Book Review: Conflicts of Fitness — Islam, America and Evolutionary Psychology
One day, I randomly opened my goodreads account after a gap of a few months to find that I have received a text! This was new for me as I never really used the app for contacting people (never even thought it could be used for such a thing) and so I was sort of surprised at the text. What was more surprising was that it was a text from an author of a book who had personally reached out to me to offer me his book for free because my reading interests matched the themes/topics of the book. I felt overwhelmed at such a treatment, and I wanted to read the book as soon as possible and write an honest positive review for it. This was, after all, the least I could do for the author in return for all of that effort of reaching out right?
Half way through chapter one, I realized I will never be able to write a positive review for this book: this was partly due to my own biases on the issues discussed, but also due to overly simplistic generalizations that the book made in order to prove its points that made it impossible for me to agree with everything said in the book.
The first chapter in this book is about the concept of polygyny in Islam, more importantly, it tries to defend why polygyny exists in Islam and argues that it is beneficial for the reproductive needs of women and promotes more stable marriages and hence an overall better society. This claim is based on some “evolutionary” assumptions:
1. Every organism’s (in our book, every human’s) ultimate goal in life is to reproduce and have as much children as possible, both in quality and quantity.
2. Keeping the first assumption in mind, women’s reproductive ideals (their sex/relationship goals) are to find a suitable mate and live and reproduce with that mate for the rest of life, while for men, the reproductive ideal is to sleep with as many women as possible.
I’m sure many men (and women) would vehemently disagree with this gross generalization and oversimplification of a very complex species, I would like to point out some faults in this argument from a more scientific perspective. For one, if the ultimate relationship/sex goal of every organism was to reproduce and send its DNA forward, why does homosexuality exists naturally in multiple species? (For a book that centers literally everything around sex and relationships, homosexuality is curiously ignored throughout the text). The book claims that a problem caused by monogamy is cheating: men, according to the author’s assumption, are encoded to want to sleep with as many women as possible, so monogamy would always cause men to cheat. But then why do women cheat in seemingly stable marriages if their reproductive ideal is to find one mate and just settle down? It even makes evolutionary sense for women to also have children with different males and increase the gene pool in their children and increase the chances that at least some would be fit to survive the environment and diseases? But because this whole line of argument would contradicts Islam’s polygynic ideal, it was conveniently ignored altogether. (If women’s reproductive ideal was long-term stable marriages, why are 70% divorces initiated by women?)
The next chapter delves into the concept of ‘reproductive climate’, meaning that the sexual/relationship preferences of men and women from a particular society are largely shaped by the society they live in. (This whole concept would contradict the generalizations made in chapter one that assumed a single set of reproductive ideals for all men and women and then defended Islamic polygyny around those assumptions but Islam was curiously never mentioned in this entire chapter.) Apart from this contradiction with chapter one, this chapter also made some overly simplistic and problematic generalizations to prove its content(again).
How a woman decides to clothe herself, particularly at social events,
reveals a great deal of information about the reproductive strategy she
is employing. The more conservatively a woman dresses, the more she
informs others about her long-term reproductive strategy. Conversely,
women who decide to wear tight clothing and/or show a lot of skin are
sending the message that they are employing a short-term strategy.
(pg. 26)
It cannot be stressed enough how problematic these lines are! The book reduces a woman’s choice of company, her clothing, and even her demands for education and work as attempts to come into contact with and have sex with a male. Many women would never even consider men while choosing what to wear, but this book downright claims that women, conservative or otherwise, dress with only one goal in mind: men. The rest of the chapter uses these assumptions to describe why the ‘reproductive climates’ in different regions of the world is how it is.
The ethical issues involved with this assumption aren’t the only problem. The book itself claims (and rightly so) that human psychology has evolved for hunter-gatherer times of ten thousand years ago or more. It is hard to imagine for such societies to put so much emphasis on clothing. Observing hunter-gatherer tribes at different parts of the world today, especially those from the Amazon, gives us insight into the fact that those people simply did not care about what one wore. Most of them probably lived nearly naked and yet the highest plausibility is that most of them still had long-term intimate relationships. The author just makes this assumption about women’s clothing (an assumption that is highly common among average Muslim men) and goes on to write the latter half of the book based on this assumption without properly justifying that assumption in the first place!
The next chapter delves into women’ condition in different Muslim countries and how Islam actually idealizes women and their lifestyle. The author talks about different interpretations of the more misogynistic aspects of Islam and mostly argues that these aspects are misogynistic because they are actually interpretations of patriarchal Islamic scholars whose worldview was influences by their patriarchal time/region. However, the author again fails to conclude how one set of interpretations is more authentic than the other, and hence the attempt to refute these claims of Islam being a misogynistic religion seem weak at best.
The final chapter sheds light on the conflict that exists between the Islamic world and the West, particularly America, and claims that this conflict exists because of the different reproductive ideals of both societies (in essence, the author claims that the West and Islam are at conflict because both want to have sex differently.) This isn’t the only laughable claim in the book: in the first chapter, the author suggests that global inequality would recede when the super rich men would start marrying multiple women and their wealth will thus be divided.
In this chapter, the author talks about feminism and its history in a pretty accurate manner, just to end it with the claim that feminism happened so that men could sleep with more women. The book even claims terms like human rights, women’s rights, reform and modernization etc. to be reproductively loaded terms, meaning these are all just excuses for people to get laid more (pg. 87).
The book is very well researched and the method of argumentation is very good. I read the whole book in just two sittings, it was interesting and held my attention for its full length. This shows that the author can write well and has a knack for presenting his arguments in a very logical manner, but the arguments themselves were based on shaky assumptions and became downright problematic and stereotypical at times. I mean, it doesn’t matter how well the book is written, or how effectively the author has presented his arguments when the book contains lines like:
…much has been made about the seeming incompatibility between the West and Islam. But even if we are witnessing a “clash of civilizations,” the current conflict can also be characterized as a clash of reproductive mentalities.
(pg. 97)
As a student of International relations/politics, this last line felt particularly offensive to me knowing all the complex reasons that go into any conflict and then seeing it being reduced to just sex. This problem isn’t just with this book however, this overly deterministic outlook is common to all the theories/predictions based solely on evolutionary psychology.
But this overly deterministic nature aside, I actually find evolutionary psychology to be a very logical field that makes a lot of sense to me. The problem here again was the author using it as an excuse to justify his own misogynistic beliefs about feminism, women’s clothing and his soft spot for Islam, all of these beliefs that are so common in most Muslim men.
But an even greater problem appears to be the premise of the book itself: evolutionary psychology and Islam are two incompatible domains. Efforts have been made to reconcile Islam with evolution and vice versa, but they’re always made on questionable grounds. The author made no attempts at justifying this, which makes his efforts at defending Islam in chapter one and three even more weak.
This book, with its very interesting premise, could have been so much better; but it was simply wasted at justifying outdated stereotypes and religious dogmas.