Reza Aslan interviewed by Rev. Alex Lang on Islamic Reformation, October 11, 2018

ladies and gentlemen please take this opportunity to silence your cellular devices First Presbyterian Church of Arlington Heights in partnership with Chicago Theological Seminary would like to welcome you to a conversation with reza aslan on Islamic Reformation please welcome pastor of First Presbyterian Church and our host and moderator for the evening Alex Lang and our very special guest speaker Reza Aslan I want to welcome you all here this evening thank you for coming out tonight every year First Presbyterian Church of Arlington Heights we try to bring important figures to our church so that we can talk about important issues that we are facing in our world today and we are thrilled and feel so honored that dr reza aslan is here with us tonight dr. Aslan is a James Joyce Award winner and he is an internationally renowned religions scholar he is also as you probably are well aware the author of the number one New York Times bestseller zealot the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth and the international bestseller no god but God tonight we are coming together as a result of his relationship with Chicago Theological Seminary he's a trustee there and we want to say thank you to CGS for making this evening possible for having this conversation and I want to go through a little bit of what this evening is going to be like so we're going to begin our conversation between Reza and myself and then we after we've established a grounding for the Islamic Reformation then we're going to open it up to you all and so I know you all have come with your questions with things that you want to ask and we hope that you will and so the way to work is when you come up to ask your question we would ask that you ask one question when you come because there's probably a lot of people and I know that he wants to answer all of the questions of people who have come here we ask you the GS Ones and you're probably thinking oh I'll just ask it in several parts as I go down right so just keep it as succinct as possible and if we have time at the end then you can come up and you can ask another question later following our conversation tonight there will be a reception out in the narthex where you came in and it's during that time that dr. Allen is going to be signing books and if you haven't brought your books with you I know a number of you already have books you didn't bring your copies with you you can purchase books and you can get them signed I can tell you right now if you've never read his books they you're in for a real treat because he really combines scholarship and narrative storytelling in an amazing way and I can tell you that as a Christian pastor who studied at Princeton there's a lot that I know about Christian history and his book zealot opened my mind about the way that I look at Jesus and I'm so thankful that he took the time to write that book now I'm sure you're tired of hearing me talk so I think we should get to our conversation for the evening would you agree all right let's do that thank you what a warm welcome thanks everyone it's great to be here I'm excited I've been looking forward to this for a while yeah I'm really glad that you could make it make it out so I was wondering for those of those here who don't really know about your background where you're from can you talk a little bit about where you grew up and maybe tell us a little bit about your family and even your religious background I was born in Iran I am an immigrant all the other religion jobs that you won't do my family came I you know we were sort of a you know culturally Muslim and family the way so many people are cultural religious my father however was a kind of a firebrand communist very anti religious proud atheist annoying yes the kind of atheist who always had a pocketful of Prophet Mohammed joke said he would pull out if appropriate acts you know like that and I actually was kind of fortunate for us because when the revolution happened in 1979 Iran had a massive popular revolution to bring down the monarchy and when the Ayatollah Khomeini came back to Iran and and said that you know he he had no interest in any kind of political role for himself he just wanted to be left alone my father who never trusted anyone wearing a turban thought you know I just just to be on the safe side let's leave until things settled down a little bit and he turned out to be right I mean Khomeini ended up taking over the country and it became the Islamic Republic that it is now and and I grew up mostly in the bay area of California this was the 1980 so it was during the height of the Iran hostage crisis it was not the best time in the world to be Iranian or Muslim did you do how'd you deal with any prejudices really yeah it was all the time that worked there were protests out on our streets my the bank wouldn't catch my father's paychecks because it was Iranian I would go to school and kids were wearing Baja Miran t-shirts yeah it was I mean you know I can say it was it wasn't the best time to be to be Muslim as opposed to now when it's great so good like a seven-year-old kid that's the thing is that you know when you're when you're seven years old eight years old and you're constantly being told that your identity your culture your religion is is the enemy you agree and for us when we came to the States this was kind of at least for my father an opportunity to scrub our lives of Islam all together you know he never he was so tired of pretending to be Muslim and Iran anyway and he thought well one good thing is now we don't have to pretend anymore and so I grew up in a very sort of non-religious family my mom still prayed every once in a while but for the most part you know we really scrubbed our lives at Islam as I've admitted many times I spend a good part of the 1980s pretending to be Mexican just told everybody which knows you how little I understood in there and then you know I think it was probably I sometimes think that it may have been the effects of the revolutionary Iran the the experience of seeing that the power that religion has to transform the Society for good and for bad which just created this lifelong interest in an interest in religion and in religious history religious figures religious phenomenology spirituality though as I say I never really had an opportunity to express that in any meaningful way until high school in high school I started going to young life [Laughter] young life for those of you unfamiliar with it it's it's a non-denominational but nondenominational is now a denomination so it's basically a you know a Protestant evangelical youth group and I went to a young life camp and I heard the Gospel story for the first time this incredible story about the God of heaven and earth coming down in the form of the baby dying for our sins this is the promise that anyone who believes in Him shall also never die but have eternal life I've never heard anything like that before in my life so with your dad being an atheist did you all talk about afterlife at all it was that even a thing that well we didn't tell in fact after I converted to Christianity and a particularly conservative evangelical brand of Christianity my dad freaked out he's just like what we came here to escape religion this is the last thing that I wanted but but you know I mean it made me a really good boy like I would come home and like I wouldn't drink and I did it was like maybe this isn't work I can like take advantage of of this but I didn't appellant I mean I you know I've never been the kind of person to just take what people tell me at face value and so I would go to church or I would go to you know Bible study and I would hear the the leader or the pastor say something or tell me something that the Bible says and then I would check I would do that thing every rarely do like I'm just gonna see make sure that's actually what it says and you know what I what I kept discovering is that well sometimes it doesn't say that or sometimes there's context behind it and then I would bring these questions to to my group assuming that it would spur conversation it did not spare a conversation but it just it made me really interested in and excited about the study of religion and so when I went to college I knew that that's what I wanted to do and so I I started studying religion in a more formal setting more specifically I started studying the New Testament and it didn't take long for me to kind of realize that a lot of what I thought I knew was incomplete if not just downright incorrect and and also the other thing too is I started learning about religion in general right not just a religion but what religion is how religion function is how to how to think about religion in its historical aspect and and how to understand it as you know fundamentally a language a means through which an individual in a community can express what it's fundamentally in expressible like this this ineffable experience of mine and the more I started studying about it the more I realized that the particular language that I had adopted the language of Protestant evangelical Christianity wasn't doing it for me and that I needed a new language and then in one of these crazy sort of you know twists of fate I went to a Catholic Jesuit college and the priests there if you know Jesuits this makes a lot of sense to you the priests there were like why not go back to Islam and no but that really was they they encouraged me they said look you're clearly you're clearly still searching for something here why not why not look at the the faith of your forefathers and I didn't know anything that song I literally knew nothing about Islam at that point and so I started reading up on it and and studying it and the best way that I can put it I don't know if this will make sense but what I discovered was it it was what I already believed I just didn't know that there was a language for it and so I often say that I had an emotional conversion to Christianity and then I had an intellectual conversion to Islam and Here I am now and here you are now were you always you're speaking of languages I mean it's clear to me from reading your books that you have a real grasp of the original languages in which these sacred scriptures were written was that something that came easy to you or was that something you had really work out no I'm languages and it's terrible because the study of religion is all about primary languages and I'm really awful at it my wife is amazing she could just pick up a language like that and I cannot it was a real struggle for me but I'm so glad you brought that up because you know in academia we talk about it a lot the importance of understanding you know primary language instead of reading for instance a New Testament not in English but an agreed and and it's it is extraordinarily important because what you have to understand is that the minute you translate something you are interpreting it especially when you talk about these languages like Greek or Hebrew or Arabic which are so variable where words have so many different meanings denotations and connotations and so somebody who translates it into English has already decided for you what that word means and it profoundly affects the way that you read and interpret the scripture and if you are you know somebody who is pious and devout and who truly believes that this is god-breathed scripture then you should figure out how to get to its source if you really want to understand it yeah primary languages are extraordinarily important well I have a quote I want to go from no god but God so I'm gonna read this quote and it'll be up on the screens for you all to read because I like this quote this is this is what he says religion has always been more than a matter of beliefs and practices it is above all a perspective a mode of being religion encompasses one's culture one's politics one's very view of the world this is particularly true of Islam which like all great religions has been shaped not only by metaphysical concerns but also by the social cultural spiritual and political milu in which it finds itself and so I was wondering since we're gonna get into Islamic Reformation can you expand on how that quote in particular can give us some insight into how Islam has been shaped by those forces over the last century yeah thank you for that it's it's funny this is I think one of the the more counterintuitive things that I talk about a lot that religion is far more a matter of identity than it is a matter of beliefs and practices that of course beliefs and practices are important but they are secondary to the identity statement that religion is when someone raises their hand and says I am Muslim I'm Christian I am Jewish I am Hindu they are making an identity statement not a belief statement the best way that I can sort of demonstrate this for you is by pointing to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life which says that 71 percent of Americans are Christian 71 percent like really really 7 out of 10 Americans 7 out of 10 Americans go to church on a regular basis 7 out of 10 Americans read the Bible 7 out of 10 Americans can tell you anything about Jesus except he was born in a manger and died on a cross right of course not you know that that's not true in your bones you know that's not true when that 70 percent says I am Christian on that form they're not saying these are my beliefs they're saying this is my identity this is who I am and that's true everywhere in the world when I said that we grew up Muslim that's what I meant well I guess it once in a while we went to mosque but if you asked us are we Muslim we would say yes because it's about who we are as human beings how we understand ourselves how we view our relationship to the world around us and so as a matter of identity going back to to the quote as a matter of identity your religion is obviously wrapped up in all the other markers of your identity be it your politics or your social or your gender or your sexuality whatever the case may be when you say I am Christian all of those things are wrapped up in it at your nationality your race your ethnicity your culture in fact I would venture to guess that a great great many of that 70% when they mark I am Christian what they mean is I am American that's what they really mean and so I think that this creates some very important perspectives for thinking about not just Islam but all religious traditions for instance I know that we talk a lot about getting religion out of politics right we hear that a lot you know that we should remove religion from politics and and I get that and I understand it I also recognize that it's not actually possible because if religion is a matter of identity then of course it's going to affect your politics it should affect your politics to say that you could just simply divorce your religion which is who you are not just your morals and your values but who you are from your political role in life especially in a democracy just doesn't make any sense does it cause bad things yes a lot no more or less than religion in general does the reason that I think that that that quote was you know seen a so revelatory is because we tend to think of Islam as somehow different right everyone in this room would say well of course Christianity has changed throughout the centuries of course it's incredibly diverse of course a Christian in Guatemala has a different view of Jesus than a Christian in suburban Chicago does of course that's obvious well what about Islam oh no not Islam no no no no Islam is the same everywhere it's never changed it's monolithic and static you know it's just it's absurd the way that we think and it's important to understand that Islam beyond just its cultural diversity has an enormous diversity of belief the diversity of practice and diversity of perspectives and to the point where in the same way that you couldn't say with a straight face Christianity is blank you can't say that with Islam either that it is in a constant state of evolution it's constantly adapting itself to the needs of every particular Muslim community around the world and that it will continue to do so why do you think that we have a tendency towards monolithic interpretations of religions and you know you can you can go off on a lot of times but I'm interested to know why do you think as people we tend to do that well because earlier I said religion is about identity religion is about collective identity that's what it's really about it's about us and then it's about tribalism it's about who is one of me and who is not and I think that it fosters that kind of sentiment in people and authorization if you will you know I was in Egypt but many many years ago and I said something about America to a cab driver or something and he's like so there you know America so a lot of Christians in America and I said yes a lot of Christians and he said what is the deal well I do why do they why do the Americans worship the Pope I don't like what why what is that and I was like wow there's so many layers begin Egypt is a country in which 10% of the population is Christian and 90% of the population is Muslim America is a country in which 70 percent of the of the country is Christian and 1 percent is Muslim you could be born live a very long happy life and die in America and never ever set eyes on a Muslim there are 350 million of us three and a half million of us are Muslim so it's very obvious why one would think of Islam as a kind of other religion you know when confronted for instance with extreme versions of Christianity extreme versions of Christianity that promote bigotry or violence or intolerance it's very easy for Americans to say well that's not the Christianity I know whether you are a Christian or not well that's not that's not normative Christianity how do you know because my neighbors Christian because my my grocer is Christian and so I know I know that that's not representative of it but if one percent of the population is Muslim then you have nothing to compare it to so when you see extreme forms of Islam you can't say well that's not really Islam how do you know well I don't I don't know when he must learn so maybe it is I don't know maybe it is I have nothing to compare it to I think that's that's part of it and then the other part of it is again this sort of the tribalism that is so endemic to religion right the old adage that my religion is a religion and your religion is a cult that notion like my religion you get this all the time when people are like you know there are there are verses in the Quran that that promote violence and I'll say yeah but there are verses in the Bible that promote violence but those we don't have to listen to those those don't really count but yours do yours do count you're different see yours is different yours is unique yours is not like the others that's a that's a pretty standard application that all people of religion apply to other religions so we're talking about a reformation that's happening right now and so I think within this and I want to make sure that I get your your quote right on this here you have defined religious Reformation regardless of what they are whether they take place Judaism Christianity Islam you've defined it as a struggle between institutions and individuals over religious authority that's right so explain to us how this struggle is taking place right now currently within Islam paint a picture for us well let me unpack that for a minute yeah yes I think especially in America when we hear the word Reformation we have this sort of skewed view of what that means right right we think of it because immediately we think of the well what we erroneously referred to as the Protestant Reformation right because in our in our impression of it Reformation was really just this kind of battle between Protestant reform and Catholic intransigence and the Protestants won that's such a weird and skewed way of thinking about first of all what happened in the Christian Reformation but just what Reformation means in general the Christian Reformation was about who has the authority to define Christianity is it the institution the papal institution which at that point had essentially maintained an absolute iron grip over the meaning and message of Christianity for a number of reasons most importantly because they were the only ones with access to the scripture that no one else could access the scripture no one else literally could read the Bible it was untrue insulated it was unavailable there was no printing press the only person that you would have ever met in your life who had any access who even owned the Bible was your priest and so if your priest told you the Bible says X Y & Z well that's what it says because what do you Andy there's no there's no checking him right and if the Pope says I am the only one who can say what this religion is and if you disagree with me then you're just not in the group anymore that authority structure you can understand can't last once information starts to be disseminated once scripture is available to other people once it's translated into German so that you can read it on your own now now you don't have to read the Latin any longer at that point then everyone suddenly becomes their own source of authority and you don't have to necessarily rely on the institutional authority any longer that conflict between individuals and institutions over who gets to define the faith resulted in what we now know as the Christian Reformation but that is a universal phenomenon you brought up the Jewish Reformation this is what happened in the first century it's funny because from the Christian perspective Jesus is the Messiah the Son of God the Living God on earth from the Jewish perspective Jesus is the Martin Luther you know of Judaism in a way he is one of a handful of individuals who long before the destruction of the temple were promoting a text based Judaism instead of a temple based Judaism same thing Judaism was in the grip of the temple priests the priestly authorities who had sole discretion over who could and could not be a member of this community they had sole discretion over who could or could not enter the temple and the temple was the sole source of God on earth yet there were a group of radical learning Jews whose argument was that the temple is not where Judaism rests the scripture is where it rests now they got a little bit of a boost because in the year 70 the temple was destroyed and so there was no longer any temple and after that point the only Judaism that existed was rabbinical Judaism but again what is what is happening there institutions and individuals just afflicting with themselves over who can define the faith so when we talk of the Islamic Reformation please understand that we're not making a value judgment that there was something wrong with Islam and now it's going to be better there is no value in a Reformation it just is it's not positive or negative it's an inevitable process whereby religious authority begins to disseminate from the traditional institutions which hold on to it to individuals on the ground now in the case of Islam there isn't a pope a singular authority Authority instead rests in in the hands of about half a dozen schools of law institutional schools of law that because of their how long they've been around and because of the consensus that has formed around them have essentially become you know the equivalent of let's say six popes it's the best way to to put it or six papacy that's a that's a better way of putting it six Vatican's but nevertheless the same thing applies these institutions these individuals the ulama the lurid ones were the only ones who had access to the scripture that the only ones who could read the scripture and so as a result they're the only ones who could interpret what the scripture meant and so for most Muslims for the last 1400 years they really had no other alternative except to go to their alum their their learnand 1 and to receive the knowledge secondhand from them in the last 50 years the Quran has been translated into more languages than in the previous 1500 years combined rapid rapid advances in education in large parts of the Muslim world in literacy in large parts of the Muslim world have given individuals access to the scripture in a way that would have been unheard of in the previous century in the previous centuries and as a result what's happened is what always happens in these cases individuals have begun to set themselves up as their own authority structures and they've begun to push back against the traditional authorities I also want to say very quickly that this is not necessarily a smooth process okay the Christian Reformation resulted in the death of half the population of Germany alone and by the way this notion of Sola scriptura this idea that the scripture alone should be the source of authority and anyone should be able to go to it and interpret for themselves what the scripture means as you already know opens up a whole can of worms because that means now anyone anyone is their own source of authority and if that person has you know an outlet or an audience a way of of making their voice heard then they can essentially start their own movements I mean Christianity fractured into hundreds of sex and schisms as a result of the Christian Reformation and the same thing happening within Islam now you have a multiplicity of voices a multiplicity of authorities no longer six now 6,000 and each one of them says this is the correct interpretation and so the conflicts that we are seeing in large parts of the Muslim world are a direct result of the Reformation they're not proof that Islam needs a Reformation they are the Reformation that's what you are witnessing is the Reformation it's a chaotic catastrophic bloody event interesting so right now and by the way it's very difficult to know who the the villains and heroes will be of this story we lionize Martin Luther Martin Luther was a genocide Ulm a niak Martin Luther didn't say that anyone should be able to read the scriptures and interpret it for themselves he said he should be able to read the scriptures and interpret for themselves when Tomas Munster his fellow Reformation leader said that's a great idea and began what will eventually became known as the well it's sometimes referred to as the radical Reformation or whatever Martin Luther's response was Munster and all of his followers should be killed and their houses should be burned to the ground so you know I've argued in the past that 500 years from now we may look back and think of a sama bin Laden as one of the Titans of the Islamic Reformation because this is a man who whose entire message was predicated on stop going to mosque stop talking to your Imam stop listening to the learned men they have nothing to teach you all you need is the Quran and nothing more and you can read that and it'll tell you what to do now I'm the one telling you what to do I'm telling you what it says but his argument was an argument of Sola scriptura that sounded very very much like the argument that Martin Luther was making 500 years ago Wow Wow so one of the right now Christianity is in the middle of a Reformation at this point in time and we're reacting to predominantly modernity and science which has slowly kind of eroded away at many of the principles that Christians have held dear for a long time I preached about that in this church a lot trying to say you know this is this tidal wave has been coming for a long time and now we are trying to work our way through what it's going to look like and it it's if you know you can literally see in some congregations it's just a roading away you know every year there's just less and less people because the younger generation they have grown up with a skeptical scientific perspective and I wonder is that something that is that is also impacting I would assume it is but how is it impacting Islam as far as you can see I mean the the youth bulge in traditionally Muslim majority countries is unfathomable I mean if you look at what we now refer to as the modern Middle East which is North Africa Middle East and then parts of Central Asia and of course South South Asia manasa it's sometimes referred to Middle East North Africa South Asia Manasa in Manasseh 75% of the population is under 35 50 percent is under 25 it's a it's a youth bulge that when combined with all these other things that I was talking about this is a a youth bulge that is educated is illiterate is globalized it's plugged in you know they they they're on the internet they're in social media they know what's happening around the world they have access to new and novel theories sources of information they they just simply do not accept the kind of traditional Islamic authorities any longer and they certainly don't do so as they're sort of sole source of information or interpretation you know they're much more likely they're much less like the book thirty years ago if you were a Muslim living in Malaysia and you had a question about some aspect of Islam in your life you know some you had a question about marriage or about whatever the case may be your only option was to go to the mosque talk to your Imam tell him your problem and then he because he's the only one who has access would tell you the answer this is this is what you should do and then you go off and do it today that malaysian has at least five or six different online fought word databases that he could just simply go to he could just simply you know search in these databases his question and get the views of 40 different Imams from all over the world and then because this is how Islam works that no no cleric has authority to nope no cleric has authority over another cleric right so it's like it's like rabbinical Judaism right one rabbi is has as much authority as another rabbi it's not like they don't one kind of overt overcomes the other one there's no hierarchy this this kid can just simply pick which which idea he likes the best that's the one I like that answer much more than these other twenty-nine answers that's just now we're sort of understanding the consequences of that that's going to absolutely alter the face of Islam in the coming century I think with Christianity what we're seeing is yes two things number one the what happens you know every generation in which Christian doctrine has to figure out a way to make peace with our rapidly changing understanding of the universe and and reality to me there's a much more interesting phenomenon taking place in American Christianity particularly in Protestant evangelical Christianity and that is the politicization of it the shorthand for this of course is what's been happening with the Trump Trump evangelicals and there have been numerous really fantastic papers and articles and books that have been written about this I've talked about this ad nauseam about the way that Trump you know he broke evangelical Christianity he breaks everything he touches but you know but he's really you know he broke he broke American evangelicalism because he's created this crisis within the single largest body of Christians in the United States over whether you know that the the sort of this kind of unblinking support of a how can I put this a racist sexist lecherous pathologically lying narcissistic sociopath tell us are you really yeah I'm sorry see it was like the most polite way that I could put it I was like how could I how can I put it politely that's about as politely as I could put it whether this this unblinking for him from his evangelical base is a betrayal of what evangelical Christianity was supposed to mean that to me is the real fascinating evolution of American Christianity that that I think is going to have some very interesting consequences in the next decade or so so yeah so bring it up looking into the future when we're talking about I guess religion and particularly Islam you know what are your hopes thirty fifty years down the line when we're talking about the various adherents to the to the different traditions of Islam what do you hope for them and then I'm also interested in and what your hopes are for Islam as a geopolitical force in the world which it is it's a it's a huge force that's super interesting well look as I said earlier I mean all religions are constantly in the state of evolution Islam thirty fifty years from now and outlook like Islam today globally one thing that's really fascinating is what we're seeing is that Christianity global Christianity is in the process of moving eastward and southward in the world whereas global Islam is in the process of moving northward and westward and it'll it'll be you know a good century before these sort of religions really rebalance the globe as far as population centers go and that's an idea that that people are already starting to to chew on now to figure out what that's going to mean a hundred years from now when we stop referring to you know when when we can say that Christianity is an Eastern religion like that's a weird thing to say that the majority of Christians are going to be in Asia I don't know that's that's a strange phenomenon to think about right because that's not how we think about it and the majority of Muslims will be in sort of Europe and in the West so that to me I think is going to be really fascinating and what that how that's going to affect Islam is I think it's going to accelerate this Reformation process but the truth of the matter is that Islam is fundamentally a communal religion that's it arose out of a communal society it's all about community your salvation rests in the Ummah in the community itself it's the source of salvation and yet it's undergoing this radical individual individual individualization that's the word I'm looking for it's undergoing this rapid individualization for all the the reasons that we had talked about before and I think that the more it moves westward and northward the more the geography of Islam changes the more individualistic it's going to become the more we're going to see greater sectarianism in Islam waiter is that me it's not just me right greater sectarianism greater schisms greater micro-communities and then I'll just add one more one more factor to this because I think it's fascinating not just for a slum but for for religion in general is that you know the the the internet and social media has transformed the definition of community we have to understand that from the dawn of humanity to about 30 years ago the definition of community was the people around you that's what it meant it was a geographic thing whether that meant the people in your cave or the people in your village or the people in your city were the people in your nation community is geographically defined and always has been now religion has always been a transnational force it's always tried to break through back borders and boundaries but nevertheless even so I mean I'm sure that that you guys have an enormous connection to the larger presbytery community in the United States but nevertheless there's still the sort of the micronus of it right that this is our community here what the Internet has done is completely change what community means it's no longer geographically bound and so you know if you are that Malaysian kid that Malay Muslim Malaysian kid you may have more in common with you know a Muslim in kid in Chicago because you both like Game of Thrones and you both you know you know like the same kind of music then either of you have with your community and so their building blocks of creating these new communities these virtual communities is already there it's already happening so that's just going to continue to accelerate the fracturing of the Muslim world into these more and more smaller more rarefied schisms and sets just in many ways the way that Christianity did after the the Christian Reformation mm-hmm so do you feel like you've gotten all right so I think that we do want to open it up for you all at this point so if you have questions again we would ask that you come up to the center here you can ask your question and we'll see where we go don't everybody jump up at once hello my name is machine and I wanted to thank you for coming tonight and for your words about Islamic work Reformation and religion as a Muslim person in today's society and with Reformation what do you see is the average Muslim living here and as their search of their identity in this country with Reformation how do you perceive the average Muslim their take on current political environment how you want to raise your children how you want to assimilate especially since you've come from an era after the Iranian Revolution where your assimilation was pretty much the opposite yeah you mean here in America yeah yeah well so I I kind of trained myself never to say things about the average anyone and certainly not the average Muslim because there's no such thing a Muslim as I never get tired of saying is whoever says he or she is a Muslim . . a Muslim is whoever says they're a Muslim that's it there's nothing there's nothing after that sentence and so you could be you know a secular Muslim or a moderate Muslim or a you know there's all these terms that we throw around because what they do is they provide a way of identifying ourselves against someone else like I'm moderate and you're extremist so I try to avoid those terms altogether insofar as the question of assimilation though I think that's a really really good question particularly because the rhetoric that one hears from the far right the Fox News community right is that well the problem with Muslim immigration is that unlike every other group of immigrants who came to the United States and Muslims don't assimilate they don't integrate into American society that's why we need a Muslim ban because their values are not our values they're not they're not true Americans the absurdity of that statement I think is just obvious on its face right I mean the same people who say that their their answer said it about the Irish they said it about the Italians then they said it about the Germans they said it about you know Mexicans they said it just every community they say that oh these the other immigrants were okay but this new group of immigrants they're the real problem because they won't assimilate it's just it's false and it's absurd Muslims as I said earlier represent about 1% of the population of the United States so just about the whole you know impending Muslim takeover conversations we should probably tamp those down until we get to 2% when we get the 2% watch.watch out at 1% you know they make them about 1% of the population but 60% of that 1% is immigrants immigrants generation immigrants like myself that's an astonishing number now understand Muslims have been in America since before there was any such thing called America they were brought here on slave ships so Muslims have been here from the very very beginning but it is true that over the last few decades there has been this massive influx of Muslims particularly from the Manasseh region Middle East North Africa South Asia and so the constant conversations that we have about whether Muslims can integrate in America is basically the same conversations that we have all the time about immigrants in in the United States Muslims as a immigrant population represent the single highest levels of literacy and education of any immigrant population in the United States the highest levels of education but also the highest levels of income in fact the median income for a Muslim household in America Dwarfs that of a non Muslim household in fact the advertising giant JW t just about four or five years ago released this big report because they were telling advertisers you need to start selling to Muslims in America they they calculated that the annual combined income of American Muslims is 120 billion dollars and if that number sounds ridiculous come to the Silicon Valley and look at the board of advisers at Google or at Yahoo or at Apple and just see how many math moods and muhammad's and alleys in Hasan's there are on those lists look I think that Muslims are having the experience particularly Muslims from immigrant communities are having the same experience in America that every immigrant community has had here demonization authorization fear and anxiety questions about you know their their what they're truly up to and what their you know what their motives are and coming here the fact that they cannot be Americans everything that is being said about about Muslims in America today was said about Jews in - in the interwar period was said about Catholics at the beginning of the 19th century you know we had an actual political party than know-nothings they called themselves an actual political party predicated almost wholly on a platform of anti-catholic catholic immigration they actually ran someone for president and almost won because their argument was that you can't be both Catholic and American you just can't you can't have loyalty both to the Pope and the president you can't obey the Vatican and Washington what if the Pope tells you to rise up against America you have to listen to the Pope and so you can't be a American if you're Catholic we said the same things about Jews in the 30s for and 40s right that the whole idea some of our greatest icons right Charles Lindbergh and and Henry Ford you know these were the most pitiless anti-semites you could imagine Henry Ford actually published the protocols of the Elders of Zion in all of his national newspapers and then forced his dealerships around the country to sell them you know Charles Lindbergh said that the Holocaust was a Jewish conspiracy in order to drag America into a war in Europe what we hear about Muslims today we've heard about every new community of Americans and the people who say those words today are going to land in the exact same garbage heap of history as everyone who has said those words about every other community in America thank you my name is Fiat I'm ed I'm one of the members of the local community here thanks for the great overview of the state of current state of Islam I have a question about Reformation versus renovations is a contention among many Muslim scholars in the West who say that the abode of Islam is sound and it has fallen in disrepair and it has been dilapidated from Delaware teachers from within and from without so the my question to you as as you've mentioned the Reformation in Christianity has led to a lot of bloodshed and problems would you agree that we need a renovation and not a Reformation that's a really nice way of saying that you know the the the quote-unquote problem with the umma is something that we've been hearing since the death of the Prophet Mohammed I said earlier that salvation in Islam rests in the community I want to zero in and explain to you exactly what means in the same way that you know Catholicism would say salvation rests in the church and Protestants would say salvation rests in Jesus Muslims would say your salvation rests in your membership within the Ummah the worldwide body of faith the Ummah is the church in in Islam the concept was developed originally by the Prophet Muhammad when there were 70 Muslims there are now 1.7 billion Muslims and so there is really no such thing as the Ummah any longer it's become a kind of utopian fantasy in a way when you hear you know some of these jihadists ideologues what you hear all the time and when they talk about the recreation of the Caliphate that's what they mean it's this idea that the Ummah has been somehow corrupted and fragmented and we have to recreate the Ummah and the Caliph becomes the the sort of physical embodiment of that of that fantasy of that dream and I get that I understand the longing for the way things used to be but it's just not realistic they will it will never be the way that things used to be that will never happen and there's no reason to actually want it to happen I find often that those people who are most vocal in saying that you know the community is is on the wrong path that you know it's a it has to be rejuvenated from within etc etc they're the ones who tend to mean that it should be rejuvenated around them right what I mean by that is that everyone should follow me and do it the way that I'm doing it and I get that that's a natural impulse that human beings have particularly religious human beings but I just don't see any value for it a Muslim is whoever they says he or she's a Muslim a Christian is whoever he says he or she is a Christian a Jew is whoever says he or she is a Jew and nobody else gets to define that for you nobody else gets to tell you whether you're a Muslim or not that doesn't happen that's how it works you get to say whether you're a Muslim or not and if that means that there's all kinds of terrors and fractures and rips and schisms and and and a thousand different ways of believing this so be it thanks again for coming dr. haslund I had a quick question what are some other authors and scholars that you like to read as you're an author yourself I would just be interested in who else like you look at for inspiration as well oh that's a that's a good question scholars of religion it depends you know when it comes to Islam I you know I was kind of taught by some of the old school guys and I prefer because I myself am a Sufi I prefer the Sufi scholarship of people like anne-marie Chimel and idris shah and karl ernst and then when it comes to christianity you know there's it really runs the gambit for me like there are a lot of very conservative Christian thinkers whose perspectives I disagree with but whose methodology I really enjoy and I named a bunch of them in the in the back of zealot so I don't wanna get too involved in it I I first came to religion through like Joseph Campbell and Houston Smith you know those guys who who were sort of the old-fashioned comparative religion people who who their their primary goal was to say isn't it weird how all these different religions throughout time and space have so many things in common with each other shouldn't someone pay attention to that and that ultimately became the discipline called the history of religions those are the people who really motivated me to do what I do now in giving that as a pretext and he wants me the observation about the great religious texts he said it's whether the narrative is true would you would you agree with that statement or with you and what way would you agree with that in what way would you disagree with that statement this is you know it's such a good I love this question I ask you this obviously as your is a general scholar of religion rather than you know if you could know it's a great in fact we were we were come talking about this upstairs just a little while ago about the difference between history and sacred history and the understanding that scripture is about sacred history not about history that what we refer to as history which is the objective accumulation of data and then the interpretation of that data did not exist when the Koran or the Hebrew Scriptures or the New Testament were written that that notion of history would have been completely foreign to the authors of our scriptures for them it wasn't facts that were their main concern it was truth and while we in the modern world of course as you know children of the scientific revolution have been told that truth is fact fact is truth that the definition of truth is that which can be factually verified that's a new concept that's a very new idea in the ancient mind truth in fact were two separate things they had two totally different functions and so we now read these ancient scriptures through this modern lens and it's precisely why it causes so many problems for us not just religious and cultural problems but even in problems of interpretation the the ancient mind the people who were responsible for the scriptures what they were trying to do was use narratives to reveal certain truths and the way that they did so was by putting this those truths in the form of a story this is a very important point for all scriptures but I think it's it's especially important when it comes to understanding the Gospels because we read the Gospels like their biographies you know written first-hand accounts by disciples who walked around with like a pen and paper and then every time Jesus did something they're like get that down did you get that write that down that was good first of all all of Jesus's disciples were illiterate very much very likely Jesus himself was illiterate scholars believed that anywhere between 80 and 90% of Jews in first century Palestine were illiterate the only Jews who could read and write in ancient Palestine were the rabbi's and the priests and Jesus wasn't a rabbi or a priest he was a day laborer so that's an important point to keep in mind but it is also important to understand that this is not to deny the divine quality of the scripture you know people ask me all the time like is do you believe that the Quran is divinely inspired yes I believe that the Quran is divinely inspired I also believe Abbey Road is divinely in fired okay I don't I mean I you know that God that I believe in didn't speak only once first of all and secondly to me divine inspiration is about the intimate connection that happens between creator and creation and the results that come out of that intimate connection but to think that divinely inspired means that every single word of Scripture is inherent and literal is absurd frankly in my in my point of view that's the wrong way to read scripture is not how it was written it's not how it was meant to be read you know well so this is a pretty example look every night when I read the Gospels I get I don't mean the great text I mean you know other text I mean all kinds honestly like it's really I mean for me I find the expression of truth in the written form in artistic expressions and musical expressions I guess I'm sure my mind is still in the scriptural form because I'm thinking like right now my sons and I are reading the Ramayana a lot and and that's a that's a text that has some really really profound truth in it and I and I something I definitely recommend for people especially if you have if you have boys I mean it's about a blue God who fights demons with a magic bow and arrow like that's the greatest boys story ever thank you sir my name is Andres Benson and I'm curious if you see this word is it Mumma or community umma yeah if you see that word in an Abrahamic sense and I'm coming to this as an immigrant kid and about eight years ago I had a day that I thought would be like changing life changing for me there was a Christian as terrorist named Anders Breivik who murdered about 70 people and I thought 67 of them children exactly and I thought today I have just become the Osama of Christianity with that name Anders beat Anders and nobody has ever said anything about that to me nobody's ever made that connection so somehow a Christian gets I don't know yeah go back well he didn't even just do it he did it in the name of Christ he said yes by the way the there's a movie coming out about it so finally maybe people will pay more attention to it I think the reason that people didn't pay attention to it is because again they they just saw they compared it to normative Christianity and they said oh well this guy just slaughtered nearly 70 children in the name of Christ like well but that's not true because that's not what Christians do how do I know that I know Christians so I can just ignore it I I think I think the earth weight the earlier part of your question wait yeah about the that's right yes right exactly to find that community so just even my scholar hat on for a minute the the consensus of scholars of early Islam is that when the Prophet Muhammad created this concept the Ummah and by the way when I say he created he really did create it we still don't actually know what the word means we're not sure there's all kinds of ideas about where he where the word came from people think well maybe it's it comes from that the word mother somehow but it was a sort of a whole new concept that the Prophet Mohammed created in which he said the Ummah is is the the community of faith it is the near unanimous consensus of scholars that when he created that concept he did so in the city of Medina that concept included Jews and Christians that when he said Ummah she meant the followers of Abraham that's what he meant now remember at this time there was no such word as Islam there was no such word as Muslim in fact the evidence indicates that no one called him or herself a Muslim until long after the Prophet had died they called themselves a whole host of different things companions things like that but the term Islam as a distinct identity marker for this one particular community did not exist during the prophet's lifetime and so when he used the word Ummah he meant the followers of Abraham that's what he meant it was only much later again this is a perfectly natural thing for religions to do as they grow and evolve and expand and become much larger it was much much later that the Ummah in an attempt to more stringently define itself excluded Jews and Christians from that term and said no no ooh ma means something distinct from these other Abrahamic religions and the idea of Islam and the term Islam arose out of that so yes unquestionably Ummah originally meant the followers of Abraham thank you I Reza my name is Derek clapping Stein I like your books and your YouTube videos my question is is there as an excuse sure as a created word instead of the ultimate uncreated word that's a really really good question so the the the what he is what Derek is bringing up is this fundamental split that took place around the ninth 10th century or so between whether the Quran is created or uncreated so let me back up a little bit because it's super fascinating but I need to give you a little bit of background to this so the Quran is not like a lot of other texts a lot of other scriptures right it's not a collection of books written by dozens of different hands over hundreds of different years the way the Hebrew Scriptures are it's not you know a bunch of letters written by believers about you know the Prophet the way that so much of the New Testament is the Quran means what's often referred to as direct revelation right it's one person receiving a sustained message from the divine and then revealing that message over the course of two decades revealing that message and then that message being written down by others and so the Quran can be baffling for the uninitiated I mean I think a lot of like really well-meaning non-muslims will be like you know what I'm gonna like read the Quran and dispel all these myths and then they go to Barnes and Noble and they buy the Quran and they open up to the first page because that's what you do with the Bible and then after about four lines you're like what is happening I don't understand any of this is there any chapters that's on purpose the Quran when it was compiled was deliberately compiled without an editorial hand yes it is divided in chapters but those chapters make no sense there's no internal sort of organization to the chapters they have titles but the titles are usually a riff on whatever the first few verses were their comeback there they're put together according from the longest chapter to the shortest chapter there's the there's no thematic element it's not like this is this is the part of the Quran where it's just about this and now this part is about this it's just all over the place and on purpose Muslims do not read the Koran the way that say Christians read the New Testament the majority of Muslims that when they read the Quran they just sort of flip it open at any point and just start reading and because that's how it's supposed to be it's direct revelation from God okay as a result of this this huge theological argument started within Islam which is now hold on if this is the Word of God and the foundational belief of Islam is that God is indivisible that's why he can never have a son for instance that God is divine unity he is indivisible then how can his word be separate from his self if it's his speech then it has to be his self there can't be a division between God's self and God's speech they must be the one and the same thing that by the way is why Muslims treat the Quran the same way the Jews Street treat the Hebrew Scriptures right that the the words themselves are divine I mean literally that the actual letters on the page printed themselves have divine power over and above what the words mean so that's why you have to be careful how you handle it etc etc so this argument arose about is the Quran uncreated and eternal the way God is uncreated and eternal or is it a created thing was there a time in which the Quran didn't exist and then the Quran did exist this argument was you know back and forth for the first five six seventh centuries of Islam and for some very very complicated political reasons that I do not want to get into well just there was a very powerful famous Calif by the name of Al Mamun who was a progressive rationalist who believed that the Quran was created and that it should be open to interpretation and he believed that so much that he slaughtered anyone who disagreed as one does when when that Calif died the backlash to his forced progressivism was so great that the other side took over the traditionalist the so-called uncreated quranists and that to this day tends to be the dominant position in all the Islamic schools of law that the Quran is uncreated it is God it's not the Word of God it is God and as a result its inherent it's unchangeable its untranslatable if you translate the Quran then it's not the Quran any longer you could understand why that would lead to an enormous amount of problems partly what we've been talking about you know this whole time so it's still that's now the dominant view there okay yeah thank you so we're gonna do these last two questions and then I'm good yeah right why don't we take them both and then I'll just sure you can do so lane ask your question and then we'll and then and then we'll get the other question too okay so I'm Wayne crimp very nervous and speaking from people okay so as a queer non-binary trans skyy gender-nonconforming I don't like gendered things so but okay so like you know I just was wondering your thoughts on the just the HUD job within the current I don't know if there's as much as a gender revolution going on other places not in like America or I don't know anyway but my like I understand it I become more comfortable with it when someone said like it's supposed to symbolize you know you're as la m'q and you will help people kind of like a cross but I was just wondering your thoughts in the modern world great question great question so do you want it so we get out so I'll take the next one too yeah okay so thank you Lane and then let's get the last question my questions to do with more of harking back to we said about Thomas monster and his compares and martin luther's striking down with him and just the whole beginning of the process or information to us the Northern Renaissance started people like Erasmus and the praise of folly which started to call any question the institution the papacy would you like would you it is there any comparison to the presence of both of 1527 that caused Martin Luther to strike it down it's like Inception the process of information the whole political aspect of it because his reliance on the German princes and we're like there's like the build-up to the whole Islamic Reformation and all just like the Internet has fractured all form leadership of it allowing more people to have more information more widespread that fabulous question thank you so much okay let's so the the first question was primarily about the hood job look I gave that question a lot and here's here's my sort of pack answer to it which is that I don't wear a hijab so I don't get an opinion [Laughter] [Applause] what I will say to expand on that a little bit as a as a scholar and a historian I can talk about how the head job arose why it arose the fact that there's actually no no commandment anywhere anywhere in the Quran that demands that women wear hijab there are Commandments in the Quran about modest dress for both men and women the hijab was originally there's evidence to historical evidence to show that during the time of the Prophet Muhammad no one but the prophet's wives war the hijabs in fact the term the the Arabic term Dada batalha job putting on the hijab was synonymous with becoming Muhammad's wife and that had to do with a whole host of sort of political issues the hijab arose o to 300 years before Islam it was primarily a practice that very wealthy Iranian and Syrian women would do and just in general a job which just means kirtan it means curtain off it means sort of separating from society it's something that wealthy women wore because it was an indication that they didn't have to work they didn't have to work in the fields they didn't have to you know do menial labor and then after the death of the Prophet it rapidly became a thing that Muslim women did to emulate the wives of the Prophet and then because religions are invented by men it very quickly then became a means of controlling women's bodies and that's how it arose in in the the sort of first to 300 years of Islam but it was still not widely used or obligatory it really wasn't until the colonial experience that the hijab became more widespread and and even in some cases mandatory and that was primarily as a way of differentiating quote-unquote Islamic culture from this sort of dominant colonial culture that was trying to eradicate it to root it out it was a form of protest if you will by women as well as by men today the hijab means a million different things I think in the American imagination the hijab somehow is the symbol of female oppression in Islam I am NOT saying that there aren't large parts of the Muslim world in which women are treated in appalling ways and that they don't have the same rights and privileges as men dude that's true there is a problem the hijab is not the problem the hood job means whatever anybody wants it to mean and so I think that we are better off not fixating on a piece of cloth that a woman chooses to put over her hair and if you truly do care about the plight of Muslim women around the world then there are things that you can do that are much more important than railing about the hijab to the question about the political aspects of Reformation it's really I mean the parallels are striking in the same way that yes it's true the princes of Europe were much more willing to advance the cause of Protestantism because it meant separating from the domination the political domination of the papacy and not having to send enormous amount of taxes to to the Pope the political aspect in the Islamic Reformation is very much similar what it's happened in the last 60 70 80 years is that as many Muslim majority countries places like Syria or Saudi Arabia or Egypt have become dictatorships primarily military dictatorships the first order of business is to control the mosque and so whereas for much of the last you know fifteen hundred years the Imam was someone who like in a you know a pastor in a neighborhood church is basically you know his living is paid by the tides that the church gives right I mean you're an employee of this church what these military dictators learned very very quickly is that you need to control the church you need to control the Imams and so in large parts of the Muslim world the Imam is a state employee so for instance in Egypt the state plays the Imam and so the state defines what the Imam can preach and cannot preach the same is true is in Saudi Arabia in Saudi Arabia the state often writes the Imams sermons for him and any Imam who dares to deviate from that script for too long isn't heard of much longer if you're a young Muslim ok this again the appeal of bin Laden and jihadism right if you're a young Muslim and you are looking out in the world at the injustice and the suffering and and the problems that are taking place and you see the corruption and the nepotism and the lack of social justice in your own country and then use go to mosque on a Friday and you sit down and you hear a government employee argue with you about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin you can understand why that starts to lose its appeal real fast and that if someone shows up on YouTube and says stop going to that mosque don't go there anymore that man has nothing for you he's as corrupt as the that pays him he doesn't know what's going on in the world let me tell you what's going on in the world if you're 16 17 18 years old and even remotely globally aware that is a very appealing message it's dangerous as all reformation z' can be but at the same time if we can get enough voices and those voices are out there and they're loud they're strong who go on who are on YouTube and who say yeah that's true Yuri mom has nothing for you but let me give you a different way of thinking about it a vision of Islam that's pluralistic and democratic and and feminist and oh and in a constant evolution a new way of thinking about this faith that can help you solve your problems your grievances and the problems of the world then it's a good thing right it goes right back to where we started Reformation x' aren't good or bad but they are opportunities thank you so he's gonna go around and he's gonna be out in the narthex to sign your books give him a second to get there and I really appreciate all of you coming out tonight he set the stage for us I think to do a lot of work in our community particularly between Christians and Muslims and so I hope that we can continue this conversation after tonight thank you again for being here and have a safe drive [Applause] you

Channel: First Presbyterian Church of Arlington Heights

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Keywords: first presbyterian church, arlington heights, reza aslan, fall anniversary speaker, alex lang

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Length: 88min 50sec (5330 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 22 2018