Watch Reza Aslan Make An Ass Out Of Himself
A scholar named Reza Aslan wrote about about the historical Jesus. From what I’ve seen, the book reprises one of the familiar narratives about the historical Jesus, which is that Jesus was not a religious preacher but a political rebel against Roman rule. Apparently Aslan was once a Christian and is now a Muslim.
You probably already know these things already, and the reason you probably knew them is because Twitter has been aflame with links to an interview Aslan has given about his book to Fox News. The Buzzfeed post about the interview has over 3 million pageviews and a “12X social lift” (whatever that means). Meanwhile the Slate post is cited among its “Most Viral”. Both call it “embarrassing”, and usually with superlatives.
Well, it’s certainly embarrassing. But mostly for Aslan.
Let’s back up here for a second. There is a problem for “historical Jesus” research, which is that source material is so scarce. You have a few fragments in Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. You have the non-canonical gospels which are of very late and dubious origins. And you have the canonical gospels, which make supernatural claims about Jesus and therefore automatically (and justly) invite skepticism. This gives a wide latitude for historians and other scholars to paint pictures of the “historical Jesus” as basically whatever they want. That’s not an indictment of Jesus scholarship. That’s just the way it is.
Meanwhile, there is a great popular interest in “historical Jesus” scholarship, if only because there is a great popular interest in “What You Don’t Know About This Familiar Story”. Many “historical Jesus” books have gone on to become publishing sensations. And often, they’ve gone on to become publishing sensations in the wake of generating controversy for proclaiming that the traditional Christian account of Jesus’ life is a-historical. (Even though it’s not possible to prove it, only to hypothesize it.) Controversy generates book sales. Particularly religious controversy. Such is the world.
In this context takes place the Aslan interview.
And it’s impossible to watch the video and not feel that Aslan has come into the studio picking for a fight. Trying to generate a viral moment.
Oh sure, the Fox News interviewer also has an agenda. But watch how the interview proceeds.
Interviewer: “You’re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”
Aslan: “Well, to be clear, I am a scholar of religions with [enunciating] four degrees including one in New Testament and fluency in Biblical Greek who has been studying the history of Christianity for [enunciating again] two decades.”
And boom, we’re off to the races!
Aslan won’t answer the question, and so the interviewer presses on (as Interviewing 101 demands), and we all go downhill from here. Aslan never stops treating the interviewer with contempt, and never stops taking offense at any relation between his faith and his book.
Those bigots at Fox News with their anti-Muslim views. Oh, how dare they say that a Muslim can’t write a book about Jesus! And their buck-toothed anti-intellectualism. This is a SCHOLAR. Don’t you understand? A scholar!
Except that there is nothing whatsoever offensive or out of the ordinary about the interviewer’s question.
“Why did you write this book?” is literally the most common interview question asked of authors! It is so common, it is such a cliché, that it is a joke in literary and media circles! This is also true of the variation “[Tidbit of author’s personal history], so why did you write this book?”
I’m a Frenchman who has never lived in the US for long, and who often writes about American politics. As a result, I am often asked why I, as a Frenchman, decide to devote so much time and attention to US politics. This is normal. And to be honest, I sometimes tire of answering that question. But I’m never offended by it.
And I’m also a practicing Roman Catholic, and if I wrote a book about Luther or Muhammad or the Buddha, it would be normal and completely innocuous to ask me why I chose to write about this particular subject given my faith tradition.
But I could take offense. I could treat the person like a child and say something like “I have a master’s degree from HEC School of Management which was ranked number one in Europe for many years running by the Financial Times — a small newspaper out of London, maybe you’ve heard of it — where I was ranked among the top twenty matriculants.” You know what that answer would make me? It would make me a complete ass and a buffoon.
Scholarship is scholarship and should be judged on its merits. But there is absolutely nothing weird or out of the ordinary for an interviewer to ask an author how his background affected his decision to write a book. It’s amazing to me that this has to be pointed out. I would even add especially if a believer in one religion writes about another religion.
Aslan, talking to his interviewer “as if she were a child”, Slate notes, says “it would be like asking a Christian why they would write a book about, you know, Islam.” Indeed, old chap! That’s exactly what it would be like!
To take an example, one of the TAS Alums is Alan Jacobs, a professor and scholar of literature. His latest book is a biography of The Book of Common Prayer. The Book of Common Prayer (I now know, thanks to Alan) is one of the great works of the Anglican Church. And I know Alan is an Anglican. So it seems obvious to me why Alan wrote this book. Alan is a man who cares deeply about books and their history and about his own religious tradition so it makes complete sense to me why he would write this book. If Alan’s next project was a Biography of the Ramayana, I would be indeed curious to note why he decided to write it.
The interview goes on in this vein. The interviewer quotes Aslan a bit of criticism of his book. Instead of responding, Aslan talks about how his book has a hundred pages of endnotes and is therefore a serious book. First of all, that’s silly. I mean, really. But second of all, answer the damn question. Aslan speaks as if the fact that he has a PhD somehow means that he is beyond criticism, at least from non-PhDs, and certainly from journalists.
Then why go on the interview?
I mean, think about it for a second. There’s about as much chance of Fox News’ audience buying Aslan’s book as there is of it buying Yeezus. So why do the interview?
Well, for this, of course. The interview didn’t ever degenerate—it never “generated” to begin with. Oh sure, Fox News had its own agenda. But Aslan could have played it cool, or presumed good faith at least on the first question. That’s if he hadn’t been coming on the interview just for this. To assume bigotry on the part of Fox News, to talk about his academic bona fides, and therefore to generate a viral moment and juice his book sales.
And this is why I’m annoyed and I’m writing this. Yes, Fox News had an agenda, and yes, Aslan is not the first person to manufacture controversy.
What’s so annoying to me is that I haven’t seen a single media outlet—that so breathlessly posted the video, and called it “embarrassing”—point out what is actually going on here. Because there’s the Bad Guys in one camp—the camp of bigoted Christians—and there’s the Good Guys in the other camp—the camp of Scholars who, because they are Scholars, are Good.
Oh yes, the Fox News video is embarrassing. It’s a little embarrassing for Fox News. It’s a lot embarrassing for Aslan. And it’s very, very embarrassing for Buzzfeed and Slate and all the other outlets that amplified it uncritically.
PEG, I’m not in agreement as to who is making an ass of himself. One could answer — I heard Aslan intervied on Fresh Air — that he was, after all, a devout Christian for some long time, and “interviewing 101” would seem to suggest that the interviewer should’ve known that, and indeed it’s in the book being discussed. But, frankly, Aslan’s contempt is clear because the question is spectacularly awful in a way your post is, well, a bit dishonest about. The question “You’re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?” is a stupid one, because Jesus is a huge figuere in the Qu’ran and in Islam as well! You analogize it to a Roman Catholic writing about Luther or the Buddha, and that’s a horrible analogy: those figures aren’t part of your scripture. So the questioner clearly has no sense what a Muslim is — it’s genuinely a dumb question, and it meets a contemptuous answer. I suppose it’d have been nice if Aslan chose to be a nicer guy about it. But his response isn’t off-base, just mildly impolite, and your critique is a bit dishonest.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jul 29, 05:05 PM · #
I guess, to clarify, I think the Fox guys really are the bad guys in this case, and clearly so. Under the terms of their question — only somebody whose treligion involves Jesus, should be interested in Jesus — they’re simply ignorant, or spreading ignorance, because Jesus is a huge figure in Islam. But Aslan (correctly) refutes the premise of their question: I’m interested in Jesus because I am a scholar of religion and I have years of background you should already know that tells you I am (cf. Karen Armstrong). Again: this is not a defense you could make if you wrote on, say, the Buddha.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jul 29, 05:09 PM · #
I’m having a hard time crediting this complaint. The question as asked clearly implied some bad Islamic motive behind Aslan’s book, and indeed the pump was primed by the hatchet job Foxnews.com had already posted suggesting that a Muslim writing about Jesus was by definition guilty of a conflict of interest. It was a very ignorant and offensive approach that would never have been taken with the countless non-Muslim scholars who write about topics outside of their own faith. “Why did you decide to write about X” is a typical question; “why did you, a Jew, decide to write a book about X” is not typical and not acceptable.
— Ben · Jul 29, 07:59 PM · #
I heard Aslan interviewed about the book on NPR, and two things were striking. The first was that the interviewer had as much of an agenda as Lauren Greene of Fox, and did not challenge a single premise Aslan put forward, even when they were (as we shall see) quite ludicrous. The second was that the foundation of Aslan’s work is the idea that Jesus could only have been executed by the Romans if He was an enemy of the state, and this would never have been done to anyone for any other reason. In Aslan’s world, Gospels written for an audience living in the Roman Empire could depict a man being executed for religious crimes between two thieves and not only be taken seriously, but spark a world religion.
This would be the equivalent of someone not only claiming today that an executed prisoner had risen from the dead in power and glory, but claiming he had done so after receiving a lethal injection for shoplifting.
No matter what anyone thinks about Fox News, this appears to be just another book where the author says, “The Bible says it, I don’t believe it and that settles it” and expects to be taken seriously (very, very, very seriously) as a historian.
— Christopher · Jul 29, 08:26 PM · #
“Aslan won’t answer the question, and so the interviewer presses on (as Interviewing 101 demands), and we all go downhill from here.”
I’m trying to understand where you get this from. Aslan’s answer to the very first question ends with
“I have been obsessed with Jesus—”
but then he gets cut off by
“It still begs the question, why would you be interested in the founder…”
Has he not at this point answered the question? “I’m a scholar of religion who is fascinated by Jesus”, and is she not repeating the exact question, “but why are you writing a book about Jesus?”
Aslan then clarifies, basically, “I’ve been obsessed with Jesus for 20 years both professionally and personally”.
This seems like sufficient motivation to write a book—what more are you looking for?
Agree that doing the interview was likely a marketing ploy, but I don’t see Aslan as a bad or dishonest actor is any sense.
— BG · Jul 30, 01:39 PM · #
I think you’re missing the forest for the trees. Or perhaps the drove for the ass, or other misplaced metaphors. Aslan wrote a controversial book, because he’s an academic and that is what they do. He was an arrogant ass to an interviewer, because he’s an academic and that’s what they do. (With apologies to the scholars who survive life entering and within academe without being transmuted into a prick). But an interviewer sets the tone for an interview, and Greene didn’t merely push, but was outright hostile.
There are actually two ways to ask, you are not X, so why are you writing about a subject important to Y. One is an attack on credibility, and the other is “I would like to know more information in face of this counter-intuitive fact.” (Another way to phrase that question: you yourself are a Muslim – so why have you decided to become a scholar on Christianity and the New Testament?) Even without the Fox News bug in the corner, Greene makes it clear which one she’s asking. Greene could have found a way to get interesting information out of Aslan, instead she provoked him for hostile reaction. Aslan may be responsible for his conduct as a human being, but Greene is responsible for the interview.
For those actually bewildered why a scholar who happens to be a Muslim, or even a Muslim who is not a scholar would write about Jesus, lets throw out a few possibilities:
1. The historical Jesus is an interesting topic that sells books
2. Christianity, and its Jesus focus, is an interesting topic being a major religion
3. Islam also venerates Jesus in religious terms, though not the same way that Christians do. Jesus is in that sense, a shared figure between the religions.
I am willing to believe the national audience is not aware of at least some of those things, much as it saddens me that most of us are religiously illiterate. And yet, a good interviewer, or even a marginally competent one would help the interviewee bring out those points to inform its audience. Just as a good interviewer is going to point out to those confused about a Frenchman writing about the US that the United States is an important place that affects the world, including France, and perhaps its also true that the Frenchman is for whatever reason, an expert on the U.S. Or he just wants the market share of American-interested readers.
You are almost right: it could have been an innocuous question for the reasonably curious. It manifestly was not.
— K Chen · Jul 30, 06:38 PM · #
That should be “Green” and not “Greene”
— K Chen · Jul 30, 06:55 PM · #
Kieselguhr Kid – For the sake of discussion, let’s assume the interviewer is ignorant and it was stupid question. The proper response would have been to give the answer you just gave – “I wrote this book because Jesus is a huge figure in the Qu’ran and in Islam as well as well as the Bible.” It didn’t sound like she was questioning his credentials, but asking about his motivation. But he assumed his credentials were being questioned. That’s just strange.
— Sam · Jul 30, 07:35 PM · #
No, Sam, it wouldn’t have been “the proper response,” because Aslan doesn’t think (nor do I) that adherence to a faith that reveres the figure, is a prerequisite for writing about him (indeed, I see better the argument that it should preclude one from writing about the “historical” figure). He thinks — I think correctly — that a long documented history of scholarship and interest in the figures of Western religion — and recognize expertise in that area (as in, “people pay me to teach it”) is a pretty good answer. And questioning his motive is remarkably bigoted: again, I am stunned by PEG here and it’s hard not to read his post as itself bigoted.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jul 31, 04:02 PM · #
K Chen,
‘s/academic/public intellectual/g’
— Gabriel · Jul 31, 06:11 PM · #