Good reactions

There may be no god but God, but there are suddenly many, many books to read about the Islamic concept of the divine as readers worldwide grapple with the conflict surrounding militant Islam that has been building for years and exploded in the wake of 9/11.

Few, however, have so taken hold as scholar Reza Aslan’s book, “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” the first work by a young and refreshingly clearheaded writer now living in Santa Monica.

The Iranian-born intellectual has suddenly become something of a fashionable item, and not just because he knows how to wear a suit. He has crafted an exegesis on Islam that makes sense to the Western mind. In the book, he describes an Islam that has been under the heel of its clerical establishment for 15 centuries and is now, he says, in the midst of an inner struggle that may turn out to be something like the Christian Reformation.

But it’s not at all clear that reformers, who want to establish room for the individual in the church, will win the day. With Muslims among the fastest-growing religious population in the United States, this is essential information, and Aslan is next writing about one of the key figures in Islam: Jesus Christ.

Pasadena Weekly: Why do you think your book has been so embraced by the mainstream?

Reza Aslan: Part of it is that I have a MFA in fiction from the Iowa writers workshop and I think of myself primarily as a writer first and a scholar second. And too often books about Islam really fall into two different categories: They’re either about Islam as politics, and so they fall into that current-events category of ‘What’s wrong with Islam?’ or ‘the Muslim enemy,’ or, if the book is about Islam as a religion, they approach it from a very academic perspective, which kind of turns off a general reader. What I wanted to do was to write a book that combines both of those aspects and provides a readable and interesting account of Islam as a set of beliefs and practices, but also about how it has evolved and developed throughout history in these wonderfully eclectic ways.

If you were going to try correct one perception of Islam for all Americans, what would that be?

I guess it would be this idea we have in the West that Islam is somehow a foreign and exotic religion, a religion of the ‘other,’ when in fact Islam is very much grounded in the same biblical prophetic tradition with which most Americans are already completely familiar.

Is the conflict between Eastern and Western culture really a religious one?

It does often get transformed into a religious conflict. This is not unusual. It’s often the case that political leaders, civic leaders, whatever, will frame both internal and external conflicts in religious terms because it’s the language that holds the most currency with the masses. Let’s not forget that, according to President Bush, we’re embroiled in a war between good and evil. Rather than talking about the war on terrorism as a very complicated, global conflict that involves various layers of socioeconomic concerns, and concerns about American foreign policy in the Middle East, and also these ideological shifts taking place within the Islamic world, you just label it a war between good and evil and any child can make that choice.

How you think that Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalism compares to US Christian fundamentalism? Are the US and Iran, for example, more similar than they think?

What all fundamentalisms have in common, whether they’re Christian, Jewish or Muslim, is that they are primarily reactionary movements. So, in that sense, Christian fundamentalism and Muslim fundamentalism have a lot in common. But I think that it’s important to recognize that this term ‘fundamentalism’ means different things when applied to different religions. To me, I see this surge in fundamentalism taking place not just in Islam but also in Christianity as not a sign of the worsening of society, but a sign that society is progressing forward, and that these groups, probably because they feel left behind, are reacting more and more loudly and even sometimes more violently to that natural, historical progression of society. What I mean to say is that if fundamentalism is a reaction to something, in this case a reaction to progressivism, then it must be progressivism that is surging ahead, not fundamentalism.

In the prologue of your book, you talk about ‘the clash of monotheisms’ Do you think that religious conflicts could ever be reconciled as long as everyone believes their god is the only one or the right one?

No, this unfortunately is part and parcel of monotheism. The problem with a monotheistic system isn’t just that it believes in one god; it’s that it often believes in only one explanation for God. And if there’s only one explanation for God, then all other explanations must be false. My issue is that what we need to do is not just have a better conception of other people’s religions, but we have to have a better conception on what religion really is. I go to great lengths to explain that religion is not faith; that religion is the language by which people talk about faith. The problem comes when religion is no longer the means to an end but the end itself. To me, that’s where this clash of monotheisms really occurs. In other words, the religion becomes God.

Has the conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims been blown up by Western media?

Definitely. The conflict between the Shiites and the Sunni, as far as it being some kind of global issue, has been exaggerated by the media. The Arab world, particularly the autocrats of the Arab world, are a little bit uneasy with this rise of Shiite dominance in the Middle East. But there’s a real threat that we, in the West, are exacerbating the situation in almost what could be described as a self-fulfilling prophecy, creating precisely the sort of inter-religious tension that we are predicting is going to come.

As far as the conflict between the individual and the church, do you think that Islam is going through a literal Reformation?

From the very beginning, there have been those individuals who have rejected the authority of the institution and have chosen instead to look either to themselves or to other individuals as sources of emulation. There is definitely a seismic shift taking place within the Muslim world over the last 100 years or so, really since the colonialist experience which [resulted in] greater literacy and more widespread access to ideas and also the rise of Muslim lay intellectuals. In other words, people like myself who are outside of the clerical institutions but who are using our scholarship in order to come up with and to create these very reformist and pluralistic understandings of Islam, understandings of Islam that most of us believe are far more in line with the original intention of the prophet Mohammad than what has come since then.

Have you been at all harassed or snubbed by American law enforcement or by academics because you sympathize with Islam as a religion and as a culture?

Honestly, the only problems that I have had are occasionally with academics, because in academia we are very much a closed circle and we do not often take kindly to those who step outside of that circle to communicate to a wider audience.

So you’ve never been visited by the FBI?

Well, I’ve been visited by the FBI, but mostly for help, and the Department of Homeland Security. I think that there are probably people within the government who look at me suspiciously, but for the most part I’ve found that government agencies are so desperate for a clear, concise and rational voice about how to deal with some of these conflicts that are taking place around the world, that they are far more willing to listen to me than to monitor me.