“Ma’am, you may not have heard of me,” Reza Aslan told Fox News reporter Lauren Green on the internet show Spirited Debate, “but I’m actually a fairly prominent Muslim thinker in the United States.” Well, that’s an understatement. Aslan is not only a “fairly prominent” Muslim thinker but arguably the most widely- and well-respected religious scholar we have. Thinker being the operative word, because Aslan is neither a pundit nor an activist (at least not for any cause more narrow than peace and understanding). He belongs to a subset of public voices once revered but now sorely needed in this country: Experts. We lost something as a nation when anti-intellectualism became not just okay but championed, when the notion that I-know-as-much-as-the-next-guy became a standard. Thinkers like Aslan are marginalized in favor of subjective, inflammatory peddlers of talking points, because the latter get better ratings.
I’ll mention briefly my earliest encounter with Aslan’s work in order to highlight my point about how not just stupid but disrespectful Lauren Green was. As a sophomore in college, I was curious to learn about world religions, and had even briefly considered converting to one. Since I felt I knew a fair amount about the Western religions, and since I’d already studied Hinduism and Buddhism at various points before then, I was interested to learn about Islam. I was embarrassed that I knew so little about one of the most populated religions on earth. I went to Barnes & Noble’s “Religion” section and found Aslan’s No god but God: the Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, which was brand new at the time. The preface drew me in immediately, an anecdote wherein Aslan ran into Christian missionaries on a train through Morocco. He had (has) a gift for narrative and an ability to break down very complex arguments into the kind of clean, direct prose that even an amateur like me could understand. Yes—if anyone could indoctrinate me, it would be this guy, and I wanted to be indoctrinated. But what actually ended up disappointing me was that the book is exactly what the title suggested: not Islamic conversion propaganda but very literally a historical text about the religion.
Disappointed as I was, it’s of course exactly because of Aslan’s intellectual curiosity, rather than some sort of underhanded religious agenda, that’s won him a solid academic reputation which extends far outside of the world of academia. He’s often called in to write guest columns in the Times, the Daily Beast, Slate, et al, and is happy to appear in promotion of his books (but not, please note, as a fill-in panelist or talking head) on shows like Nightline and Real Time with Bill Maher.
He was on Maher last week, in fact, promoting his new book Zealot: the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. It’s always interesting to see Maher and Aslan spar. Maher pretty famously hates religion, and loves nothing more than to put the entire enterprise of religion down at any opportunity. (Maher is also, deny it if he likes, staunchly Islamophobic, frequently painting Islam as a “more hateful” religion than any of the others. Normally he gets away with that kind of dismissive bullshit, but once, when Aslan was a guest and Maher said, “Not all fundamentalists are the same. Don’t give me that. Their [middle eastern] fanatics suicide bomb people, ours don’t do that,” Aslan responded, “Well, Bill, our fanatics live in suburban middle class American neighborhoods, theirs live on piles of rubble where their houses used to be, so there is a bit of a cultural divide there.”). This time, Maher, in conversation with Rev. Jim Wallis, claimed that the Bible was tainted “like a turd in a pool” by nonsensical rules, like killing your neighbor if he works on a Sunday. Wallis suggested that many critics of the Bible haven’t read the whole thing, to which Maher replied, “I have, actually, I took a whole course on it” (which, when sitting at a table with Wallis and Aslan, six theological degrees between them, must have made Maher feel at least a little stupid for saying. I mean, I took a course in Chaucer as an undergrad; I’m not exactly fluent in middle-English). Aslan patiently replied, “There’s nothing easier than scouring the scripture for little bits of savagery, and then talking about how ridiculous it is. But even the most literalist literalist is not a literalist—the reason the Bible is such an important book and has endured over so many years is because it can be whatever you want it to be.”
All of this is to say that Reza Aslan is a cool, even-handed individual who has no ulterior interest in religion besides discussing it in a scholarly way. Lauren Green, however, opened up her interview with, “You’re a Muslim, so why would you want to write a book on the founder of Christianity?” Aslan, understandably, looked taken aback and replied, “Well…to be clear, I’m a religious scholar with four degrees, one of which is in the New Testament, and fluency in Biblical Greek, who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades who also just happens to be a Muslim. I’m not just some Muslim writing about Jesus, I’m an expert with a PhD in religions.” Green pressed on, however, reading off of her notecards, which obviously had zero questions about the book itself and only about the author’s personal religion. Hoping to put that to bed, Aslan pointed out that his book isn’t even about Christianity or even Jesus in any kind of religious context but rather a historical document of Jesus the man, whose death (Aslan’s words) “resulted in the greatest religion the world has ever known.” I don’t know how Green could have expected him to be any more respectful than that, but she still pressed on, analogizing Muslims and Christians to Democrats and Republicans, respectively, stating that this is like a Democrat writing a book about Reagan (I don’t usually watch Fox News—I always assumed people’s jokes about them thinking of Reagan as the second coming were hyperbolic, I never knew this is the kind of shit they actually say). Aslan, exasperated, said, “Well, no, it’s like a Democrat with four degrees in the subject of Reagan writing a book about Reagan.” Asked why some scholars disagree with Aslan’s findings in the book, he had to explain that, well, that’s what scholarship is—people coming to diverse conclusions based on historical texts. Finally, in easily the most ridiculous moment, Green pontificated on the fact that Aslan has never publicly stated he was a Muslim, which resulted in his retort that begins this article.
Without getting into the subject of Islamophobia, let me just say that…actually, never mind. Let’s get into it. First of all, Green is of course wrong in her Democrat v Republican analogy (in her defense, she was quoting someone else) because actually Islam and Christianity are not by any means in opposition to each other. Apart from the way that any given religion is in a “competition” for people to become members (and any given religion by definition considers their own beliefs “right”, hence all others “wrong”), there is nothing at all in either the Bible nor the Koran that suggests some sort of diametrically opposed belief system singular to these two religions, so obviously (I can’t believe I even have to point this out) a member of one doesn’t mean an enemy of the other. Secondly, there’s nothing in the Koran to suggest that Islam is an evil or hateful religion (n.b. the parenthetical above regarding right/wrong), which is why people like Maher and Green have to resort simply to characterizing Islamic people as behaving maliciously. As a result of this, you often hear the argument that it’s totally sensible to be suspicious of Islamists (or even simply middle-eastern people, regardless of religion), since the majority of terrorist bombers have been Muslim. This is not only totally racist but an established, well-known logical fallacy called the “fallacy of the undistributed middle”, in which we make a conclusion about the whole based on an unrepresentative few (for other examples of small-minded people trying to win arguments this way, see arguments against: single mothers and black people).
Anyway. Joke’s on Lauren Green, Spirited Debate, Fox News, and whoever it was who wrote those cue cards for her, I guess, because far from the desired of effect of making Islamists look like zealous heathens who want nothing more than to bring fire and rage to the American people, Aslan, as always, conducted himself with dignity, and made me remember why I’d considered converting in the first place.
Full interview here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY92TV4_Wc0
About Ted McLoof
Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.