Is ISIS Evil?
Morality, Religion, and Self-Deception.
By Professor Todd Calder (Saint Mary’s University)
November 05, 2016 Picture: Stringer/Reuters.
This article is part of The Critique’s November/December 2016 Issue “The Great War Series (Part III): Defeating ISIS”.
I. Introduction
In contemporary moral and political discussions, the concept of evil is used to pick-out the most morally despicable sorts of actions, characters, events, practices, etc. To call someone “evil” in this context is to condemn them to the greatest extent possible.
Since its inception in 2013, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has frequently been called evil by journalists, politicians, and religious leaders. These ascriptions seem entirely appropriate. ISIS has used particularly horrific tactics to combat its enemies and recruit members, including attacks on civilian populations (such as the recent attacks in Paris), public beheadings, abductions, slavery, trafficking of women and children, and the forced recruitment of children. It seems that if anything is evil, ISIS is.
But is anything evil? Almost as frequently as the word “evil” is used to describe terrorists and terrorist groups such as ISIS, reflective journalists and intellectuals have questioned our use of the term “evil.” These critics suggest that evil is an outdated, vague, misleading, dangerous, and unhelpful concept that should not be used in contemporary moral and political discussions. The Australian philosopher Luke Russell calls people who believe we should abandon the concept of evil “evil-skeptics.” [1] In this essay I consider the most compelling reasons for evil-skepticism and offer reasons to reject this view. I argue that ISIS is evil, but that we need to be clear about what we mean by this. The essay begins with some important distinctions.
II. Individuals, Collectives, Persons, and Actions
When we say that ISIS is evil, we might mean several different things. On the one hand, we might mean that the group, or organization, itself, is evil. On the other hand, we might mean that some, or all, of ISIS’s members are evil.
Furthermore, when we say that ISIS is evil we might mean that ISIS itself, or its members, are evil persons. Or we might mean that ISIS itself, or its members, are evildoers, but not necessarily evil persons. In all likelihood when most of us say that ISIS is evil we mean several of these different things at once. However, it is important to be clear about the different sorts of claims people might be making when they say that ISIS is evil.
If the concept of evil picks-out only the most morally despicable sorts of actions, characters, events, etc., then to say that ISIS, itself, is evil is to say that ISIS is capable of being morally responsible for what it does. For it is only appropriate to morally condemn an entity if that entity has the capacity for moral responsibility.
It is controversial whether organizations, themselves, can be morally responsible for what they do. Some philosophers, such as Manuel Velasquez, argue that only individuals can be morally responsible for what they do [2]. According to this view, claims about the moral responsibility of organizations are reducible to claims about the moral responsibility of individual members. Other philosophers, such as Peter French, argue that organizations, themselves, are moral agents [3]. According to this view, claims about the moral responsibility of organizations should be taken at face-value and are not reducible to claims about the moral responsibility of individuals.
I favour French’s position, but I won’t argue for it here. Instead, I’ll focus on the claim that individual members of ISIS perform evil actions. If organizations, themselves, can perform evil actions it will be because they have characteristics relevantly similar to those characteristics that allow individual human beings to perform evil actions. I discuss these characteristics below.
When we claim that individual members of ISIS are evil, do we mean that they are evil persons or evildoers? An evildoer is someone who performs, or has performed, at least one evil action. An evil person is someone whose overall character is evil. Not all evildoers are evil persons, since someone might perform an evil action uncharacteristically, for example, under abnormal stress. And not all evil persons are evildoers, since some of the morally worst sorts of people, i.e. evil persons, are too cowardly, incompetent, or lazy to perform evil actions, and these vices do not make our characters any better. It is a harsher moral judgement to call someone an evil person than it is to call her an evildoer. When we say that members of ISIS are evil we might mean that they are evil persons. But we might mean, instead, that they are evildoers but not evil persons.
III. Is Evil is a Religious Concept?
Some evil-skeptics believe we shouldn’t use the concept of evil in moral and political discussions because evil is essentially a religious concept that has no application in secular contexts. On this view, to say that ISIS is evil is to say that ISIS, or its members, are in league with Satan or otherwise possessed by demonic supernatural forces. If we don’t believe that Satan or demonic supernatural forces exist, then we shouldn’t believe that evil exists. Thus, the concept of evil should only be used in religious or fictional contexts and not in serious moral and political discussions about the real world.
But does evil necessarily refer to Satan or demonic supernatural forces? I don’t think that it does. Evil is primarily a moral concept that refers to the most morally despicable sorts of actions, characters, events, etc. The notion of evil is used in religious contexts, but so are lots of other moral concepts such as good, bad, virtue and vice. If we don’t want to reject these other moral concepts, then we shouldn’t reject evil.
Evil is only a religious concept if we cannot make sense of it without making reference to other religious concepts such as God or Satan. The concept of sin is a religious concept in this sense since it necessarily makes reference to transgressions of God’s moral laws. Thus, to rebut the view that evil is a religious concept it is sufficient to show that plausible secular accounts of evil exist. I do this below.
III. Does Evil Entail an Implausible Moral Psychology?
Some evil-skeptics believe we should reject the concept of evil because it requires us to accept a controversial, if not obviously false, view of human psychology. According to this view of human psychology there are two sorts of people: evil and good. Evil people are malicious, act from incomprehensible motives, and are incorrigible and unchangeable. Good people are just like you and me: we sometimes do wrong, but we would like to do right and can be persuaded to act correctly through reason and fear of punishment.
The evil-skeptic argues that this black-and-white view of human psychology is entailed by ascriptions of evil. To say that someone is evil is to say that she is malicious, incorrigible, unchangeable, and acts from incomprehensible motives. The problem with this view of human psychology is that (most) real people who do terrible things are not like this. Most people who cause other people serious harm do so from selfishness or other comprehensible motives. And most people who cause serious harm can be reasoned with and changed, at least to the same extent that the rest of us can. Evil-skeptics worry that the binary view of human psychology entailed by ascriptions of evil suggests (wrongly) that people who cause serious harm are beyond the moral pale and may be subjected to inhumane treatment.
In response to this objection we can argue that the binary view of human psychology is not entailed by the concept of evil. A more realistic view of evil and human nature allows for a diversity of evil actions and persons. People perform evil actions for a variety of motives, most of which are comprehensible, e.g. power, wealth, and revenge. Further, there is no reason to think that most evil people cannot be constrained or changed by punishment or good reasoning. Moral monsters exist. Psychopaths such as Dennis Rader who torture and kill for pleasure act from incomprehensible motives and are likely incorrigible and unchangeable. But not all evildoers are sadistic psychopaths. If evil is synonymous with sadistic psychopathy then very few people are evil. But the notion of evil is broader than this. Not only are sadistic psychopaths evil, but so were many Nazis during World War II.
A realistic view of evil and human psychology recognizes that most of us could become evil and that most evil people are not very different from the rest of us. This view of evil and human psychology is supported by the results of some famous experiments conducted by social psychologists Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo [4]. In Milgram’s experiments ordinary Americans were asked to administer increasingly painful electric shocks to people who they believed were also innocent participants in an experiment on learning. A surprising 65% of the subjects were willing to inflict the highest level of shock (450 volts) even though they believed that these shocks were extremely dangerous and possibly fatal. They did so, not because they were threatened or coerced, but because they were asked by an experimenter working for Yale University.
In Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, ordinary college students were randomly assigned the roles of prisoner or guard. Zimbardo allowed the guards to design prison rules and treat the prisoners as they saw fit. What was to be a two-week experiment was discontinued after only six days to prevent the further escalation of abuse and violence perpetrated by the guards on the prisoners.
Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s experiments suggest that most of us could become evil in the right circumstances. Thus, the evil-skeptic is correct that we should reject a binary view of human psychology according to which evil people are incorrigible, unchangeable, and act from incomprehensible motives, while good people can be constrained by reason and punishment and act from comprehensible motives. But there is no reason to believe that the concept of evil entails this view of human psychology.
IV. Is Evil too Dangerous?
A final criticism has its origins in Friedrich Nietzsche’s attack on the concept of evil in his Genealogy of Morality [5]. Nietzsche’s idea is that we should question the motives of people who make ascriptions of evil. Nietzsche locates the origins of the concept of evil in feelings of hatred and resentment. He believes the concept was developed by the weak and the powerless to attack and oppress the noble and the strong. In a similar vein, contemporary evil-skeptics argue that ascriptions of evil are not used to make truthful statements or judgements but to demonize enemies and implement politically expedient practices and policies that subject adversaries to overly harsh treatment. For instance, by calling terrorists “evildoers” political and religious leaders of Western democratic countries seem at times to suggest that terrorists are incorrigible, unchangeable, act from incomprehensible motives, and/or are possessed by Satan. The implication is that if terrorists have these attributes then we are justified in treating them inhumanely.
A related criticism is that, even if we do not intend to demonize others by calling them evil, we may do so inadvertently due to ambiguity surrounding use of the term “evil.” Evil-skeptics argue that if we remove “evil” from our lexicon we make our moral and political discourse less likely to lead to further injustices, whether these injustices are brought about intentionally or unintentionally.
We can make several responses to these criticisms. First, we can note, as I did above, that, properly understood, the concept of evil does not imply that evildoers are incorrigible, unchangeable, act from incomprehensible motives, and/or are possessed by Satan. Second, we can agree that the term “evil” is ambiguous but deny that that is a good reason to abandon the concept. If the term evil is ambiguous then we should be careful to say what we mean when we use the term, but that is no reason to abandon the concept altogether. Furthermore, if “evil” is an ambiguous term then more conceptual work needs to be done on it (not less).
“If the term evil is ambiguous then we should be careful to say what we mean when we use the term, but that is no reason to abandon the concept altogether.”
The problem with abandoning the concept of evil is that doing so will not make the most morally despicable sorts of actions, characters, events, etc. go away. It will only deprive us of the conceptual tools to discuss and combat this important category of immorality. Without the concept of evil we are forced to describe the morally worst sorts of actions, characters, and events as “very wrong” or “very bad” which does not adequately capture the moral significance and gravity of what we are describing.
VI. A Theory of Evil
Now that we have considered, and responded to, the most compelling arguments for evil-skepticism, we can return to the question of whether ISIS is evil. To answer this question we need to know what makes actions and people evil, i.e. we need theories of evil action and evil personhood. I’ll begin with a somewhat simplified version of a theory of evil action which I have developed elsewhere. On this account, to perform an evil action we must cause or allow significant harm for an unworthy goal and believe that this is what we are doing or be responsible for our ignorance. By significant harm, I mean a harm that stands-out in one’s life (or would stand out in the life of a person who isn’t regularly subjected to such harms) and has long-lasting negative psychological effects. A slap on the face is not a significant harm, a severe beating might be; so might solitary confinement.
A significant harm is caused, or allowed, for an unworthy goal if the goal for which the harm is caused, or allowed, does not make-up for the disvalue of the harm. In other words, if the state of affairs that would result if the harm was suffered and the goal achieved would be less valuable than the state of affairs that would result if the harm did not occur and the goal was not achieved, then the goal is unworthy of the harm. Causing significant harm for pleasure, entertainment, career advancement, power, etc. is evil on this view. Causing significant harm to one person to save five others from similar harm is not evil on this view, although it might still be wrong [See Steinhoff’s application of the trolley problem to the question of whether one should bomb ISIS].
An important part of the theory is the condition that to perform an evil action we must believe that we cause, or allow, significant harm for an unworthy goal, or be responsible for our ignorance. For it isn’t evil to cause significant harm for an unworthy goal purely by accident. For instance, it wouldn’t be evil to hit a man on the head with a snowball even if he happens to have an abnormally soft skull and therefore dies from the blow; not unless you have good reason to believe that he has this abnormal condition.
We have good reason to believe that we do not cause significant harm or that we cause significant harm for a worthy goal if these beliefs are adequately supported by available evidence. If we have no reason to think that the man we are about to hit in the head with a snowball has an abnormally soft skull, we are not responsible for our ignorance about the significant harm that we are about to inflict on him.
We are responsible for our false beliefs about the significance of the harm we cause or the worthiness of the goal for which we cause it, if our beliefs are not adequately supported by available evidence. In these cases we use techniques of self-deception to evade acknowledging the truth about what we do. In his book Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust [6], David Jones discusses several techniques used by self-deceivers including: (1) avoiding thinking about the truth, (2) distracting themselves with rationalizations that are contrary to the truth, (3) systematically failing to make inquiries that would lead to evidence of the truth and (4) ignoring available evidence of the truth or distracting their attention from this evidence.
Adolf Hitler is a good example of a self-deceptive evildoer. Hitler could not accept that Germany, and the German people, were responsible for losing World War I and for their failing economy. Instead, he blamed Germany’s troubles on a Jewish conspiracy. He used various techniques of self-deception to convince himself that Jewish people are inherently and irredeemably evil and that they were the cause of Germany’s problems.
For instance, he sought-out unreliable information about Jews in anti-Semitic pamphlets, he made no attempt to seriously consider other possible explanations for Germany’s troubles, and he ignored evidence suggesting that Jews are just like other people in all morally important respects, such as his friendly personal relationships with various Jews.
However, Hitler was not the only self-deceptive evildoer during the Nazi era. Many, if not most, Nazis were similarly self-deceptive. For instance, Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible for the transportation of millions Jews to the concentration and extermination camps, did not question the morality of the Final Solution (a euphemism for the Holocaust) because he cared more about his career than he did about whether he played a role in an atrocity. Hitler stands-out as particularly evil because of the very active and central role he played in bringing about the Holocaust.
VII. ISIS and Evil
In light of the theory of evil explained above, let us now consider whether it is appropriate to call members of ISIS “evildoers.” There are three questions to consider: (1) did members of ISIS cause significant harm? (2) Were these harms inflicted for unworthy goals? And (3) did the perpetrators of these harms believe they caused significant harms for unworthy goals, or were they responsible for their ignorance? The answer to the first question is pretty clearly yes: beheading, torture, rape, murder, etc. are all significant harms that have been inflicted by members of ISIS.
The second question (whether these harms were inflicted for unworthy goals) is more difficult to answer, and must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. It might be that some significant harms perpetrated by members of ISIS were for worthy goals, although I doubt that many, if any, of them were. Let us take the recent terrorist attacks in Paris as an example. 130 non-combatants were killed and 368 were injured. ISIS claims that the attacks were in retaliation for airstrikes on ISIS targets carried-out by France.
Should this justification convince us that the Paris attacks were carried-out for a worthy goal? It isn’t obvious that it should. The terrorist attacks certainly didn’t stop France from making airstrikes against ISIS targets. On the contrary, the first thing France did after the attacks (besides searching for the perpetrators and their conspirators) was to increase airstrikes on ISIS targets. Perhaps this is precisely what ISIS wanted. Airstrikes by Western countries hurt ISIS if they hit valuable military targets. But they often help ISIS by killing non-combatants and destroying civilian infrastructure which turns public opinion against ISIS’s enemies and makes it easier for ISIS to get new recruits.
Although I think it is false, let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that the Paris attacks improved ISIS’s position in their war against their enemies. However, even if that were true, the attacks would only have been for a worthy goal if they made, or will make, for a state of affairs that is more valuable than the state of affairs that would have resulted if they did not occur. How might that be true?
Perhaps, the Paris attacks will be so effective at increasing bombing by France and thereby turning public opinion against ISIS’s enemies that ISIS wins the war. This would allow ISIS to set up a stable caliphate in Iraq and Syria and perhaps elsewhere. Would that create enough good to compensate for the harm caused during the attack? Obviously, the answer to this question is controversial. ISIS members believe that the world would be much better-off if they were able to establish a stable caliphate, while most others disagree. Let’s leave it at that for the moment and consider a less controversial case.
Here is a quote from a New York Times article written by Rukmini Callimachi, posted August 15, 2015:
“In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old [Yazidi] girl [who had been abducted and enslaved by ISIS], the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted. He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her”.
It is obvious that what this ISIS fighter did (rape a 12-year-old girl) was significantly harmful and for an unworthy goal (sexual pleasure). But before we can say whether the ISIS fighter performed an evil action, we must consider whether he believed that he caused significant harm for an unworthy goal, or was responsible for his ignorance. This is the third question that needs to be answered before we can determine whether ISIS members have performed evil actions.
The ISIS fighter described in this article seems to have believed that by raping the preteen girl he was following the dictates of the Quran, and thus, not doing anything wrong. There is some textual support for this belief. According to the Quran it is permissible to have sexual intercourse with slaves [7]. Furthermore, a supplementary holy book (Sunan Abu Dawud) suggests that it is permissible to have sex with captured slaves in the presence of their husbands, if they are unbelievers [8]. Presumably, this sex would be nonconsensual.
ISIS draws on this sort of textual evidence to encourage its members to believe that the Quran allows them to buy, sell, and rape slaves who are unbelievers. However, most Muslims do not read the Quran and other holy books as endorsing slavery or rape [9]. Some of these Muslims argue that slavery is not encouraged in the Quran, but rather, recognized as a fact of life, inherited from a time prior to Islam. They point out that, in several places, the Quran asks believers to free their slaves [10]. Further, in several sections of the Quran men are encouraged to be kind and equitable to women (and slaves) which seems inconsistent with rape [11]. Why should an ISIS fighter accept the view of the Quran offered by ISIS leaders over the view accepted by moderate Muslims who denounce slavery and rape?
Furthermore, even if ISIS’s interpretation of the Quran is correct and it is permissible to rape sexual slaves, it does not follow that doing so is for a worthy goal. What would the world need to be like for the rape of a 12-year-old girl to result in enough good to make-up for the harm she suffers? And if, by some miracle, raping 12-year-old girls in these cases does result in tremendous amounts of good, we have no reason to think that it does.
In response an ISIS leader might argue that since it is written in the holy books that Allah allows these rapes, we do have good reason to believe that they result in enough good to make-up for the harm. But other explanations exist. For instance, perhaps Allah allows for some evil in the world. Or perhaps these holy books misrepresent Allah’s will. Or perhaps Allah doesn’t exist. Whatever the case may be, our question is: did the ISIS fighter have good reason to believe that raping the preteen girl was for a worthy goal?
Before answering this question, it is important to point out that the ISIS fighter had self-interested reasons to believe that raping the girl was permissible and for a worthy goal: he wanted to rape the girl, and so, he wanted to believe that it was permissible and for a worthy goal. There are also self-interested reasons for ISIS to encourage their members to believe that raping captured girls is permissible: the promise of guilt-free (non-consensual) sex with virgins can be used to recruit and motivate fighters. Thus, both the ISIS fighter and ISIS itself have motives to be self-deceptive about the value and permissibility of raping girls in these situations.
Let’s review the information available to the ISIS fighter at the time he made his decision to rape the girl to see if it was reasonable for him to believe it was for a worthy goal. It would have been obvious to him that the girl did not want to have sexual intercourse with him and that she would suffer terribly from what he was about to do to her (unless, of course, he was evading acknowledgement of this truth). He knew that the goal of his action was his own sexual pleasure. He knew that on ISIS’s interpretation of the Quran raping the girl was permitted, but that ISIS leaders had self-interested reasons for this interpretation. And he knew that most Muslims condemn rape. Given this information, what should he have believed? It seems obvious that he should have believed that raping the girl was most probably for an unworthy goal. But he may have believed that raping the girl was for a worthy goal (or he might not have thought about it much at all) because he may have used techniques of self-deception to evade acknowledging the true nature of his actions.
Let’s return, briefly, to the ISIS terrorists who took part in the Paris attacks. These terrorists may have believed that they were causing significant harm for a worthy goal (the establishment of a stable caliphate). But what should they have believed given an unbiased assessment of available evidence? They should have believed that it was unlikely that the harm they caused would do much to further their goals, and that, even if it did, it is questionable whether establishing a religious dictatorship by force in a territory occupied by people with diverse religious and political beliefs would be an overall good, never mind good enough to make-up for the harm of the attacks. And so it goes for most violent actions perpetrated by members of ISIS and other terrorist groups.
Thus, it seems that members of ISIS have performed evil actions. But are they evil people? Only if their evil actions are characteristic of the sorts of people they are. In other words, members of ISIS are evil people only if they have strong dispositions to desire to cause other people significant harm for unworthy goals on a regular basis. This may be true of some members of ISIS and not of others.
What about ISIS itself? Is ISIS, itself, an evildoer? Is ISIS, itself, an evil organization? ISIS, itself, is capable of performing evil actions and being an evil organization only if it has characteristics that are relevantly similar to those that allow individual human beings to perform evil actions and be evil persons. For instance, to perform an evil action ISIS must be able to cause, or allow, significant harm for an unworthy goal and believe that that is what it does or be responsible for its ignorance. I think it makes sense to say that that is what ISIS does when it encourages its members to buy, sell, and rape sexual slaves, or when it orchestrates a terrorist attack. However, as mentioned in Section 2, it is controversial whether organizations, themselves, are capable of performing evil actions or whether only members of organizations can perform evil actions. This topic is beyond the purview of this essay, and so, I will not pursue it any further here.
Conclusion
In this essay I have argued that evil-skeptics do not give us good reason to abandon the concept of evil. Plausible secular theories of evil are available that do not entail an implausible binary conception of human psychology or suggest that we should treat evildoers inhumanely. According to the theory of evil explained in this essay, to perform an evil action we must cause or allow significant harm for an unworthy goal and believe that that is what we are doing, or be responsible for our ignorance. This theory of evil does not make reference to Satan or the supernatural, allows for a diversity of comprehensible motives for performing evil actions, and does not entail that evildoers are incorrigible or unchangeable.
With this theory of evil in hand, I have argued that some members of ISIS have performed evil actions, and that it is likely that some members of ISIS are evil persons. It might appear that my support for the claim that ISIS is evil reflects my bias in favour of Western countries and their allies who oppose ISIS. However, nothing I say here suggests that ISIS’s enemies are free from blame and have not performed evil actions of their own. It might be that in their war against ISIS, Western countries and their allies have caused ISIS fighters and non-combatants significant harms for unworthy goals while either believing that that was what they were doing or being responsible for their ignorance. The sad truth about evil is that it often leads to more evil. The hope is that by recognizing this fact, and seeking to understand the nature of evil more fully, we might be able to break this cycle.
Footnotes & References
[1] Luke Russell, “Evil-Revivalism Versus Evil-Skepticism,” Journal of Value Inquiry 40 (2006): pp. 89-105.
[2] Manual Velasquez, “Debunking Corporate Moral Responsibility,” Business Ethics Quarterly 13, No.4 (2003): pp. 531-562. See also, Jan Narveson, “Collective Responsibility,” Journal of Ethics 6, No. 2 (2002): pp. 179-198.
[3] Peter French, “The Corporation as a Moral Person,” in Collective Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics, ed. Larry May and Stacey Hoffman (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1991), pp. 133-149. See also, Tracy Isaacs, Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
[4] Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1974). Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007).
[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
[6] David H. Jones, Moral Responsibility in the Holocaust: A Study in the Ethics of Character (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999), pp. 81-82.
[7] The Koran, trans. N.J. Dawood (London, Penguin Books Ltd, 2006), 4:24, p. 63; 23:1-6, pp. 240-241.
[8] Sunan Abu Dawud, compiled by Imâm Hâfiz Abu Dawud Sulaiman bin Ashʻath, Vol. 2, Hadiths 1161-2174, ed. Hâfiz Abû Tâhir Zubair ʻAlî Za’î, trans. Nasiruddin al-Khattab (Houston: Darussalam, 2008), Book 11, Hadith 2150, http://sunnah.com/abudawud/12.
[9] See, e.g. Mariam Hakim, “The truth about Muslims and Sex Slavery—According to the Koran, rather than ISIS or Islamophobes,” The Independent, February 15, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-truth-about-muslims-and-sex-slavery-according-to-the-quran-rather-than-isis-or-islamophobes-a6875446.html.
[10] The Koran, 24:32-33, pp. 248-249.
[11] Ibid., 2:228, p. 33; 4:19, pp. 62-63; 30:21, p. 285
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