In Depth with Reza Aslan

0:00 police zealot reza aslan where does the phrase no god but God come from it's the first half of the Muslim profession of faith called the Shahada there is no god but God and Muhammad is God's messenger it's essentially the phrase that initiates a convert into the Muslim faith you also write in that book no god but God but now Islam can be is available to all Muslims and every Muslim can speak for Islam yeah it's a strange phenomenon because it's what I refer to as the Islamic Reformation because Islam though

0:46 it's not a priestly religion they're you know it has its more like rabbinical in a sense that there are a whole host of different schools of law and interpretations and certain individuals who because of a lifetime of learning have achieved a level of knowledge that allows them to speak authoritative Lee about Islamic theology Islamic jurisprudence but as with Judaism those individuals don't have authority over one another just as many Jews would say you know you get four rabbis in a room and you'll have five opinions about something the same is true about Imams so it's a religion that tries to not have an intermediary between the individual and God and yet because again

1:33 like Judaism it's a legalistic religion it has resulted in the creation of this class of scholars the ulama the learned ones as they're known who have maintained a monopoly over the meaning and message of Islam for most of the last 14 centuries how did that evolve from Mohammed into a freedom to interpret you know it's interesting this is in many ways is the same process that all great religions go through you have a prophet who is primarily a reformer not a creator of a religion I think that's the very important thing for people to understand we this misperception that what a profit is

2:21 is somebody who invents a new religion but that's not what a profit is a profit is someone who reforms the religion and a cultural and social milieu in which he lives Jesus for instance did not create Christianity Jesus was a Jew preaching about Judaism the Buddha did not create Buddhism the Buddha was a Hindu he was reforming Hinduism and the same is true the Prophet Muhammad as the Quran repeatedly reminds people this is not a new religion this is the same message that was given to all the prophets that came before Muhammad etc etc but what happens is that eventually the prophet passes and now it's the responsibility of the prophets followers to figure out a way to make sense of the words and

3:08 actions of this prophet and that's when religion is first founded and religion as a man-made institution requires a power structure and who becomes in charge of that religion well first it's the prophets initial followers and then it's the second generation and then that power structure is based not so much on whether you knew the Prophet or not but on how much knowledge you can accumulate about the traditions the theology that was espoused by the Prophet and hence these massive institutions that we see of religion now if you follow that timeline on it doesn't take a long time

3:54 for individuals to start complaining about that institution and to start recognizing that there's a bit of a gap between what the institution has to say and what the Prophet had to say and that's when you have this grand clash between individuals and institutions that happens in all great religious traditions over who gets to define faith the term that scholars use for the that clash is Reformation and in know God but God you write that religion is by definition interpretation and by definition all investigations all interpretations are valid how does that play out in the contemporary Middle East especially what's going on a rock

4:40 some of them that people don't on flicks people don't like that saying what I what I said there you know met religious people don't like it religious people like to think that there is one version of Christianity one version of Islam one version of Judaism and it's their version correct but of course the problem is that when you are confronted with sacred scriptures what you have in front of you doesn't really exist in a vacuum I mean really Scripture without interpretation it's just words on a page that's all it is it requires someone to encounter it and interpret it and in doing so one cannot help but bring one's

5:29 own preconceived notions one's political and economic and social views why are there a thousand different versions of Christianity thousands of different versions of Islam precisely for that reason and so as interpretation it becomes very difficult to say this interpretation is wrong and this interpretation is right now I do want to say one very important thing you can say that one particular interpretation is more reasonable you can say that it's more historically accurate but there's a reason why in this country's history just a couple of hundred years ago both slave owners and abolitionists not only use the same Bible to argue their

6:16 differing viewpoints they use the exact same verses to argue their different viewpoints that's the power of Scripture that's the power of religion now in an institutionalized religion one in which there is an authority structure a papacy what have you whatever you want to call it that has a complete monopoly over the interpretation of faith then you can maintain a level of control I mean the Pope can actually say to a Catholic theologian you or wrong your interpretation is incorrect and indeed if you continue to pursue your interpretation i will excommunicate you and you are no longer a part of this community there is nothing like that in Islam or in Judaism

7:02 for that matter there is no centralized religious authority and what that means is that anything goes any interpretation is now a valid interpretation there is no one there's no referee there's no one to say you're wrong and you're right and so it becomes a great shouting match again I keep paralleling Judaism and Islam the problem of course is that there are about 15 million Jews so it is an argument that is happening you know not at the same global stage that you have the one and a half billion Muslims having this argument but when you look at the conflicts in the Middle East when you have Muslim Democrats and Muslim autocrats are fighting against each other Muslim

7:48 peacemakers and Muslim war makers arguing against each other what you are seeing is precisely the result of this Reformation process this individualization of Islam the process whereby the authority to define this faith is being removed seized I should say from the hands of these institutions that have gripped it for most of the last 14th centuries and are now being led by any individual with a megaphone reza aslan are the what are the similarities between the Talmud the Quran and the Bible well there are I think two ways to answer that question mythically they are very much representative of a single prophetic

8:35 history in other words what you are seeing is an understanding that prophetic consciousness if I can use that phrase it's something that can be passed on from profit to profit from Adam to Moses - from Adam to Abraham to Moses to Jesus to the Prophet Muhammad that's certainly the way that the Koran presents it the Quran really sees Islam and the Prophet Muhammad as a continuation and indeed in this case a seal of a a prophetic consciousness that is just sort of moving along through history a a sort of a a historical account of God's

9:21 self-revelation to humanity that's one sort of the mythic element certainly the values and the mores are almost identical the notion of man's responsibility to man the idea of the relationship between creator and creation the duty that humanity has towards the Creator to worship to praise to obey concepts of an afterlife are very similar concepts of the cosmos are very similar but I think more importantly what you see with these three religions is a desperate attempt to I guess I would say bring the expanse

10:11 between humanity and God closer together there is this sort of mythic quality that God is physically apart from us right he's up in the heavens he is the highest God and I guess if you want to put it in its simply simplest way the history of religions be it the monotheistic Abrahamic religions or not the history of religions is predicated upon this long arduous attempt to create less of a distance between God and humanity to bring the this gap to a close in many ways that's what Jesus represents as the Incarnate God it's a

10:57 it's an attempt to say that there is no gap between humanity and God because God became a human which is why I think Christianity is so profoundly successful as a global religion but I think these three religions these Abrahamic faiths are intimately intertwined mythically historically morally really can these three texts be read as political books it's a very good question and I'm gonna answer it in a different way I think this notion that religion and politics are separate things is a very new idea I think it's important to

11:44 understand that religion and I'm talking about all religion in all parts of the world is far more a matter of identity than it is a matter of beliefs and practices let me give you an example of what I mean by this according to the Pew Forum about 7 out of 10 Americans self-identify as Christian let's think about that for a moment shall we seven out of 10 Americans really 7 out of 10 Americans go to church on Sunday 7 out of 10 Americans read the Bible on a regular basis let alone actually follow its precepts 7 out of 10 Americans can tell you anything about Jesus except that it was born in a manger and died on

12:31 a cross of course not the vast majority of that 70 percent when they say I am a Christian are not making so much a faith declaration they are making a statement of identity it's about who they are as individuals how they see themselves in an indeterminate world and as a matter of identity your religion subsumes your politics your economic views your social views that has always been the case and it's still the case now we only pretend that religion and politics are separate things but they are not they are very much a part of the same multifaceted identity that individuals espouse and with regard to Judaism Christianity and

13:18 Islam and certainly with Buddhism and Hindus and everything else it's a very important thing to recognize that the phrase I am a Jew I am a Christian I am a Muslim has less to do with these are the things that I believe these are the rituals that I follow then it does with this is how I see myself as a person this is how I understand my role in the world and and my relationship to the Creator as far as Mohammed was concerned you write and know God but God the Jews and the Christians were people of the book spiritual cousins who as opposed to the pagans and polytheists of Arabia worship the same God read the same scriptures and shared the same moral values as his Muslim community Mohammed aligned his

14:05 community with the Jews in Medinah because he considered them as well as the Christians to be part of his Ummah what is luma luma is a word that means community and it's really a word that the early Muslim community kind of made up we're not exactly sure where the word came from it may be Hebrew maybe Aramaic nobody really knows but there was no way for the early Muslim community to define the kind of new group the church that they were trying to create because really if you think about it in sixth seventh century Arabia there was only two ways two possible ways to organize yourself either monarchy which is something that the Arabs had a great

14:50 distaste for or tribe those were your choices neither of those things worked for the Muslim community and certainly tribe was too limiting because you can't you can't convert to a tribe you can't join a tribe you just have to be born in to a tribe and so the umma was a way to kind of create a new way of understanding what social organization can mean a social organization based on religious identification and perhaps the most surprising aspect about the way that the Prophet Muhammad and the early Muslim community viewed their this new social organization is that it was

15:36 inclusive of other monotheistic faiths not polytheistic faiths if you were a pagan if you worshipped other gods you were an outsider you did not belong but if you were what the Quran calls people of the book al-kitab which by which it meant Jews and Christians and it also included believe it or not surah a streams in that in that group then they saw you is part of this larger community as part of this Ummah and that I think is really unique in the history of religions in fact the Quran refers to something called the oome al-kitab the book the mother of books but basically this is

16:21 what it what it's saying is that there is this kind of heavenly or text this heavenly scripture and seated in God a physical book in heaven with God from which all scriptures of the world come and so in other words if you take all the scriptures of the world the the Torah the Gospels the Quran the Bhagavad Gita the Rig Veda the gothis and you combine them all together you get this one heavenly book that's quite a remarkable statement for a scripture to make because not only is it validating other scriptures but it's saying something quite unique that all these religions are intimately connected the Quran says something along the lines of

17:06 God could have given you one prophet and one scripture if he wanted to but he chose to make you into different communities quote so that you may know one another now this notion of Jews and Christians as fellow believers did not last much longer after the Prophet Muhammad's death and within about a generation or so the scriptural scholars the ulama that I was referring to very quickly transform Jews and Christians into unbelievers and really separated Islam from its parent religion as a way of of creating independence if you will in other words what they believed was that the Coran annulled the previous scriptures

17:53 but that's not what the Quran ever says the Quran says that it completes the other scriptures but it sees those scriptures as as part and parcel of this larger mother of books in heaven quite quite unusual in the history of religions and one more quote from no god but God before we get into your other books all religions are inextricably bound to the social spiritual and cultural milieu from which they arose in which they are developed it is not the prophets who create religions prophets are above all reformers who redefine and reinterpret the existing beliefs and practices of their communities providing fresh sets of symbols and metaphors with which succeeding generations can describe the nature of reality indeed it

18:39 is most often the prophets successors who take upon themselves a responsibility of fashioning their masters words and deeds into unified easily comprehensible religious systems like so many prophets before him you right Muhammad never claimed to have invented a new religion right right and again it's people of religion who have the biggest problem with that kind of notion first because of course they want to believe that their religious ideas their values their interpretation can be linked directly to the Prophet whether it be Muhammad or Moses or Jesus or the Buddha or what-have-you and that is rarely rarely the case but most

19:25 importantly I think because people of religion want to believe that their religious views are static that they are monolithic you hear this a lot of course in large religions with multiple sects like Christianity and Islam Muslims and Christians like to say that their particular Christianity their particular Islam is the correct one and all the other ones are incorrect but when you study the world's religions you understand very very quickly that there is no such thing as correct religion there is no such thing as Islam there is no such thing as Christianity there are only Christianity's and islam's and that there are almost

20:10 infinite varieties throughout history in in the beliefs and practices the interpretations of these religions and that each one of these varieties is inextricably tied to the cultural milieu the political milieu out of which they arise Islam I think is important by the way what I find really unusual about what I'm saying right now is that most rational minded people would say well of course that sounds true I mean when you think about Christianity of course there are a hundred ways of understanding Christianity but then when you make the same statement about Islam they say oh no no Islam there's only one version of Islam Islam is monolithic but of course

20:56 Islam like Christianity comes in every flavor that you can imagine take a plane from New York to London from London to Baghdad from Baghdad to Istanbul from Istanbul to Jakarta from Jakarta to Addis Ababa and you will never see the same Islam twice who was a historic Muhammad the Prophet Muhammad was a fascinating character he belonged to a very small fairly insignificant clan which was a part of an enormous and extremely significant and wealthy tribe so if you will he was part of this kind

21:41 of ruling system but an outcast in that ruling system he was an orphan in a society in which orphans had no real protection whatsoever a society that was deeply stratified between the very wealthy and and the poor and he had sort of figured out through his own you know social and-and-and business acumen how to become a very successful merchant in other words ad by the time that he he became around 40 years old he had figured out a way to use this religio-political system that had amassed enormous amount of wealth at the very top - to his own benefit to his own advantage he seems to have been a deeply spiritual man though his spirituality

22:27 was very much steeped in the pagan polytheistic culture out of which he arose something that a lot of Muslims don't like to think about that Muhammad was a part of his society that he was a product of his world that he didn't just drop from heaven and live in a vacuum for 40 years before he became a prophet but eventually that spiritual longing led him to have a series of ecstatic experiences in which he claims to have had direct messages from God condemning the economic disparity the social disparity in his society and you notice I keep using these terms economic and social disparity because the fascinating thing about the Prophet Muhammad's message is at least in the first decade

23:13 or so in which he was receiving these revelations they had very little to do with theological or legalistic concerns they were overwhelmingly a condemnation of the wealthy and the powerful a promise of judgment to those who exploit the poor and the marginalized the weak the dispossessed a commandment to protect those who cannot protect themselves the orphans the the the widows those who have been left behind by this mass accumulation of wealth and what's I think very important for people to understand and again this is something that Muslims just sort of have

23:58 a hard time recognizing because they like to think of the Prophet Muhammad as purely a religious figure someone who came with this brand new idea that there is only one God which was not brand new at all I mean every Arab in the Arabian Peninsula had heard this message a thousand times one thing that I write about in the book in that which I think is new to a lot of Muslims is that the pre-islamic Arabia was a land that was awash in religions there were hundreds of Christian groups and Jewish groups and Zoro Austrian groups and another group of pre-islamic monotheists called the Hanif all of whom believed that there was only one God and in fact the pagan Arabs themselves more or less believed that

24:44 there was only one God they just thought that that God was just inaccessible and so there were these other lower gods that you could go to for your supplications the phrase there is no god but God would have elicited a collective yawn from pre-islamic Arabia but the condemnation of the economic situation in Arabia the political situation that was intolerable to the ruling powers and that's where the friction between the Prophet Muhammad and the Koresh this massive tribe that ruled mecca originally came from that's where the conflict in the clash came from and by the way that should sound familiar to

25:30 people familiar with other prophetic histories especially that the history of Jesus I mean really Jesus's conflict with the authorities of his time had far less to do with theological doctrine than it had with social and economic issues that's what a prophet does a prophet is a reformer not a creator of religion when did Muhammad live which century well so the tradition say that he was born in the year 570 ad that's most certainly not a historical an accurate calendrical date the fact of the matter is is in pre-islamic Arabia birthdays were not significant events so nobody knew when the Prophet Muhammad was born and nobody cared until he was

26:17 declared to be a prophet but we go with 570 as the traditional date so let's just say near the end of the sixth century and then he died somewhere sort of in the first third of the seventh century I think what's really unique about the Prophet Muhammad when it comes to sort of the the history the prophetic history that many people are familiar with is that we usually hear about our profits being failures right that's the that the history of prophethood that one expects a prophet gets a message from God nobody listens to him he usually dies in disgrace and that after he dies people say ah he was right and we should have listened to him all along

27:03 what's unique about the Prophet Mohammed is that while he was disadvantaged and disgraced for the first half of his prophetic experience the second half was enormous ly successful he actually succeeded he created a little state 'let based on his revelations and interestingly interestingly enough it's that success that I think creates the greatest amount of suspicion among non-muslims about the Prophet Mohammed he couldn't have possibly been a prophet of God because he succeeded because his message took because people listened and agreed whereas we want a prophet that is

27:51 rejected and tortured and killed and and that's a really interesting phenomenon to me though the way in which the prophets success is seen as proof of his nonprofit status by the time he lived on earth how established was Christianity very well established very fascinating thing here so Christianity of course starts in the in the around the mid to the end of the first century it comes as I say in multiple multiple forms until around the start of the 4th century when the Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity and begins the process he doesn't do it himself but begins the

28:37 process of turning Christianity into the official religion of Rome the problem for Constantine however is that there are about a hundred different kinds of Christianity and you can't have Christianity be the imperial religion of the world's most powerful Empire unless it comes in one ever and so Constantine quite famously takes the leaders of the Christian movement the the bishops of the Christian movement he locks them up in a room in a small town called Nicaea and he's essentially says do not come out of this room until you figure out what Christianity is because it can only be one thing and of course the bishops at the time come up with what is known as the Nicene Creed defining more or less

29:25 what Orthodox Christianity shall be but what happens immediately after the Nicene Council is that all of these heterodox versions of Christianity overnight become illegal and anyone who espouses those views has essentially three choices either get the heck out of Rome as fast as possible convert to Orthodox Christianity or die what happens is you have this flooding in to the lands of the Middle East of these heterodox Christian communities who want to maintain their faith but cannot do so in Rome so where do they go they go to the Near East they go to Iran they go to

30:11 North Africa and they go to the Arabian Peninsula so 200 years later by the time the Prophet Mohammed arises he is living in a world that is full of Christians but not the kind of Orthodox Christians that you see in Rome certainly not the Orthodox Trinitarian versions of Christian these are Christians who are referred to sometimes as mono physics or Gnostic Christians Christians who believe that Jesus only had a singular nature be it only human or only divine who rejected the notion of the Trinity and so for the Prophet Muhammad he would have been very familiar with this one

30:58 particular version of Christian thought by the way just as he would have been extremely familiar with Judaism because the Jewish tribes in the Arabian Peninsula were also many and quite sick accessible and well-established all of this is to say that the Prophet Muhammad gute was born and grew up in a world steeped in Jewish and Christian thought Jewish and Christian mythology there's a reason why when you read the Quran when it sometimes restates the great stories of the Hebrew Scriptures be it stories about Jacob or Joseph or Moses or Abraham it often begins those stories

31:46 with the words recall or remember recall when Moses received the commandments remember what happened to Joseph when he fled from his brothers the reason for that is quite simple the Quran is repeating stories that it assumes its audience is already familiar with em indeed they would have been familiar with it because these stories were part of the milieu of pre-islamic Arabia how political was Constantine's move to Christianity you know I get asked that question a lot and I think that most historians most scholars would say that it was purely a political decision after all Constantine was immersed in a civil

32:32 war over other claimants to the throne of Emperor and that the this sort of sudden conversion to Christianity was whether it was intended to or not the the sort of that one element that pushed him over to the over to the top and allowed him to claim the throne for himself I am one of these historians who tends to think you know we should probably just take people at their word if Constantine says that he had an ecstatic spiritual experience in which Jesus came to him and told him to believe in him let's just go ahead and take his word for it were there political implications or perhaps even you know political ideas behind this

33:18 conversion certainly so but who are we to judge a person's soul good afternoon and will welcome to book TV's monthly program called in-depth this is where we talked to one author about his or her body of work this past year we've had Mark Levin amedy slays Bonnie Morris Luis Rodriguez as some of our guests on in-depth and this month we have international bestseller Reza Aslan here are his non-fiction books he began in 2005 with no god but God the origins evolution and future of Islam beyond fundamentalism confronting religious extremism in the age of globalization came out in 2010 and zealot came out last year the life

34:03 and times of Jesus of Nazareth professor Osmond also teaches creative writing at UC Riverside he got his bachelor's degree at Santa Clara his master's in divinity at Harvard a Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and finally a PhD at UC Santa Barbara and that was a religion PhD wasn't it that's right that's right I actually got my degree from the sociology department because my dissertation was about jihadism as a social movement but I did all my coursework in the in the department of religion well that's another topic we wanted to bring up and but first I want to go to zealot which got a lot of attention last year when it came out and you write in that book that today I can

34:50 confidently say that two decades of rigorous academic research into the origins of Christianity has made me a more genuinely committed disciple of Jesus of Nazareth than I ever was of Jesus Christ yes as I say in the book when I was 15 years old I went to an evangelical youth camp with some friends in Northern California and there heard the Gospel story for the first time it was a transformative experience for me this story of the God of heaven and earth coming down in the form of a child of dying for our sins this promise that all who believe in him shall also never die but have eternal life I had never heard anything like this before in my

35:36 life I immediately convert to this particularly conservative brand of evangelical Christianity and began preaching this gospel messages I had heard it to everyone and whether they wanted to hear it or not frankly but when I went to university and began to study the New Testament for a living what I discovered was a great distance between the Christ of faith as I had learned about him in my church and the Jesus of history as I was studying him at university these were different individuals and I know that that really disturbs a lot of people both people of faith and people without faith because we think that they are the same that the

36:23 Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are the same person but they aren't not the same person the Christ of faith is derived from the Jesus of history certainly but the Jesus of history this Jewish peasant revolutionary who lived in the backwoods of Galilee 2,000 years ago became so much more real to me so much more accessible and appealing that while I left Christianity as a faith I became absolutely obsessed with learning everything that I could about this man and found him to be so much more extraordinary and indeed I would say so much more worth following than the

37:09 Christ of faith were you raised a Muslim I was I came from a fairly lukewarm Muslim family in Iran you know we were culturally Muslim the way so many people around the world are culturally religious when we moved to the United States in 1979 of course this was in the height of the Iran hostage crisis and you know being a Muslim was not the easiest thing to be in the United States I I and my family really sort of scrubbed our lives of anything that hinted at Islam for me especially it was an it was a way of absorbing into American culture of it was a seven eight-year-old boy I wanted to be normal I didn't want to stand out in any way but I've always been deeply

37:55 interested in religion despite the fact that I didn't come from a very religious family or receive any kind of religious or spiritual edification in my household I think partly it had to do with my experience of revolutionary Iran those images of the the power that religion has to transform a society for good and for bad never left me and it created this indelible and deep desire to know more about religion and spirituality as I say despite the fact that I didn't really have an opportunity to really do so until I was 15 years old and first had an opportunity to express it but you know I've always been interested in religion I've always been really

38:41 interested in religious history religious archaeology religious literature religious phenomenology spirituality these are things that fascinate me to no end to or to is the area code five eight five three eight eight zero if you'd like to participate in our conversation this afternoon with reza aslan and you live in the eastern central time zones five eight five three eight eight one if you live out west by the way you can also contact us if the phone lines are busy through social media email book TV at c-span 0rg you can send us a tweet at book TV as our twitter handle and finally you can make a comment on our Facebook page facebook.com slash book TV your Shia I

39:27 do not accept any kind of sectarian designation at all again I think for me well let me put it this way when you study the religions of the world it becomes very difficult to take any religion all that seriously because what you recognize what you discover very very early on is that all these religions are basically saying the exact same thing they're expressing the same aspirations the same desires the same answers often using the same mythology to do so that really what you see are different symbols and phors expressing the exact same sentiments now most of my colleagues would say well then why bother choosing

40:15 one of those if they're all saying the same thing let's just ignore it all and indeed I think what would surprise a lot of viewers about the study of religion and scholars of religion like myself is that we're all pretty much atheists but a few of us are not I am you know an exception I am one of these you know scholars of religion who also takes faith very seriously most of my colleagues view faith the way that a biologist views a microbe it's something to be studied from afar from a distance but not you know something that is absorbed or taken personally by any means I study the world's religions and I am a person of faith and I follow something that the Buddha once said

41:00 which is that if you want to draw water you do not dig six one foot wells you dig one six foot well Islam is my six foot well it's the path the symbols and metaphors that I use to understand my place in the world and to to experience the the the reality of transcendence but what the Buddha meant is that while you're well maybe separate you are drawing the water that every other well around you is drawing from the water is the same and that's something that I never forget my identity as a Muslim

41:45 comes primarily from my acceptance of Islamic metaphors Islamic symbols as a comfortable and viable way of expressing the ineffable incomprehensible experience of the divine but that's all it is it's just a language it's just symbols and metaphors those symbols and metaphors are not more true they're not more right they're just more appealing that's all how significant is the sunni-shia split and what's it created you know it's a lot more significant nowadays than I think it has been in the past certainly

42:33 as the main dividing line in Islam Sunni by the way make up about 85% of the world's Muslims the Shia make around 15% very much historical shift like the Catholic Protestant shift and had as much to do with political and social issues and indeed even economic issues the Shia tended to be far less economically successful than the Sunni were the Sunni maintained the power and the structure of the of the first Islamic empire but nevertheless in the same way that many Christians would say Catholic Protestant it's all Christianity and many Christians would say no Catholics are right and

43:19 Protestants are wrong it's very much an individual experience I've seen Muslims who say this these sects are irrelevant and I've seen Muslims who say that know if you're a shear you are an apostate you are an unbeliever but ultimately the reason that these sectarian differences have risen to the forefront over the last decade and it really has been really just the last decade or so well you know what let's say around 2001 around the time of the invasion of Afghanistan is because there has been this deep political divide in the Middle East there has been in other words political benefit from inside and

44:07 outside forces to stoke sectarian tensions for one's own nationalistic concerns you see this of course a lot with the cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia Iran which sees itself as the banner of Shia Islam and Saudi Arabia which sees itself as the banner of Sunni Islam these two nations have been fighting a cold war in the region for far more than a cade and have deliberately stoked sectarian tensions for their own benefit now in many cases those sectarian tensions have become no longer controllable for for either country but in Bahrain in Lebanon in Syria well I would even the United States has stoked

44:54 sectarian tension in that region you know there is this idea that you can control religious extremism that you can use it to your advantage and you know I'm hoping one day we're gonna learn that that's just simply not the case that that you can't control fanatics no matter how hard you try in your book beyond fundamentalism by the way what was the original title of that book and why did it change the original title was how to win a cosmic war and why did it change these are one of these mysteries of the publishing world that authors are never privy to it was a it was a it was a publishers decision to change the title well in the current version of beyond fundamentalism confronting

45:39 religious extremism in the age of globalization you write that a cosmic war is a religious war it is a conflict in which God is believed to be directly engaged on one side over the other it partitions the world into black and white good and evil us in them in such a war there is no middle ground everyone must choose a side it is a simple equation if you are not us you must be them you are the enemy and must be destroyed that's right and in fact this notion of cosmic war is something that exists in all great religious traditions in the West of course it can be traced right to the Torah this is precisely the kind of war that God

46:25 demands of the Israelites a war in which the Israelites themselves are not even really participants in the Israelites are essentially nothing more than that the ponds whereby God destroys his enemies himself when you look at the great Wars of the Hebrew Bible whether it was the conquest of Canaan or the destruction of the Jebusites or the destruction of the Amalekites or any of these tribes that the Israelites destroyed the the Bible makes it very clear these enemies did not fall to Israel Israel's arms israel's weapons Israel's might was irrelevant it was God who destroyed these armies and indeed it wasn't so

47:12 much that God the God of the Jews the god of the Israelites destroyed these different tribes it's that God destroyed the gods of these other tribes the very concept of divine war in the ancient mind had less to do with armies fighting each other than it did with gods fighting each other when the Israelites destroyed the Canaanites what was actually happening was that the God of Israel Yahweh was destroying the God of Canaan Baal that's how it worked and to take it to the next level when the Babylonians destroyed the Israelites it wasn't two armies fighting each other it was the god of Babylon Marduk destroying

47:58 the god of the Israelites Yahweh and indeed the very notion of monotheism the way that we understand it the notion that there is just one God and no other is a fairly late notion in the Bible it doesn't really show up until after the Babylonian captivity in 586 BC Abraham was not a monotheists a Brazil theist he believed that his God was the highest God but that there were other gods Moses was not a monotheistic he no theist he believed that his God was the highest God and by the way Moses as God was not Abraham's God Abraham's God was called el or El Shaddai and Moses as God was

48:43 called Yahweh el was a a Canaanite God a Canaanite deity Yahweh was an Egyptian deity it's only after the Babylonian captivity that el and Yahweh become a single God el Yahweh scholars sometimes referred to them and the concept of monotheism is born all of this is to say that notion of divine war that we human beings are merely pawns in a cosmic conflict between the forces of good and evil between angels and demons that this battle is not really taking place on earth it's taking place in the heavens that it indeed it's an eternal battle at one in

49:30 which the forces of good will eventually defeat the forces of evil this is a phenomenon that you find playing itself out right now in a large part of the conflicts around the world not least of all in the Middle East it's the conflict that al Qaeda is fighting it's the conflict that Isis is fighting it's a conflict that a great many Jewish extremists and Israel are fighting it's a conflict that many people in the US military themselves think that they are fighting a war between the forces of good and evil not between the armies on earth that's a cosmic war and the great fear about cosmic wars as I say in the book is that they are unwinnable Paul emails in from

50:20 Los Gatos California how can Islam ever be at peace with the Western democracies when one goal of Islam is for all the world to be ruled by Islamic law the Quran says quote and fight with them until there is no persecution and religion should be only for Allah well first of all that is not a goal of Islam this notion of you know that the whole world has to be under Islam and that verse in the Quran is of course a historically contextual verse I mean what's important to understand is for the latter half of the prophet's life he was at war with the pagan tribes of Arabia secondly it's also important

51:06 to understand that as a proselytizing faith that Muslims course believed that their message should be viewed by all people all proselytizing faiths believe this but the notion that Islam is a religion that is spread by the sword is actually historically incorrect indeed for the first hundred and fifty two hundred years of Islam not only was conversion not mandatory or forced upon people it was discouraged because there were financial benefits of conversion that created a situation whereby the first Islamic empire the Umayyad Empire which ruled until about 750 ad actually made it very difficult for people to convert

51:52 to Islam because you had to pay fewer taxes if you were a Muslim and so they didn't want people to pay these taxes that said I do think it's important to understand that this notion of a conflict between Islam and Western democracies is a figment of the imagination one-third of the world's Muslims live in democratic state the largest most populous Muslim country in the world Indonesia is a democracy the second most populist Muslim country in the world Pakistan is a democracy Turkey is a democracy Bangladesh is a democracy Senegal is a democracy Malaysia is a democracy indeed of the ten most populous countries in the world in populous Muslim countries in the world

52:39 five technically seven but two of them are not very good democracy certainly Egypt cannot be called a democracy any longer are democracies so this notion that Islam is somehow inherently anti-democratic is simply factually historically empirically inaccurate but one could make the argument that all religions because they rely on a notion of absolutism are anti-democratic I mean let's be honest we live in a country in the United States in which again according to Pew about one-third of Americans 100 million of us fall under the desert knate of religious nationalists

53:26 dominionists is the term that scholars use these are Christians who believe that the United States is a Christian nation founded exclusively on Christian values and Christian principles and should be as Rick Santorum has repeatedly said as Mike Huckabee said on the campaign trail when he was running for president should be predicated exclusively on biblical values and indeed to paraphrase Mike Huckabee that the very constitution of this country needs to be changed so that it aligns with biblical values now one can quite easily say that that is an anti-democratic view because it is essentially a prioritizing religion and one version of religion one one

54:13 interpretation of religion over all others in over civil society so in a sense all religions are both anti-democratic and democratic which goes back to what I've been saying for the last hour which is that religion is nothing more than interpretation religion is what a religious person says it is Islam is what any Muslim says it is my version of Islam is as valid as Osama bin Laden's version of Islam I would love to sit here and say that his version of Islam is incorrect and my version is right except that that's not true we're both right and we're both

54:58 wrong you have the Christian abortion bomber his version of Christianity is as correct as Desmond Tutu's version of Christianity they are both right and they are both wrong so if you have Muslims who say democracy is antithetical to Islam they're right if you have Muslims who say democracy is absolutely compatible with Islam they're right so stop saying Islam is this or that Christianity is this or that there's no such thing as this or that when it comes to religion it's all what an individual says it is reza aslan in

55:45 zealots this is the dedication for my wife Jessica Jackley and the entire Jackley clan whose love and acceptance have taught me more about Jesus than all my years of research and study well anybody you know who saw that famously uncomfortable Fox News interview knows that my wife is a Christian as is my mother by the way I'm the one who converted my mother to Christianity and she's still a very devout Christian and you know my wife and I have twin boys that we always joke are undeclared but which will grow up in all great religious traditions and and will decide for themselves what they want to believe the reason I made that dedication is because my wife's family comes from a

56:31 very devout evangelical Christian background and for a lot of people that seems incongruous how could it be that you know this devout conservative evangelical family my brother-in-law is an evangelical pastor can have in their family a a Muslim of all people and while they will really admit that when they discovered that their daughter was you know dating and about to marry a Muslim man they were confused they'd never met a Muslim before you know my my mother-in-law you know humorously says the only thing she knew about Islam is what Sean Hannity told her and yet

57:17 within five minutes of meeting me all of that went away and what they displayed towards me is a love and acceptance and compassion that is the best expression of Christianity not the expression of Christianity that we so often see in the media that we see from our politicians a a religion of exclusion a religion that is all about who is not part of us who does not receive salvation but the Christianity that is about inclusion that is about love that is about acceptance and they taught me they really taught me what true Christianity

58:03 is about and I am forever grateful for it I am as much a part of their family as anyone else we have a an amazing relationship and I have learned as much from them as they've learned from me we have two hours left in our program today on book TV Reza Aslan is our guest and now it's your turn to talk to a Michael Fayette Alabama you're first up hi oh thanks tremendously um dr. Allen before my question I want to apologize sincerely on behalf of all of us Christians for what you and other Islamic have heard too often in the United States a lie is a false God you worship but Wayans worship and our Jewish sisters and brothers worship the only real God I

58:51 can't stand that coming out of local teachings what is it called talk radio down here let's be honest it's a Protestant radio sadly we don't get the splendid Eternal Word television network Catholic even though that's just 80 miles away in a Michael Michael could you give us your religious background and and are you a person of faith today but don't anybody call me please don't anybody call me a conservative I'm conservative on moral and ethical values especially big Hollywood big Nashville big Marvel and DC Comics big Madison Avenue and I I'm even angry about

59:36 r-rated dumb r-rated comedies being in the what is it called reach of children under 12 thanks to Netflix and video stores but we are very much politically liberal when it comes to government being involved in foreign humanitarian aid in domestic social spending and creating jobs I mean they wanted right there we're gonna leave it there and we'll see if reza aslan has any comment for you well I think that that's a perfect expression of what I've been saying all along about religion being a matter of identity not necessarily just a matter of faith and practice that you could be an extreme liberal evangelical Christian

1:00:22 like my friend Jim Wallace is a creator of sojourners or you can be an extreme conservative evangelical Christian in other words you may have the same beliefs and practices but those beliefs and practices can be expressed in diametrically opposite ways the other thing that I'll just say Michael and I appreciate you know what you were you were saying and listen I've gotten as much love from Christians as I've gotten anger and hate and again it goes back to individuals and and the way individuals think for themselves the problem for me I've been saying earlier that we should not confuse religion with faith that they are different things religion is not faith faith is mysterious it's

1:01:08 unethical it's deeply individualistic if you believe in God you believe in something that is by definition impossible for the human mind to comprehend God is if anything uh turley transcendent we do not have the ability to understand what God is two stood alone Express what God is what is religion the language that helps us express it that's it it's just a language of symbols and metaphors that give us the opportunity to express to ourselves and to like-minded people the ineffable experience of faith the danger

1:01:54 comes when people confuse religion with faith when they think that religion is the destination not the path to a destination when they think that religion is the ends not the means to an end and I think that if we did a better job people of faith of all faiths and recognized that my particular religion is just a unique way of expressing similar sentiments as other people of religion we would have far greater peace far greater understanding than we do now unfortunately most religious people be they Jewish or Muslim or Christian or Buddhist or Hindu or whatever most religious people tend to believe in

1:02:41 their religion not in what their religion tells them to believe in other words your faith is not in God but in your religion and that I think is a tragic tragic mistake professor Roslin are your books available in your home country of Iran are they available in Israel or some of the more volatile Arab countries my books especially no god but God have been translated into Hebrew and are quite popular in Israel MA and and in Arabic there's an Urdu version of coming zealot it will be available in Arabic and or do in the next year it takes a while to do the translation we of course have very strict sanction laws

1:03:30 against Iran the Treasury Department makes it very difficult to translate and sell English material in Farsi to an Iranian audience and of course Iran makes it very difficult for material like this to be spread out so what I have done is I have paid for my own Persian translations of my books and if you are not an Iran you can go to Amazon and buy them in Persian but if you are in Iran you can just simply go to my website reza aslan calm and download a free version in Farsi of my books no god but God is available right now the Persian translation of zealot is finished and were in the

1:04:15 process of putting it online so that any Farsi speaker anywhere in the world can have free access to it because of your writing have there been any fad laws against you be then be there Muslim Christian or Jewish sure but listen as I like to say you know thought was are a dime a dozen you know if you you are I can get you off give me an hour I'll get you a fatwa on any subject that you want a fatwa which is you know achieved almost sort of supernatural dimensions in the United States because of course the violence that are taking place and perhaps a Salman Rushdie affair a fatwa is nothing more than a juristic opinion by a Mufti a Mufti is just any legal scholar who

1:05:02 has achieved a certain number of years of training in Islamic law there is no enforcement mechanism for a fatwa it's literally an opinion it's not a papal bull there is no sort of infallibility to it and indeed what's really fascinating about thought was is that there no fatwa can overcome another fatwa so in other words if you have two Imams in this room and one issues of fatwa saying Coca zville drink Pepsi and the other issues of thought were saying Pepsi is evil drink coke there is no mechanism to decide which is correct you as a Muslim get to just simply decide if you like this Imam you follow his foot was if you don't you follow the

1:05:49 other guy spot was and indeed most Muslims don't have a single Imam that they follow they just follow whatever foot was they like so they'll follow Imam a when it comes to say fought was about marriage or purity they'll follow Imam be when it comes to fought was about say you know living it in a certain way or let's say foreign issues that's the thing about Islam is that it is sent ironically speaking community because of the the previous color it is a quintessentially democratic religion in that it's really up to you who you want to follow John is calling in from Issaquah Washington John you're on book

1:06:36 TV yes my question is is that do you see the future of religions can - just diversify and grow a number or do you see a future where religions coalesce and maybe become like one unified religion what a fantastic question and this is something that I'm deeply interested in when I write about religious traditions because I do believe that you can sort of move forward in the timeline the history of religions and make certain predictions and I think that this is gonna sound weird but both of you're sort of two possibilities of religion are becoming true one religion is becoming far more individualistic it's becoming fractured

1:07:23 into greater sex and schisms primarily this has to do with the Internet I mean sociologists referred to this process that's taking place over the last decade as post-materialism that's just a fancy way of saying that the very definition of community is altering right before our eyes think about it this way for all of human history I mean ever since we were you know Neanderthals living in caves for all of human history the definition of community was the people around you the people in your cave the people in your tribe the people in your village the people in your city the people in your country the people in

1:08:10 your nation it's geographically defined what it means to be in a community in the last decade that definition has been shattered by the internet because now community is no longer geographically constrained indeed a kid in Indonesia let's say a Christian kid in Indonesia may have more in common with the Muslim kid in Los Angeles because they share the same love of music love of movies they share the same interest they share the same values then either of those kids may have in common with their own sort of geographically defined communities this is what we mean by

1:08:55 post-materialism in other words it's no longer safety or sustenance or shelter that defines a community it's these post materialist values and religion has been utterly shattered the very definition has been utterly shattered by these new community formations which is why we're seeing more sort of religious sects popping up online people don't meet in actual churches they meet in chat rooms so that's one future of religion the other future of religion however is one in which science and religion are starting to become closer and closer to each other now this drives both religious and

1:09:42 scientific people mad when I say this but the truth of the matter is is that the more science begins to redefine the nature of reality the more it starts to use religious language to do so certainly mystical language to do so the idea that all matter is eternal that it has always existed and will always exist that what makes me what I am is the same thing that makes this table what it is these are mystical religious ideas that have been around for thousands of years so I think that if we look at these two trends and move into the future we can start making some very interesting predictions about what religion will look like a hundred years from now a

1:10:29 thousand years from now what I can tell you with some confidence is that religion is not going to go away we've been talking about the death of God for about a hundred years now at the dawn of the 20th century one half of the world's population defined itself as either Christian Muslim Jewish Hindu or Buddhist 100 years of secularism of scientific advancement of economic development and that number is now 2/3 it seems that people are becoming more religious not less religious and I don't think that there's a reason why this trend is going to reverse anytime soon marry Atlanta good afternoon please go ahead Hey raise that I just

1:11:17 have to say I admire any person who can put a sentence together that has fatwa and papal bull at the same behind I appreciated that oh yes brilliant are you familiar with Richard Rohr and his Center for action and contemplation I've heard of it yes I have okay the reason the reason I asked is he's the type of Catholic he's a Franciscan monk and his outreach I'm not I'm Palestinian I'm episcopalian so I'm not a Catholic but he preaches the way that the Pope the new pope does it's very inclusive and basically we're where I want to get is not an ad for him I'm

1:12:03 sorry but to come up with everything that religion comes down to our I liked whether you went with symbols and metaphors but I'm looking for actionable consequences of those those metaphors and and I'm not looking for war I'm Palestinian mean the more that I'm looking for well just take Jesus as one you know healing preaching feeding basically taking care of our yeah our regular sisters and brothers of all different colors in the faith so I guess what I'm trying to say is I love where your brain is it just is astounding is there an actionable yeah question

1:12:52 Mary thank you before I begin that answer that question I let me just talk a little bit about my love for Pope Francis everybody loves Pope Francis for a whole host of reasons well but people would don't they don't realize is that Pope Francis is the very first Jesuit Pope which if you understand anything about Catholic history and anything about the Jesuits you understand what a remarkable statement that is how earth-shattering it is to have a Jesuit Pope finally at the Vatican and as a proud product of a Jesuit education in fact it was the Jesuits who first taught me about religion it was the Jesuits who first taught me about the historical Jesus I couldn't be prouder or happier to have Pope Francis in the papacy right

1:13:40 now because at the heart of the Jesuit ideal is the preferential option for the poor is the notion that Jesus's message is about the poor and for the poor and that the only way to really live up to Jesus's commandment is to also have a a commitment to the poor to the dispossessed to the marginalized and Pope Francis I think has learned a valuable lesson from his predecessor Pope Benedict which is that you know the Catholic Church's two things it's a bureaucracy and a church and you can't really reform the bureaucracy Pope Benedict realize this but you can reform the church and the way to do so is to just simply live out the

1:14:27 commandments of Jesus and hope everyone else follows and that's what Pope Francis has done and I am so so proud to be a product of a Jesuit education and someone who who really supports this Pope and what he's been doing so that's my my two cents on the Pope this notion of the sort of the things that religions have in common is of course incredibly important at the heart of it is this idea that is found in all religious traditions and which is most familiar to Jews and Christians as do unto others as you would have them do unto you the golden rule exists in every religious traditions in the world religions that go far back before

1:15:14 Judaism the code of hammurabi the oldest most ancient code of ethics that we have has the golden rule in it this idea that there is a way of treating other people regardless of their race or ethnicity of their religion their nationality and it's simply how you yourself want to be treated seems so basic but at the heart of it is this notion of compassion that we are to have compassion for one another that we are not to focus on our differences but the things that we have in common now I will be the first to admit that this is very difficult to do it's difficult for the reasons that I mentioned before because people confuse religion for

1:15:59 faith and they so they focus on their religion that that divides us rather than the faith that unites us but also because we tend to focus on something that I call interfaith dialogue that if we can all come together if a Jew and a Christian and a Muslim can come together and talk to one another about their religions that it'll create a greater bond it's a beautiful idea and I'm not by any means dismissing it it's a great thing and it should happen but it's not enough interfaith dialogue is not the end all and be all and so the advice that I have for all those great churches and synagogues and mosques who want to

1:16:44 have greater connection greater connectivity and cooperation with people of other faiths it's not enough to come together to talk about the things that unite you what you need is interfaith action I am a great supporter of a wonderful American organization called interfaith youth core founded by my friend eboo Patel out of Chicago the Interfaith youth core has a very simple message rather than getting young people of different religions to sit into a

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