Reza Aslan in Conversation with Jack Miles

it is a pleasure to be here this afternoon for what I'm sure will be an interesting conversation with not my old friend but my new friend reza aslan some years ago I paid the first visit that I had ever paid to a marvelous scholar of of Chinese religion named Anthony U at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Tony you wrote me a letter afterward quoting a Chinese proverb whose import is something like this we've known each other for so long it's a shame that our first meeting was so delayed Reza and I have had several long conversations with something like that that mood about them a story is told about meeting unintended between the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury and the Roman Catholic primate of London who accidentally entered the same taxicab from opposite doors and the cab pulled away before either of them could get out and they drove along in awkward silence until the Archbishop of Canterbury said well your eminence we needn't sit here in silence after all we do worship the same God and there was a brief pause and the Cardinal primate of London said yes your grace you in your way and we in his relations between these two lords of religion were not helped by the fact that of course both were Englishmen your Englishmen being a self-made man who worships his Creator most of us are more like the archetype ol Irishman who doesn't know quite what he believed but will willingly die defending it this comes from the generally beleaguered condition of Ireland but these days we all believe that we are under siege don't we everyone and everyone's group feels that it is the victim group it is the group most abused by its enemies and the one that has the greatest grievance to bring before the court of public opinion are we drifting in this world toward religious war that's the worst kind of war isn't it because it's the kind most intractable to negotiation if we surrender to drift that's where we may end up but what we are collectively trying to do I believe is chart a course that can be a common course we're in search of what can be a common destination for the populations of our planet and some of us are rather than surrendered to drift are trying to paddle in the direction that can win acceptance Reza Aslan is one of those and it's because of that that that his work has has received a welcome so warm that it seems almost a kind of relief is there a way to tell the stories that we tell on this planet so that they become intertwining stories so that they become a common story in which everyone can have an acceptable place that I think is the challenge before us and to tell the story from this point on means appreciating the story to this point raises book tells the story of Islam from origins to the present but with a vector pointing toward the future past present and future with a flow with a narrative flow that that bespeaks his his training and his as a novelist and I venture to say a novel a novelist whose first novel you'll soon be reading this is no mean feat the history of religion is a story that's very complex and doesn't necessarily lend itself easily even to the skills of an accomplished novelist but I think he has brought that off in his book and I'm hoping that in our conversation today some of what he has brought about can can be shared with you and then toward the end of the session we'll will take some questions and and perhaps find some pointers toward where we'll go from here the title of the book is no god but God and you will notice that the second word and begins with a lowercase G and fourth word with an uppercase G no god but God is the foundation statement of Islam this was the very beginning of the revelation that Mohammed received from God our our picture I would say here in the west of the revelation to Muhammad is of a man in a white role may be mounted on a camel or sitting by a campfire alone in a in a desert all by himself sands blowing about perhaps and he hears a voice from God and what the voice says is that there is no god but himself well but what was the situation in fact at that time I mean can you tell us a bit about Mohammed began this is an excellent question I think a perfect place that starts the discussion I just want to begin by thanking you all for being here and and I feel really guilty I came in a little bit late and had to push my way through the people waiting outside and and I there's plenty of room on the stage I was thought perhaps it here but it's our feet it is exactly and I also want to say what an incredible honor it is and and quite frankly it's a it's a little intimidating to to be sharing a stage with someone whose work that I've admired and I've been reading for for so many years and I can't for the life of me figure out why this is reza aslan in conversation with jack miles I feel like I'm far more interested in what you have to say then and I think any but I'll try my best to keep up it's what I'm trying to say here so platitudes aside you bring up a very good point because we don't normally talk even in Islamic studies we don't normally talk about what pre-islamic Arabia was there is this conception of course in the Muslim world that this era an era that Muslims refer to as jihad Lia or the time of ignorance was an era of moral depravity and and backwardness and darkness and then like the Rising Sun suddenly the Prophet Mohammed appeared and almost in a social vacuum created this religion that we call Islam but of course pre-islamic Arabia and in particular the city of Mecca where Mohammed was born and raised and in which he preached was a melting pot of sorts of not just different cultures and and ideologies but more specifically of religions this was an area in which Christians and Jews and zoroastrians the pre-islamic religion of Iran and a whole host of different what we would refer to as as pagan or polytheistic religious traditions as well as number of indigenous Arab monotheistic movements coexisted side-by-side it was an era in which these religious traditions because they were in so often removed from their from their centers from their geographical centers whether that be in Palestine or you know in Rome what have you had the opportunity for profound religious experimentation and so we're really talking about a place in which religion was active and and alive and it really was that the perfect setting for someone like Mohammed to arise and to be be able to fashion this distinctly unique message but one that is so much a part of the previous messages that had come before him so this was anything but I guess what I'm trying to say a time of ignorance and darkness quite the opposite however it was one in which the religious and the social traditions were inextricable that were they were absolutely intertwined in every way and particularly with regard to the economy pre-islamic Arabia was after all the home of the Kaaba the sort of central religious sanctuary that is still to this day the the focal point of the Muslim world but of course the Kaaba was around for hundreds of years before Muhammad and it was at this time according to Muslim tradition a place where it was it was essentially an Arab pantheon a place where all the gods of pre-islamic Arabia resided in one form or another and that brought an enormous amount of power and prestige to the tribe that ruled over Mecca the Quraysh and it had created what I refer to as a religion economic system one in which the economy of the city was based upon the religion of the city the Kaaba because of course if all of the gods of pre-islamic Arabia resided in this one place then that means that every tribe in the in the peninsula would have to at one time or another make a pilgrimage to the city of Mecca in order to worship their gods in fact it's very important to understand that that these gods these individual gods got to Mecca because they were literally stolen and brought there so that to force peoples of other tribes to to come to Mecca and of course they would come with their worship and their offerings but they would also come with their goods and their services and it created a situation in which the economy of this society was really built upon the religion of the society that worked absolutely one in the same but in that kind of system what you have is a situation of great stratification so those people who are in one way or another in charge of the religious infrastructure of society are now also in charge of the economic infrastructure of society which creates a situation in which you have a very small group of people the the elites of society the Quraish hierarchy who more or less owned everything and then the second-class citizens which would primarily were merchants these were businessmen who had some connection with the ruling elites and then of course the slaves the servants the orphans the unprotected so you had a religious melting pot a what we could refer to I suppose as an ethnic melting pot but all intertwine with this economic stratification that really left no room for anyone who was not part of this elite and that of course included the Prophet Muhammad and so when I talk about Muhammad's earlier message and the reason I gave this prologue about what pre-islamic Arabia looked like is because it's important to understand that Muhammad's message was not just a religious message in fact I would argue that it wasn't primarily a religious message certainly not at first it was a social message and the very term there is no god but God the very profession of faith that really launches the theology of this is not just a religious statement it's a social statement and it is essentially an attack on the very religio economic foundation that I was referring to what Muhammad was saying essentially is that the gods in the Kaaba do not exist and if they don't exist then there's really no reason for the Kaaba and if there's no reason for the Kaaba then there's no reason for all these pilgrims to come here every year and if there's no reason for all these pilgrims to come here and every year then there's really no foundation left for the economy of society and it was that distinctly social and economic message that really set him at odds with the ruling establishment not his religious message again think about it the idea that there is no god but God this notion of monotheism was not unheard of it wasn't in no way innovative or unique in pre-islamic Arabia there were plenty of Christians in Mecca who believed that there were plenty of Jews in Mecca who believe that there are plenty of Arabs who believe that so this idea that there was some religious conflict between the so called pagan Arabs and the monotheistic Muslims is really a misunderstanding of this social service circumstances in that in that what you what you describe Raisa it seems in some way to do bear to bear comparison with the the Protestant Reformation in that the the reformers of course didn't introduce Christianity to the world Christianity was already there but there were certain economic practices or certain practices that mingled economic profit with with religious belief that they objected to and they wanted as they saw it to to go back to a corrected version they wanted to correct the errors that had had crept in over time into Roman Catholic practices was there something akin to that and Muhammad's early preaching very much so and I think this goes to the larger issue of prophecy and prophethood prophets are not creators of religion I think we have a tendency to think of them as such Moses did not invent Judaism any more than Jesus invented Christianity or Mohammed invented Islam in fact it's quite often a prophet successors who are given the responsibility of transforming the words and the deeds of the Prophet into some kind of unified and often institutionalized system of beliefs and practices what prophets are our commentators they are social reformers they are their job is to take the existing structure of society the religious political economic social structure of society and to reform it to present a new way of thinking about not just humanity's relationship to God but our relationship to one another and this is very much in line with how Muhammad I think considered his own prophetic consciousness over and over again the Quran says this is not a new message this is the same message that was given to Adam and to Abraham and to Moses and to what the tribes of Israel the same message that was given to John the Baptist and to Jesus Christ their God is your God their scripture is your scripture so what Muhammad really saw himself is not as an innovator as somebody who was giving a new message to to the world but somebody who was essentially commenting on the the message that was already there a a reformer a a revivalist in in some ways and very much in that in that protest in sway as someone who was saying that not only was the the so-called pagan structure of society wrong but even those Jews and Christians who in Muhammad's mine had gone away from the the practices and the traditions of Judaism and Christianity that they needed to be called back and Muhammad really saw himself in that same prophetic line as someone who calls people back to God the of course that simple act of calling people back to something that they ought to be believing already or that their their ancestors believed in properly and they have partially lost sight of can be in context and extremely disruptive wand as you as you point out and and Muhammad was ferociously resisted by those whose whose religious Empire was religious and economic system he was calling into question but then passed the point of where that the prophecy has been delivered and the the crucial and necessary disruption and has occurred there does always come a time of consolidation that time when the religion we may say really is formed not by the charismatic religious leader himself but by his followers in some configuration so for example in in Christianity at least as it it seems to me there was the view that Jesus passed on his teaching to his Twelve Apostles and they conveyed it around the Mediterranean and became the bishops of the great capital cities of of the Roman Empire as it gradually changed from a an empire practicing greco-roman paganism to one whose religion was overwhelmingly Christian where was a thaw rity located in this new religion well it was vested in these Twelve Apostles that's the view that lives on in Eastern Orthodox Christianity to this day alongside it and with very very early roots but in in a competition with the view I just described was the view that st. Peter the leading apostle among the twelve the one who became according to tradition the first Pope was in person the locus of authority what did Christians believe who should determine that he should be the one who would determine it and whoever succeeded him in in that role so there was a then a group picture of how authority was exercised and a more personalized picture it has seemed to me that that this this difference in Christianity has an analogue in Islam in the difference between Sunni Islam and Shia Islam but I'm talking beyond my expertise here it's just a guess on my part and I'd like you to tell me why I'm wrong raisa or how I'm half right and what work we hear so much especially now with the war in Iraq taking the turn that it has taken about Sunni and Shia or Shia Muslims where did they originate it's an excellent question and a very important one you're absolutely right well it does originate of course in the very same this this example that you gave about the dispersal of religious authority in Christianity it's it's one that definitely has its parallel in in in the Muslim world the Prophet Muhammad had a quite a successful career I mean I think that that's something that right away makes a lot of people especially those who are familiar with the judeo-christian conceptions of prophethood scratched their heads and in fact for years that was I think he during the papal propaganda of the Crusades that was the the chief proof that Muhammad was not truly a prophet because if he were truly a prophet he would have been scourged and killed and defeated and would have been a complete failure and then later generations would have said well you know how to but the very fact that he was absent with Jesus yeah exactly but the very fact that he was successful in and that his message was enormous ly appealing to to a great many people and that he died at the at the height of his powers was an indication that that obviously this wasn't a message from God because if it was a message from God it would have been rejected not accepted so that that's an interesting paradigm right there but when Muhammad died he really made no he made no statements about not just who would replace him as leader of the community either religious leader or political leader because of course he was both in at that time but also what kind of community he was leaving behind he really did not make any kind of comment about it at all and there's a lot of speculation as to why he wouldn't have done so perhaps he was waiting for a revelation from God that never came perhaps he just wanted the community to decide for themselves what was going to happen upon his death and so when we talk about this split between the Sunni and the Shia that occurred really at that moment of Muhammad's death often it's it said during the first 12 hours of Muhammad's death is when you had this first split in the Muslim community we have to separate it in I think three different ways we have to think of it as political ethnic and religious politically speaking this was primarily a discussion over who was going to succeed Muhammad whether it was going to be this popular consensus that the community themselves would decide who would end by the community of course I mean the elders of the community the decision-makers of the community would decide or whether it would be a issue of lineage for our great many Muslims the the natural successor to the Prophet Muhammad was his only remaining blood relative his his nephew and son-in-law Ali there was this conception that somehow the prophethood that was inherent in Muhammad would be present in his in his lineage in his very blood that very much in the same way that you had the successors in the Bible with Moses and Aaron etc etc there were just as many I think Muslims who rejected that notion and and wanted Abu Bakr who was one of the earliest followers of Muhammad and who represented a different different clan and Muhammad's and so at first this was primarily a political discussion there was no real religious difference between the Sunni and the Shia the Shia of course representing the party of Ali or the Shia to Ali so this is primarily a political discussion now if those of you familiar with Islamic history know that that the party of Ali lost its cause eventually and became outcasts social and political outcasts in in community and it was only when they really broke away from the mainstream Muslim community that they were shunned and and their their beliefs were outlawed their ideology was outlawed and and that they began to refocus some of this political energy into a religious innovations and began to I think really redefine themselves not as a political force which they were not anymore but as a religious force and you had a whole host of different and very unique and innovative notions of God and and of Muhammad and of the Quran that arose from this from the Shia movement but what I really want to emphasize is that religiously speaking these were ideas that really existed from the very beginning I don't want to make it sound as though suddenly there was this new sect and these holy new ideas that are that arose these were ideas about you you know the hidden meaning the hidden message in the Quran in the revelations about Muhammad's spiritual connection to to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and to into God himself in in that sense there's the spiritual connection of Muhammad that really were around from the very beginning and that only after this this separation in which the Shia the party of Ali found themselves ostracized really began to formulate into a new religious identity and then of course there's the ethnic aspect of it during those first couple of hundred years in which Islam spread from this tiny community of faith in Mecca to the world's largest empire and within a century or so this was a distinctly Arab conception of Islam in fact Islam was seen as the property of the Arabs there is this tendency in the West to think of Islam is spreading by the sword very common perception that conversion was forced upon people and that's why Islam spread so rapidly well strangely enough the the opposite is true not only was Islam not forced upon the the populations that the captured populations it wasn't even encouraged in fact it was actively discouraged because every time somebody converted to Islam they would have to pay less taxes and the the Arab Empire the last thing that they wanted to do was continue to have these hundreds of thousands of people who are constantly converting to Islam and they're losing all of this this revenue so they made it very very difficult for non Arabs which by the way at a very early stage began to outnumber Arabs within the kingdom they made it very difficult for non Arabs to convert to Islam you had to essentially become an Arab first you had to find an Arab tribe that would be willing to adopt you and then once you became Arab then you could convert to Islam and even then you were still considered a second-class citizen well shia islam the shia conception of what it meant to be a muslim did not have that arab ethnic identity attached to it so it became enormous ly popular and appealing to non arab muslims particularly those converts from the sasanian the iranian empire so the persians the indo-europeans the central asians and so she isn't became a force in itself and as more and more cultures and and ethnicities and and local traditions began to to come into islam began to convert to islam this Shia version of it the more she ISM band to change and so essentially what what is is very exciting about Shiism as a as a movement within Islam is that it really absorbed a whole host of local traditions and conceptions about God and about religion and what we now see is shiism is really the amalgamation of islam and and some sort of central asian Gnosticism and and some indian philosophy and a lot of persian Zoroastrian conceptions of cosmology and all of that came together under this guise of of a Muslim identity to create religiously now what we refer to as XI ISM so there are three different ways of thinking about the Sunni and Shiah split that I think are very important to differentiate though of course they do in the end combined to make one sort of unique identity within this year we don't have time to run down the full inventory of what those those differences are between Shia Islam and Sunni Islam that developed over time but it might be good if we could talk about one or two and one that I'm particularly curious about attempt to my just as you were speaking there about how Muhammad made no provision for how the community of his followers would be governed after his death is the idea that the world may be soon to end this is commonly asserted with regard to Jesus and even with regard to Paul that that all provisions for government within their movement were provisional because it was thought that that rule of the Last Judgement was at hand and they would all quickly be moved anyway what was the expectation in early Islam Sunni or Shia about how it would all well that's an interesting question I mean Muslim eschatology this idea of the end times was really adopted almost in totality from the Christian conception of the end times in fact one of the real fascinating things about the the Quran is that the images that it uses not just to talk about heaven as a garden and as a paradise but also the images that it uses when it talks about the end times the blowing of trumpets and the the the rain rain of fire things like that are distinctly Christian images images that must have been around must have been prevalent in pre-islamic Arabia because the way that they're referred to in the Quran there is this there's this idea that that the audience is already familiar with these things familiar with these images and so Muhammad uses them and and preaches about them in very surfacey ways doesn't really go through the trouble of explaining where where these ideas and these these images came from well I want to go back just very quickly because you're right we don't have time to talk about all of the the various differences between Sunni and Shiah Islam but I think there's one important difference and it does come back to this conception of the end times between the two groups and that is this notion of where spiritual authority rests with the Shia again I think that part of this had to do with the fact they had no political power that they became ostracized so soon after the death of Muhammad there was this notion that religious authority rests in the line of Muhammad in the heritage of Muhammad so in other words that spiritual that ineffable quality that made Muhammad a prophet disappear ISM his that's right his charism absolutely was passed on to Ali his his nephew and son-in-law from Ali it was passed to his sons Hasan and Husayn and then from from their sons and and this this line continues and these characters these these designated lines of Mohammed are referred to as Imams this is a very complicated word and Sunnis also used the term Iman in in Sunni Islam it just simply means teacher or follower the person that you that you pray behind the leader of a congregation but when the Shia used the term Imam they are referring to something wholly different they are referring to what is often referred with what is often defined as the proof of God on earth in other words the person on earth who in their very being represents the living embodiment of the revelation of God represents the the presence of God on earth what happens of course is that the line of imams comes to an end in some Shia groups it comes to an end after the fifth Imam and some it comes to end after the seventh in the main the the largest group of Shia represented by the Shia in Iran and Iraq it comes to be comes to end at the 12th but nonetheless there is this conception theologically speaking that there must always be any mom on the earth that that you cannot ever have existence without the existence of the Imam because if there is no proof of God on earth then there is no God on earth and if there is no God then there is no earth so there's this conception that the last Imam whether it's the fifth or the seventh or the twelfth is omnipresent it's it's he's ever-present he's not physically on earth he's in hiding somewhere but that he is waiting for the for the right time for the end times to suddenly reappear and restore justice on earth very much in a messianic way he like the second coming of Jesus is very much like the second coming of Jesus he's known as the math D the the the the hidden one the Hidden Imam and the Shia are in in that very sense waiting for those last days waiting for the math D to arrive and until he arrives they will always be the minority they will have political control they will always be the the outcasts and the up the ostracized until the math D arrives and restores the the true community of Muhammad on earth so very much in that Christian sense of waiting for Jesus now I should say that the Shia like all Muslims are also waiting for Jesus to come back Muslims believe that Jesus is the Messiah and they they await the Messiah's return at the end of time but there is some doctrinal confusion well well Jesus and the math D come at the same time well Jesus come first and paved the way for the math D well the math D come first and paved the way for the third for Jesus will Jesus focus on the Christians while the math D focuses on the Muslims you see all of this in the in the doctrine it's quite confused as as any issue with the end times often is and awe in all religions but nonetheless that unique sense of eschatology I think while certainly Sunni Muslims also believe in in Jesus as the Messiah and most Sunnis actually await the math D as well this becomes uniquely Shia it's a way for them to think of themselves as a persecuted minority who will at the end of time finally be re-established that that that the that the Sunni majority the persecutor will get its comeuppance you know when it be at the end of time mm-hmm so that is that is a real distinct difference between the Sunni world and mushiya world tell us if you will what the what the word Sunni means or from or soon are we here sometimes yes Sunni Sunni comes from the term Sunnah and it refers to the traditions of the Prophet the Shia comes from the terms the Shia - Ali the party of Ali and I think in those two terms you get a real sense as to where the the authority rests in the Sunni world the authority rests upon the traditions themselves the Quran the hadith which is the oral anecdotes about the words and deeds of Muhammad that were elected to 200 years after Muhammad's death and and then of course the the hundreds and hundreds of years of commentary upon those those original traditions so the Sunni find their source of authority in the traditions themselves the Shia find their source of authority in the charisma of the Prophet and in the charisma of the prophets designated successors the Imams who are no longer on earth anymore except for that last Imam who is somewhere in hiding and so what happens if you're a Shia and your source of religious authority is not accessible anymore you cannot you cannot have any kind of access to him essentially what happens is that the representatives of that Hidden Imam of the one who is to come the representatives have that authority upon them themselves which is again why in Shia Islam there is far more deference given to the clerical authorities than there is in Sunni Islam and why in Shia Islam you have this very rigid hierarchy from the grand ayatollahs at the very top to the mid-level clerics the MU gia the the persons of emulation in other words that authority comes from one's connections one spiritual connection to this prophetic line so this would would employ them that in in Sunni Islam arresting authority on tradition that that anyone who has taken the trouble to study the Quran carefully and master the hadith would have the right to to speak with some measure of authority and authority would be a variable in its grandeur depending on the learning and prestige of the school perhaps worthy is it Mufti that's right a Mufti is someone who is capable of issuing a fatwa which is a legal opinion in other words is someone who has the authority to make any kind of commentary on either the Quran or the traditions that's absolutely correct but it does create this this one little problem in Sunni Islam and that is that if the tradition is is what matters and that the tradition is where the source of authority comes from there's really very little room for innovation on that on that tradition the tradition tends to remain somewhat static not wholly static there is of course a great evolution in theology and and thought in the Sunni world but there is some limitations to how far that kind of innovation could go in fact in Sunni Islam the very term innovation Binda is considered a heretical term that it's a bad thing to have any kind of religious innovation so a sunni cleric is one who essentially gets his authority from his learning and from his scholarship on these traditions but one whose primary part primary function is to simply comment upon the the traditions themselves to try to interpret them in some way as to make sense in in the modern world but not to create any kind of innovation that of course is completely different from Shia Islam the Shia also maintain that they know the tradition has its authority but the real authority rests not with the words on the page but with the interpreter himself the Ayatollah the Imam however you have it day because of their spiritual connection to Muhammad because of their spiritual connection to the Imams and more specifically to the Hidden Imam they have enormous latitude to come up with unique and innovative interpretations on Islam based not on the text themselves really but based solely on their own reasoning on their own end pendant reasoning their own judicial mind if you will so it allows for much greater diversity in in Shia theology and in Shia doctrine than you have in Sunni doctrine which again when we're talking about the modern world in these very complex ideas about how do we reconcile Islamic values with democratic values or enlightenment values in this very strange way it becomes much easier for the Shia to do that than it does for the Sunni you know Raisa is associated now but fairly well from a number of public statements with the the view that the conflict that is taking place in the world just now is not between the OMA or world Muslim community and the West but rather a struggle within Islam between modernists and and reactionaries and that what is underway is something like the the reformation of the 15th century 16th century in in the West now this brings me to a point I made just earlier today when we were speaking raise Aniyah at lunch that it was at the time of the the Reformation that the term Lutheran arose and and Calvinist to religious leaders whose names became attached to forms of Christianity associated with them each of them in in his way believed that he was delivering a crucial correction to the practice of Christianity and in his day and attracted followers whose tradition lasts down to the present Raisa has has added a term so far as I know in use before before he coined it holman ISM for the named for the ayatollah khomeini as the founder of a novel form of Shia Islam with strong impulse to transform the practice of Islam around the world in the same way that Calvin and his followers sought to transform the practice of all Christianity earlier there was another individual in managua hub for whom the Wahhabi form of of Islam is named this is the this is just as Ayatollah home a nice form of Islam is a derivation from Shia Islam Wahhabism which is dominant in Saudi Arabia and has had a very strong impulse to spread its understandings of the tradition the Sunnah around the world is derived from that that strand of Islam so this carries us down a good deal closer to the present time and I would like to ask you to comment on Wahhabism and Holman ISM and where they came from where they're going well going back to what we were talking about the differences between the Sunni and the Shia and where authority rests oh maybe was really a religious innovator I sort of talked about mania ISM as in Islamic millenarianism very much like Christian millenarianism this conception that we can we on earth can actually pave the way for Jesus's return we can build the kingdom of God on earth and in so doing the Messiah will will come back this was very much what what how many thought again remember the Shia as a persecuted minority had really remained distant from any kind of political authority Deshea really saw themselves as removed from world and waiting for the end time waiting for the math d2 to arrive to restore the kingdom of God on earth Khomeini had a vastly different idea his idea was that no if we could actually build that kingdom here on earth then we will usher in the end of times we will actually assure in the return of the madyun and this is very familiar for some of us who know this in Christian terms and in Christian Christian theology and who made his conception of that was well what needs to happen is that the state has to be under the rule of the representatives of the macd the representatives of this Messiah who are the representatives well the clerics the ayatollahs they are the ones who speak for the macd and if and if they were given complete control over the state over society then they would build the perfect society the perfectly moral society the society that the Matty himself will build when he comes at the end of time and in doing that on earth you are essentially compelling the Matty's arrival so it's a it's a religious revival ISM that attempts in many ways to go back to the very religious roots of Shiism this conception of placing religious authority in the hands of of the individual the leader well what waha BISM does is very much the same idea but in a uniquely Sunni version if religious authority rests solely in the tradition solely in the Quran and the hadith then everything else whatever innovations have have arisen around Islam are heretical forms and must be stamped out so that's why I refer to all of ism as a puritanical set it is Puritanism I mean in its in its perfect form this idea that we have to return to the the unadulterated pure version of Islam that that the Prophet Mohammed put into place and strip Islam of all of its ethnic and religious and cultural innovations and as Puritans the wahabis have done really a marvelous job I mean they have been helped by you know the the geopolitical dominance of of the Saudi Arabia over the last and oilmen century in oil money yes money absolutely and so they have they have really managed to spread this Puritan ideology throughout the Muslim world so really there is there's really no place on earth anymore with the size of old Muslim population that doesn't have a mosque or a school or a charity or a foundation that is funded by built by the Saudis and that really promotes this waha be Puritan puritanical version of Islam so these I think are very much a response to Islamic modernism and it goes back to what at what we were talking before about this internal conflict taking place within Islam and how it represents the Islamic Reformation this term you know I give up I get a lot of criticism for using this term and so I'm not beaut I'm not the person who coined it and I'm certainly not the only person who writes about it or talks about it but I get a lot of criticism about it for obvious reasons and that's because the term Reformation has these Christian and European connotations that that are simply not applicable to some of the very complex socio-political conflicts taking place throughout the Arab and Muslim world but but I use the term deliberately because what I want an audience to do is go back to the fundamental issue regarding the Christian Reformation and again it was what we've been talking about throughout this conversation and that is who where does Authority rest does it rest in the institutions or does it rest in the individual this argument is precisely the argument that is raging throughout the Muslim world and again you know there is no single institution in Islam there is no Vatican that speaks for the world's Muslims but as we saying and this is a particularly SUNY phenomenon as we were saying if Authority rests in these traditions and the only people who can read or comment on these into these traditions are the clerics then the only people who can comment on Islam the only people who have any authority over the meaning and message of Islam are these clerics there are the only ones who can really read the texts they're the only ones who have access to the Quran because for centuries the Quran really could not be translated from arabic because it would lose its its power as the quran and that sense of authority is precisely what had had sort of kept islam in many ways in their iron grip really no one outside of this very small group of men were able to discuss or comment upon islam in any authoritative way that is precisely what has been changing over the last century or so for a number of reasons not just because of advances in literacy and education throughout the muslim world but also because of greater access through the internet through through publishing of new and innovative ideas and sources of knowledge and information about islam from not just clerics around the world but even from non clerics from laypeople and that sense of individualism has really transformed islam over the past century in profound ways and is really created this conflict not and i'll give you the perfect example of that very briefly you know we talked about bin Laden a lot and about this movement that that he has created that is sometimes referred to as bin Laden ism or jihadism but what we tend to forget is that bin Laden is in many ways the poster child of the Islamic Reformation he's not a counter to the Reformation he is a product of the Reformation this is a man who is saying in a very public way that authority rests in the individual that's precisely why he issues these Phut was which he is not allowed to do only a cleric is allowed to do that's why he he issues these Jihad's which again he's not allowed to do only a cleric is allowed to to lead a jihad that's because what he is trying to do is set himself in opposition to these institutions very much like Luther very much like the the Christian Reformation radicals Thomas Munster Hans hood to say that that authority rests in the individual and it's the individual that matters well that's precisely what the modernists are saying that's precisely what Muslim reformists are saying that's precisely what I am saying so in many ways we are as awkward as it sounds on the same side of the Reformation but as one would expect when religious authority passes from the hands of institutions to the hands of individuals that you are going to have wildly divergent views of of what that religious interpretation means and a great part of this conflict this internal conflict we are seeing in the Muslim world is a direct result of that new source of authority the individual instead of the institution when it comes to the meaning and message of Islam the it has been alleged that the the Codex this form of the presentation of printed material cut pages sewed together on one side and printed on both sides a rose it certainly did arise around the time that that Christianity arose and it has been suggested that it may have been a Christian invention because almost all of the earliest codices are actually Christian texts another technological innovation was the development of printing which coincided and had an enormous impact on the Reformation perhaps it will be the Internet as a form of communication that will will play the comparable role in the in the change that Raisa is describing in in world Islam but as he very astutely points out individualism is to be distinguished carefully from tolerance you can have an authoritarian religion that is is tolerant and gentle and you can have an individual of empowering himself whose vision is quite intolerant I have here Jimmy Carter's new book our endangered values which includes what I found rather interesting checked list of what distinguishes fundamentalists of any sort in within any religion from from modernists and before he gives this little list he reminisces about the time when he a lifelong Southern Baptist now elected president received you to visit from the president of the Southern Baptist Convention in the Oval Office he writes this had been a routine ceremony for many years especially when the President of the United States happened to be a Baptist I congratulated him on his new position as president of the Southern Baptist Convention and we spent a few minutes exchanging courtesies as he and his wife were leaving he said we are praying mr. president that you will abandon secular humanism as your religion this was a shock to me I considered myself to be a loyal and traditional Baptist and had no idea what he meant later after attending services with his own pastor he found out about a change that had taken place in the Southern Baptist Convention bringing to the fore a number of modifications of what had been its its traditional way of exercising Authority for example a clause was introduced that red lay leadership of the church is unbiblical when it weakens the pastor's authority as ruler of the church changes of this sort can occur or can be revoked within any given religious group here is his checklist though because I think it's an interesting contribution to this and I as I say it applies across the board almost invariably if fundamentalist movements are led by authoritarian males who consider themselves to be superior to others and within religious groups have an overwhelming commitment to subjugate women and to dominate their fellow believers the Ebrahim Jafari be until recently the president of Iraq and the provisional government referred disparagingly to be insurgents in that country as TOC theory the the Muslim word for heretic or unbeliever is kaffir and attack fear is someone who says as a Muslim who says to another Muslim you are a Kaffir you are a heretic this I found a very interesting isolation of a pattern of behavior on the part of a of a Muslim obviously in a crucial position in his country at a crucial time in its history but let me go on with Carter's list although fundamentalists usually believe that the past is better than the present they retain certain self beneficial aspects of both their historic religious beliefs and of the modern world there is a picking and choosing then and it's a self-interested smorgasbord decision fundamentalists draw clear distinctions between themselves as true believers and others convinced that they are right and that anyone who contradicts them is ignorant and possibly evil fundamentalists are militant in fighting against any challenge to their beliefs they are often angry and sometimes resort to verbal or even physical abuse against those who interfere with the implementation of their agenda and finally fundamentalists tend to make their self definition increasingly narrow and restricted to isolate themselves to demagogue emotional issues and to view change cooperation negotiation and other efforts to resolve differences as signs of weakness what he means in this last point is that we mustn't assume that everyone is hoping for what I announced as my hope at the beginning a common destination a coalition large large enough and broad enough to include everyone there are on the contrary many who as soon as this begins to happen want to introduce some new cause of distinction some new passion that that then can be used as a point to which you can retreat and assert your superiority over those who otherwise might be content to make some sort of accommodation with you does any of this bear on what you've just been absolutely and you know the other thing that I would add to to that list is that fundamentalism is almost by definition a reactionary movement it's not an independent ideology there is no such thing as just fundamentalism as itself fundamentalism - to really define itself needs to set itself in opposition to something as a reaction to something and this has of course a lot to do with the very history of this of this term as most of you know fundamentalism began very early in the 20th century as a distinctly American and distinctly Protestant reaction to the secularization and modernization of American society it really as a result of the First World War and so it this was a group of Protestants who were deliberately reacting to this rapid secularization rapid modernization of society by reverting to what they referred to as the fundamentals of their faith hence the term fundamentalist and of course chief amongst those fundamentals of their faith was this conception of a literal literal reading of the Bible which really was not in any overwhelming sense that the majority conception of the the mythology in the literature of the Bible up to that time but again even this notion of reading the Bible as literal fact was a reaction to the evolution and and and the the ascendancy of of scientific conceptions of history and this notion that for something to be true it must be objectively verifiable well if that's the case then the Bible must be objectively verifiable in order for it to be true and this this conception really led to a lot of this literalism that we see so much amongst fundamentalism so and in in many ways this is true I think of all fundamentalisms whether it's Hindu fundamentalism or Jewish fundamentalism or Islamic fundamentalism that these are primarily reactionary ideologies now I think this is a very important point to keep in mind because from the narrow perspective of history if we look at what has been taking place in not just religious traditions but in the political realm as well in the United States in the Muslim world and you really across the board and a whole host of different countries and different societies one can make an argument that fundamentalism is on the rise and that it is ascending and that you know that this is an indication that people are becoming more militantly religious and and more reactionary and and putting aside these conceptions of rationalism and secularism that are supposed to be the defining characteristics of the evolution of our society in one way or another well I think yes from the narrow perspective that that is a that is a valid argument to make but if you think of fundamentalism again as primarily a reaction as a reactionary move and then there is another way to think about this as well that the rise of fundamentalism is essentially the result of the greater rise of secularism and modernization and reform that as society continues to push ahead in in progressivism that there are going to be more and more people who perhaps because they feel left behind are going to react at even larger and greater levels to to this natural evolution of society so in many ways the rise of fundamentalism might signal a good thing in my it might actually be a a result of the rapid progression of society that that we are seeing if one expands one's perspective I think a little more historically before we return to questions I I would invite you Raisa to to say something about what I believe is the the less reactive the more positive I'll call it very loosely aspect of Islam and of religion in general even in your book and and that is Sufism and and what it might represent but we could we could spend the rest of the day talking about Sufism and I still don't think I'd be able to get it across well enough I dedicated a whole chapter to this in the book which kind of lays it out I think in in in a clearer way than I could talk about in the next few a few minutes but you know I often say that Islam is not a missionary religion in other words it's not a religion whose core is this conception of making disciples of all nations but of course Islam has spread in in in this you know very missionary way throughout throughout the centuries but that has primarily been a result of Sufism it is the Sufis who have become the Muslim missionaries and the reason for this is that there really is no such thing as Sufism we can't talk about Sufism as though it represents something Sufism is essentially a perspective about Islam and as such open to a whole host of ideologies and religious traditions it very easily absorbs these these cultural and religious thoughts into itself under this larger umbrella of Sufism and the reason for that I said the Sufis begin as all mystical religions do whether it's Christian mysticism or Jewish mysticism with the conception that religion is only the starting point the Sufis talk about religion as an outer shell that must be discarded before one can actually have an understanding of God that religion provides signposts towards God but that Sufism is the actual path to God it's not just pointing the way to God it's moving one towards God and that kind of conception opens itself up to I think greater universalism and greater pluralism because it really doesn't matter which religion you start with if it's an outer shell that must be discarded anyway one of the great metaphors of Sufism is that it's you think of a mountain and that God is at the peak of this mountain and there are many trails that lead to the peak some trails are better than others some are easier than others some are more sensible than than others but it really doesn't matter because they all eventually lead to the same point to the to the zenith where where God is they all eventually lead to God so it doesn't matter which path you take but you must be on a path and you must be moving forward on that path from one stage to another and that really represents I think the totality of what Sufism stands for it doesn't reject the traditions it doesn't reject the Quran it doesn't reject you know even orthodoxy in in many ways it just sees it as the beginning and that one has to actually move from there and and physically move towards God in order to actually really understand the meaning behind what Islam is there's there's another great really wonderful quote from a Sufi master about for instance the Quran or the scriptures and about what the scripture means of course Sufis revere the Quran as the Word of God but they will they see it as a as a love letter from God to human beings and as the great Sufi master once said what's the purpose of reading a love letter when you're already in the presence of the beloved well that's a that's a lovely note to transition on I think those who attempt to impose personal control over over mystery always find themselves in a condition of anxiety and those who who manage somehow to find a way to to surrender to it can can achieve something closer to peace the standard greeting among practicing Muslims as you may know as salam alaykum Salam means peace it it is the same word as Shalom in Hebrew and peace can can mean peace and well-being it can also mean the the absence of war it can be surrender and and quiet and the abandonment of pointless resistance antagonism among human beings or or foolish pride in the thought that that everything can finally be brought under the control of one a simple human mind I went to church this morning in Trinity Episcopal down the street here and for him one of the hymns sung was a hymn derived from Hebrew Scripture from chapter 6 of the Book of Isaiah in which the the Prophet receives is calling and a coal is placed upon his lips and and the presence of God with smoke and thunder fills the temple and the words holy holy holy are heard the third verse of of that hymn is one that Jews Christians and Muslims could all find in perfect harmony with fair religion I think because of this aspect of of humility holy holy holy though the darkness hide thee though the sinful human I by glory may not see only thou art holy there is none beside thee perfect in power in love and purity thank you raisa we will now take excuse me we'll take the they think the questions are from the from the from the microphone right yes to bring this out - I just want to say that was the best heckle I've ever got to bring this up - last week and religion and politics I wondered if I could ask your response to two paragraphs from an article by Gabriel Ashe which received a couple days ago public rejection of corruption is no doubt a major explanation for the rise of Hamas but so is religion Palestinian society has turned increasingly to religion in response to the hardships of daily life under Israeli occupation at the same time it is hard not to credit the religious bond and commitment for Hamas strength and ability to resist the lure of corruption it is fashionable in the West especially at the center and left of the political discourse to compare our fundamentalists with our are fundamentalists with theirs well there is truth in this comparison it misses quite a lot our fundamentalists from George Bush to Robertson are fundamentally corrupt though religion is a racket on the Muslim side the opposite seems often to be the case far from being a shakedown religion over there is an antidote to corruption and the last paragraph if I may well Palestinian society turned more religious Hamas turned more ecumenical in these elections the candidates for a mosque new political party reform and change included women Christians and moderates Hamas is now a larger political tempt of Palestinian nationalism with a strong religious orientation it encompasses radicals moderates and conservatives with a variety of perspectives thank you incredibly astute analysis not just of the the rise of Hamas is a political group in in Palestine which is hard hard for I think a lot of Westerners to to swallow had almost nothing to do with Israel at all the overwhelming majority of Palestinians some 78 to 79 percent of Palestinians have just are absolutely fed up with the cycle of violence in in Israel Palestine want a two-state solution have no interest in this conception of driving the the Jews into the sea just want an independent Palestine living side by side with an independent Israel as most people want after 50 years of not constant violence so wasn't Hamas is stance on Israel or even their religious ideology that brought them to power a vote for Hamas was a vote against Fatah a group that despite hundreds of millions of dollars in aid over the last two decades has been mired in corruption in an aptitude and and and I think that the result was pretty obvious in in this last elections but there's a larger issue here and that's this concerned this question of the role that religion plays in society religion of course is an incredibly powerful language with which to frame one's social or political or economic views ideologies it really allows a way to take these very complex issues and put them in very simplistic terms you know the best example of this of course is after September 11th in which the President and and men and a large number of the American press essentially encapsulated this unprecedented global conflict that was taking place that had social and political and economic factors to it by simply saying well it's a war between good and evil well that's simple I mean anyone can make that decision I mean it's a very simple process it's all hands yeah very very easy to put things that way and that's that's precisely what religion does and particularly of course for marginalised communities oppressed communities whether those are you know Christian Catholic communities in Latin America or whether they are Muslim communities in in Palestine and I think particularly with regard to the Arab world you know for the past 50 years or so because of the auto crafts in the region the these president presidents for life these monarchies that have essentially created with the with the UN Arab Human Development Report report refers to as a legitimacy of blackmail by convincing the Western world that they're anti-democratic policies are necessary because if it weren't for them then the fundamentalist would take over so in other words there's only two choices in the Arab world there's autocracy and there's theocracy and if the people were given a choice between a liberal democratic society in which their opinions and their values actually matter and there's a rule of law and a separation of powers and a fundamentalist theocracy of course they would choose the acqua see they're Muslims what else I mean what what else would they choose so that sense of of you know legitimacy of blackmail has created a situation in which there is no room for any kind of legitimate opposition in in large parts of the Arab world in Egypt in in Morocco in Jordan even in the Palestinian territories and when you outlaw legitimate opposition then you you create a situation in which the only open space in society the only free space in society is the mosque and of course that's where the opposition is going to coalesce so it shouldn't be surprising that the that opposition becomes religious in nature now the really interesting thing about this of course is what happens and a an oppositional force a religious oppositional force is suddenly given the political voice they've been clamoring for and that I think is what what we are gonna have to wait and see I personally think that this is as strange as it may sound the best thing that could have happened not just for the Palestinians but for the whole of the Arab world and quite frankly for the for the peace process Israel has been saying for four years now that they cannot negotiate with the Palestinians because there is no there's no real legitimate body to negotiate with they've got a they've got a pretty good point in that sense so what Palestine needs to do is fix Palestine first and that's precisely what this process is going to do I think for the first time Aric politicians are having to do something they've never really bothered doing before actually earn their votes and and we're gonna see a profound change not just in the Palestinian territories but across the Arab world as these formerly banned opposition groups are allowed to actually participate in elections are given the opportunity to put their agendas to the people in a way in which in the United States we have complete access to the difference the last comment here the difference between you know you know American fundamentalism however you wanted or in Muslim fundamentalism isn't so much in their aspirations both groups want to inject society with their own moral values the difference is in the access that they have to the public in the United States we give an enormous access to these groups and allow them to share their views with the American public and then it's up to us to accept them or reject them in the Muslim world that that access is not allowed in any way and so it's driven underground it becomes radicalized it becomes militarized and then we're surprised that that this is the situation so again I think some very exciting things are happening politically in in in in the Arab world I think the the victory of Hamas also makes another relevant point which is that nationalism is not necessarily always benign and always the solution to problems that that religion poses take for example the recently noticed case of the novelist Orhan Pamuk this is a Turkish novelist who was hauled into court for the crime of merging the honor of the Turkish people by by criticizing Turkey while in Switzerland he was not criticized for doing something against his Muslim faith but for doing for betraying his Turkish nationality the the Fatah movement was a form of Palestinian nationalism but it's innocence wasn't guaranteed by that fact alone in in Iraq in a speech about Iraq rather President Bush told the story of an Iraqi who held up his purple finger after voting and said I am NOT a Sunni I'm not a Shia I am an Iraqi and that's the assumption that Americans tend to make because we're so so comfortable and really so proud not without reason of being able to say well you're a Jew I am a Christian but we are both Americans and that's what matters that's what we think will be the happy outcome in Iraq but we forget sometimes that in the name of fanatic nationalism terrible crimes have been committed so it comes down to monitoring the performance of of a given group if the group running the country as is the case now in in Turkey regards itself as as Muslim allow it to do so and watch and see what happens in in Turkey the the Islamic ruling party has been far kind to the to the Kurds the largest minority in the country then the secular nationalists were when they were in power what will happen now that a Muslim flavoured party has come to power among the Palestinians time will tell but it certainly deserves as much of a chance as as any secular party it has been given professor Iceland you started out this afternoon painting a picture of a rather passive tolerant and you ended up with the Sufis gentle thoughtful people and yet the history of the borders between Islam and Christianity is anything but that we have the blond Europeans in Kosovo who I don't believe ran to Islam on their own but there was forced conversions so there's a history of that so I'm a little confused is this such a kind and gentle religion or is it a religion of domination the Sufis I don't believe are very well received today within Islam nots very true it's neither it's a religion and a religion is nothing more than merely a language the language with which a community of faith communicates with one another and so like any language especially one made up of symbols and metaphors it could be understood in a variety of ways either militant militant lyrics or you know in the in pacifist ways so you know as a scholar I'm loathe to sit here and say well this isn't Islam and that is now me no no scholar would say something like that especially a religion a religion is almost by definition interpretation and unfortunately by definition all interpretations are valid however there is I think a difference between looking at what people of a religion have done and what the religion itself emphasizes I mean I think most of us recognize that there is an incredible difference between the the teachings and the message of Jesus than of the horrific and bloody history of Christianity the same of course is true with regard to Islam and trillium of any religious tradition so I think we must be careful about the ways in which we use a history of an empire or the history of a state - that that follows or that uses religion as its ideological underpinning to comment on the religion itself if that were the case then one could simply say that all religion is useless and and bloody and and certainly that that argument has been made but I don't think that it's a legitimate argument really I know I without getting in further in that way there's a there's I think a counter Santayana point to be made Santa Jana is famously the man who said those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them but but those who suppose that by learning the lessons of history they can read the future are as bad off the past performance of any of our nations or any of our religions if we list the the worst aspects of it would cause us all to despair what we're seeking is is the a possible version of all of these groups which are so large that they're surely not going to disappear can we imagine a path forward if we can then then we have as as a planet of fighting chance in in 1951 the the respected Protestant journal Christian century published an article with the title pluralism national menace why was pluralism a national menace because this was of course very early during the long-running Red Scare there were thriving communist parties in France Italy and Spain and here in the it states you had what the editors of Christian century regarded as a deeply sinister emerging country within a country consisting of Catholic schools Catholic hospitals Catholic sports leagues Catholic professional associations of doctors and and lawyers all taking orders from a foreign potentate it was really quite sinister so they thought well there wasn't nothing to go on the question was would it be possible for Roman Catholicism in its complexity to come up with a version of itself that the Protestant majority of the United States could live with that happened and now pluralism seems as American as apple pie and and and fear has been transferred to a new group of more recent immigrants and a new foreign Menace that seems to to link them so it's not that what what the questioner said didn't happen of course there were forced conversions and of course there has been terrible slaughter in the in the course of religious history the question is whether a path forward can be found and this is why for me someone like Reza Aslan and and not he alone but the the emerging bicultural american muslim population is potentially of such historic significance america is very influential even now even at our the lowest ebb that we've ever been in international prestige still we are watched we are noticed and copied and what any group within our population does matters to their counterparts abroad what American Jews do is overwhelmingly important in Israel and what American Catholics do is very important in Rome what American Muslims do is going to have in my judgment very large unpredictable but it's almost inevitable that it will have some some impact around the world

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 50,162

Keywords: Reza, Aslan, religion, Jack, Miles, Islam

Id: EMA3pZSkF0s

Length: 89min 14sec (5354 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2008