoric on Islam and Palestinians mirrors Dawkin’s God Delusion. Even if I grant you that you have logic on your side, you are not persuasive to the audience that really needs persuasion. The good work you have done in the realm of spirituality with the Waking Up app may be undercut, as God Delusion undercut Dawkins' most powerful work on evolution, the real gateway to secular humanism—and a synthesis with the best religion offers—that you and he want to promote.
A Role Model for Persuasion
If you truly want to foster reform and persuade, look to Gandhi and the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent—a conflict that rivals Israel-Palestine in its complexity and generational trauma.
Gandhi would have loved your Waking Up app. Its synthesis of spiritual teachings from many different traditions is something he embraced wholeheartedly. He was a model of religious integration, drawing on Buddhist ethics, Jain non-violence, Christian service, and Enlightenment human rights.
Where you and Gandhi would part ways is on your stance regarding Israel and Palestine, how you speak of Islam, and how your rhetoric inadvertently burns bridges rather than builds them.
Even in the political storm of Partition, Gandhi held a genuine belief that religions—including Islam—have profound good to offer when interpreted liberally rather than literally. He was able to genuinely exhort Muslims and Hindus to their better selves. Asking deeply religious populations to suddenly become secular humanists is a complete non-starter; appealing to the better angels of their own faiths remains the only viable path for those seeking reform.
Unlike you, Gandhi did not equate Islam with its most literalist, violent fringe. Instead, he held it up as an ideal to strive for. He deeply admired Islam’s egalitarian nature, particularly in contrast to the rigid hierarchies of his own tradition's caste system, observing: "The spirit of brotherhood is manifested in no other religion as it is in Islam." He frequently pushed back against those who painted the faith as inherently violent, stating unequivocally, "I do regard Islam to be a religion of peace in the same sense as Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism are." By emphasising these noble qualities, Gandhi gave Muslims a reason to live up to their own highest ideals rather than pushing them into a defensive, reactionary corner.
His non-literal interpretation of religion extended to Judaism as well. He advised his close Jewish friends—and the broader public—that the "Promised Land" was not a literal territory to be occupied, but lay within.
Crucially, while Gandhi spoke hard truths and criticised Muslims and Hindus, he was no armchair lecturer. He had formed deep, abiding friendships with Muslims, anchoring his unwavering belief in their inherent goodness. When he criticised them, he did so with real skin in the game, literally bleeding and starving for Hindu-Muslim unity. When communal violence peaked in 1947, he undertook gruelling fasts in Calcutta and Delhi, putting his own body on the line to physically break the cycle of violence.
He was so effective that Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, famously wrote: "In the Punjab we have 55,000 soldiers and large-scale rioting on our hands. In Bengal, our forces consist of one man, and there is no rioting... may I be allowed to pay my tribute to the One-Man Boundary Force."
Ultimately, Gandhi failed to keep India united. He was assassinated by a Hindu extremist a few weeks after his final fast, which stopped rioters from killing Muslims and successfully pressured the Indian government to release funds that belonged to the newly created nation of Pakistan.
Gandhi’s final years were marked by attacks from both Hindus and Muslims, despite his immense service to both. Like now, the people wanted tribalism. Successful influencers must inspire love in one group and hatred in another. Refusing to play that game leads to rejection from both sides—an honourable mark of non-partisanship. This tribalism explains why Gandhi is mostly forgotten in India and Pakistan even today. The nations remain tribal, enthralled by those who stoke fear, anger, and hate.
Yet, Gandhi’s legacy endured, inspiring leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. But it's not just these leaders who have changed the world, it's how non-violence has been taken up by the average citizen. Research shows that nonviolent civil resistance campaigns are far more effective than violent ones[1].
I desperately wish Palestinians would completely renounce violence and adopt Gandhi's sustained, highly disciplined non-violent protest. If they did, I have no doubt they would gain far more than violence has ever delivered.
And I wish that Israelis would relinquish violence, too—even for self-defence. Yes, I know this is hard, but it’s do-able, as Gandhi and Marin Luther King preached. If Israel did this and dropped their weapons, it is my belief there would be no genocide by Hamas, because the world would come to Israel's defence.
Albert Einstein—the man who perfectly encapsulates my own worldview—called Gandhi his "supreme moral compass,” likely because Gandhi, to his very last breath, extended love and empathy, even when his own life and that of his people were on the line.
If he could do it during the cataclysm of Partition, a rupture of Biblical proportions, we can do it now for Israel and Palestine.
Sincerely,
T A Ahmed
[1] In the 1990s, around 65% of non-violent movements succeeded in overthrowing a dictator. In the late 2010s, that figure was down to 34%. Violent movements are even less effective—their success rate is currently around 8%, down from a peak of more than 40% in the 1970s. (Protests Are Not Emotional Support Groups by Dan Storyev and Maria Kuznetsova (Persuasion, June 2026).