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Bill Mahers recent monologue on Real Timeexcoriating self-professed liberals for going soft on Islam hotly debated again last Friday with Ben Affleck and Sam Harris, and expounded on in this exclusive Salon interview might well serve as a credo for atheist progressives the world over. He began by introducing a photo, originally posted on a social media site, showing a teenager in Pennsylvania mounting a statue of Jesus Christ in such a way as to create the impression that Jesus was fellating him. Noting that it may not be in good taste, Maher declared that theres no picture that makes my heart swell with patriotism quite like this one.

Why? He explained that in the United States, with separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution, the youth, on account of his sacrilegious prank, would not do jail time or face violence because liberal Western culture is not just different, its better. . . . rule of law isnt just different than theocracy, its better. If you dont see that, then youre either a religious fanatic or a masochist, but one thing you are certainly notis a liberal.

(In fact, Maher proved too sanguine about the supposedly religion-free workings of the U.S. justice system. As punishment for the irreverent post, a court ordered the teen to do community service, observe a curfew, and stay off social media for six months. Hardly comparable to facing a fatwa for drawing a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad, but indicative nonetheless of the worrisome pro-faith bias infecting at least courts of law in our supposedly secular republic.)

Maher included Barack Obama among those unwilling to talk straight about Islam, and rebutted the presidents repeated statements that ISIS is not Islamic by pointing out that vast numbers of Muslims across the world believe . . . that humans deserve to die for merely holding a different idea, or drawing a cartoon, or writing a book. This means, said Maher, that not only does the Muslim world have something in common with ISIS, it has too much in common with ISIS.

Mahers is no offhand opinion, but a blunt statement of fact. A wide-ranging 2013 Pew Research Center poll, conducted between 2008 and 2012 in 39 countries, offered a deeply disturbing, unequivocal overview of the faith-based intolerance prevalent across much of the Muslim world. Among other things, majorities of Muslims varying somewhat according to region favor putting to death apostates and adulterers, condemn homosexuality, abortion, and euthanasia as immoral, and believe that a wife must obey her husband. Large minorities condone honor killings. It should be noted that for practical reasons, the Pew Center could not survey Muslims in the repressive, highly conservative Gulf States (including Saudi Arabia, the homeland of Wahhabism), so, if anything, these numbers provide an excessively moderate summary of Muslim positions on issues progressives hold dear.

There can be no doubt about the wellspring of these nevertheless profoundly illiberal results. Texts in the Koran and the Hadith (the sayings and teachings traditionally attributed to the prophet Muhammad) back every one of the retrograde, even repulsive, positions the Pew Center catalogued. There are also passages in these writings that appear more tolerant, but the point is, Muslims looking to back up hardline interpretations of Islam do not lack for scriptural support.

Maher did not cite polls on his show he is, after all, a comedian but had he done so, he would have given doubters a way to verify the veracity of his monologue. That left room for interpretation and dispute, or at least for what passes for such on cable news channels. To decode Mahers pronouncements about Islam, CNN Tonights hosts Don Lemon and Alisyn Camerota called on Reza Aslan, the author of No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

To start the discussion, Lemon asked Aslan what he thought of Mahers performance. Jumpy and defensive from the start, Aslan quickly steered the discussion away from the gist of Mahers monologue that Islam does have a violence problem Western liberals need to be frank about and toward Mahers outrage at Female Genital Mutilation. FGM, was not an Islamic problem, its an African problem . . . a Central African problem, Aslan asserted. Nowhere else in the Muslim, Muslim-majority states is [FMG] an issue.

This is flat-out wrong. Though the barbaric practice predates Islam, FMG occurs, as far as is known, in at least twenty-nine countries (among them Egypt, Kurdistan, and Yemen) across a wide swath of Africa and the Middle East, and beyond. Muslims even exported the savage custom to Malaysia and Indonesia, where it is a growing problem. Those working locally to eradicate FGM have, understandably, a good deal of trouble making it an issue, given the lack on openness in discussing sex-related topics in the countries involved, so the situation may in fact be worse than is now recognized. And if it wasnt originally Islamic, it has so been for fourteen centuries. The Prophet Muhammad, in the Hadith, condoned it, even encouraged it (calling it an honorable quality for women) and ordaining only that it not be performed severely.

Aslans erroneous dismissal of FGM as a central African problem will help none of the tens of millions of girls and women who have suffered mutilation across the Islamic world, but it will give comfort to those who hope to continue butchering their victims without scrutiny from abroad. Neither CNNs hosts nor Aslan mentioned Mahers call to liberals to stop ignoring the practice, nor did they bring up his pointed words about Yales craven, abrupt cancelation, earlier this year, of the invitation to speak sent to one of FMGs most prominent victims, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the brave, Somali-born anti-Islam activist and writer. Maher blames a misguided attempt at evenhandedness by the schools atheist organization for the disinvitation, but surprise! it was actually the Muslim Students Association that first asked for her event to be called off.

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