“You’re a Muslim, so why would you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”

That’s how Fox News’ Lauren Green began her challenge to Reza Aslan’s right to write about Jesus.  The video of her interview with him instantly went viral (in fact, several accidental theologists sent it on to me — thank you!).  It inspired several spoofs, including this one here.  Aslan’s book, Zealot (my San Francisco Chronicle review of it here) was already #2 on the Amazon bestseller list;  by the next morning, it was #1.

“Gotcha, J. K. Rowling!” Aslan responded.

But aside from the small detail that Christianity was founded by Paul, not Jesus, Green’s question may not be such a terrible one after all.

I’ve been there, and often still am — from the other side, as it were.  The first time conservative Muslims asked why I’d decided to write a biography of Muhammad, I spluttered in amazement: “But you don’t think he’s worth writing about?  This man who carved such a huge profile in history?  He’s your prophet, how can you even ask?”

It quickly became clear that this was not a sufficient answer, and that the question was not about my decision as a writer.  It was about my decision as a Jew.  Just as Green focused on Aslan’s Muslimness and assumed that his real agenda was to attack Christianity, so certain conservative Muslims focused on my Jewishness and assumed that my real agenda must have been to attack Islam.

Let’s get one thing straight right away:  just as many mainstream Christians have welcomed Aslan’s book, so many mainstream Muslims have welcomed mine.  It’s the conservatives we’re talking about here, those who cannot tolerate any deviance from received orthodoxy.

In the context of Fox’s Islamophobic politics on the one hand, and of the Israel-Palestine conflict on the other, perhaps such suspicion is inevitable.  But since Aslan’s book and mine both draw on scholarly resources but were written for general audiences, there’s another less obvious factor.  Most devout believers are unaware of the vast body of academic research on the early history of Christianity and Islam.  Used to hagiographic or devotional literature, they see any more dispassionate view of their revered figures as an assault on their belief.  Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection.

But what if Green had interviewed Aslan not with the desire to criticize, but with the desire to know?  What if my conservative Muslim questioners had been more curious than judgmental?  Without such knee-jerk defensiveness, the question of what a non-Christian brings to the study of Jesus or a non-Muslim to that of Muhammad becomes an interesting one – a question, that is, about the value of the ‘outsider’ point of view.

Precisely because he or she does not come from a place of belief, what seems obvious to the insider is not at all so to the outsider.  It demands to be explored, to be understood on the multiple psychological, cultural, and political levels on which history takes place.  Done well, this process can create important new insights into otherwise received versions of history, opening up fresh ways of seeing and understanding, and finding new relevance in old stories.

As with Jesus, so with Muhammad:  by placing him in the world he experienced, in the full context of place and time, politics and culture – the ‘outsider’ biographer honors the man by honoring his lived experience.

Historical reality doesn’t detract from faith;  it humanizes it.  And when gross inhumanities are committed every day in the name of one faith or another, that alone should surely be more than enough reason to write.

“A tough-minded, deeply political book” — my review in the San Francisco Chronicle of Reza Aslan’s best-selling ‘Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth‘

‘Zealot’?  A biography of Jesus could have no more provocative title.  But it turns out to be the perfect one for Reza Aslan’s unearthing (or should that be un-heavening?) of “the Jesus before Christianity.”  As he cogently demonstrates, the real Jesus — the radical Jew who preached, agitated, and was executed for his pains — was a far more complex figure than many Christians care to acknowledge.

The zeal in question is both religious and political.  At a time when this kind of zealotry is associated predominantly with Islamic extremists, it’s fascinating to see similar processes at work in first-century Jewish Palestine, which was occupied territory – occupied, that is, by the Romans.  In opposition, messianic nationalist movements created what Aslan aptly describes as “zealous warriors of God who would cleanse the land of all foreigners and idolaters.”

This is the historical and political context Jesus was born into, one that takes us beyond the Christ figure created by his followers after his death to the actual man, “a revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of his era were, in religious and political turmoil.”

Given that turmoil, it should come as no surprise that “the Jesus of history had a far more complex attitude toward violence” than is usually assumed.  Gentle shepherds don’t have much place here.  Aslan reads the admonitions to love your enemies and turn the other cheek as directed toward relationships between Jews, not between Jews and foreigners, and especially not between Jews and occupiers.  “The message was one of repossessing the land,“ he writes, “a movement of national liberation for the afflicted and oppressed.”  A kingdom, that is, very much of this world, not another.

This historical territory has been explored before, by biblical scholars such as Richard Horsley and Dominic Crossan.  But in Aslan’s hands, it gains broader resonance.  He brings to bear his expertise in the volatile territory of politics and religion (his earlier book Beyond Fundamentalism analyzed the root causes of militant religious extremism) as well as his deep background as a scholar of religion, renowned especially for the most readable history of Islam yet written, No god But God.

As in those earlier books, not only does he get the full picture, but he can also write – sometimes irresistibly, as when he drops into a kind of tongue-in-cheek interfaith slang, mentioning Herod’s “nebbish sons,” for instance, and Herod himself as “King of the Jews, no less!”

But cherished legends, watch out.  Aslan can be scathingly dismissive of such episodes as Salome dancing for John the Baptist’s head, or Pontius Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus.  Prepare for words like “nonsense” and “fairy tale” as he traces what holds up historically (and geographically), and what’s been elided, even deliberately disguised, in the gospel accounts.  Which is not to blame the gospel writers.  Aslan points out that the concept of empirically valid historical reality is a relatively modern one.  “It would have been an altogether foreign concept to the gospel writers, for whom history was not a matter of uncovering facts, but of revealing truths.”

Perhaps the most fascinating part of Zealot, then, is the analysis of how Jesus was tamed by his own followers, and why.  Soon after his death, the early Jesus movement split between the “Hebrews” who stayed in Jerusalem under James’ leadership, and the Hellenists abroad led by Paul.  The bitter infighting between them would be resolved by force majeure:  the disastrous failure of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, which led to the torching of Jerusalem in the year 70 and the expulsion of surviving Jews from what remained of the city.  With the ‘Hebrew’ faction thus in disarray, the Hellenist appeal of Paul’s Christianity won out, and Jesus’ specifically Jewish revolutionary fervor would be toned down to suit a much larger audience:  the Roman empire itself.

This entailed absolving the Romans from responsibility for the crucifixion, instead blaming the unruly (and unrulable) Jews, and thus laying the basis for two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism. Where the early Jesus movement was Jewish, Christianity would now be anything but.  As Aslan notes, the gospels are, in this sense, a radical break with history – a wiping out of the specific past to be replaced by a universal future.

Yet Zealot itself is testament to the fact that they didn’t quite succeed.  Aslan’s insistence on human and historical actuality turns out to be far more interesting than dogmatic theology, and certainly more intriguing and exciting for any modern reader not piously devoted to the idea of gospel truth.  This tough-minded, deeply political book does full justice to the real Jesus, and honors him in the process.

(Seattle:  I’ll be talking about the book with Reza Aslan in the auditorium of the downtown Central Library on Monday July 29, 7-8.30 pm.  Free admission.)

Is Reza Aslan considering a run for political office?  This recent TEDx talk sure sounds like it.

Aslan wrote the best-selling ‘No God But God,‘ by far the most readable introduction to the history of Islam, and his recent anthology of 20th-century Middle East literature, ‘Tablet & Pen,’ is a fixture on my bedside table.

Like any good politico, he starts out all rosy-eyed.  Bear with him.  He draws clear parallels between prejudice in the U.S. against Jews and against Catholics — both groups seen at one time as un-American, foreign, “other” — and the current politically manipulated wave of Islamophobia.  And he draws the clear conclusion:  anti-Muslim zealots are so angry because they know they’re on the losing side of American history.

As they say in the Middle East, “from your lips to God’s ears.”

See what you think:

Am off Monday to the hills outside Guadalajara, back December 1.   No phone, no computer, no electronics of any kind or size means I’ll be offline for two weeks.  I’ll be hiking like a mountain goat, eating like a pig, and frolicking like a five-year-old.  But that doesn’t mean I’m leaving my mind behind in Seattle.   With my newly enhanced vision, I’ll be reading like crazy.

So what does an accidental theologist pack for such a trip?  Here’s the list:

— Reza Aslan’s new anthology of Mideastern 20th-century literature, Tablet & Pen.  A big, solid, juicy collection translated from Arabic, Turkish, Urdu, and Farsi.  Some of the writers I already know, but many I do not.   I’ve dipped into it already and know it’ll be a wonderful travel companion, equal parts exploration and pleasure.

— Two novels by the newly crowned Nobelist Maria Vargas Llosa:  The Storyteller and (for the plane) Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

— Four volumes of The History of al-Tabari (from a forty-volume translation of the great early Islamic historian) which I will re-read very closely, pen and notebook in hand, in the clear early-morning hours before breakfast.

— A novel by Luis Alberto Urrea called The Hummingbird’s Daughter, recommended by a friend.  Might be a bit too magical-realist for me right now, but it’s set during the Mexican Revolution so into my suitcase it goes.

— A Teach Yourself Spanish book (file this one under good intentions that will probably come to naught).

— And then a toss-up as to the last selection:  one of two classics — either Montaigne’s Essays, whose wit and elegance I dip into occasionally and have been telling myself for years I should read all the way through, or Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, the Victorian blockbuster satire of greed and concupiscence that is as contemporary now as it was 140 years ago.  Maybe the Trollope’s the book to read on the plane trip back…

Until December — Lesley

I think of them as H2D2 — not the name of a techno-punk band, but the two H’s and two D’s of the ‘new atheism’ quadrumvirate (that’s a triumvirate plus one, or at least it is now) consisting of Hitchens and Harris, Dawkins and Dennett.  One of my first posts here on The AT was Is Christopher Hitchens Running for Pope? and I’m far from the only one to suspect his evangelical fervor.

Now Reza Aslan, author of Beyond Fundamentalism and No God But God, by far the best general introduction out there to the history of Islam, is tackling both the fervor and the astounding simplicities of H2D2 thinking.  In a post over at the Washington Post’s ‘On Faith,’ he starts by talking about an atheist ad on the side of a London bus (what is this thing with buses and religion?), but quickly gets to the point.  The H2D2 movement, he says, is:

… a new and particularly zealous form of fundamentalism–an atheist fundamentalism.  The parallels with religious fundamentalism are obvious and startling:  The conviction that they are in sole possession of truth (scientific or otherwise), the troubling lack of tolerance for the views of their critics (Dawkins has compared creationists to Holocaust deniers), the insistence on a literalist reading of scripture (more literalist, in fact, than one finds among most religious fundamentalists), the simplistic reductionism of the religious phenomenon, and, perhaps most bizarrely, their overwhelming sense of siege —  the belief that they have been oppressed and marginalized by Western societies and are just not going to take it anymore.  This is not the philosophical atheism of Feuerbach or Marx, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche (I am not the first to think that the new atheists give atheism a bad name).  Neither is it the scientific agnosticism of Thomas Huxley or Herbert Spencer.  This is, rather, a caricature of atheism: shallow scholarship mixed with evangelical fervor.

Read Aslan’s full piece, posted on the Washington Post’s ‘On Faith’ blog, here.

Meanwhile Hitchens’ new book Hitch-22 is, to quote the Hitch himself, Not Great.  I opened it expecting an extended fireworks display of wit, and instead found a self-conscious memoir written in the pompous style of a member of some musty gentleman’s club in St James’ Square, musing aloud while nursing a glass of port and a gouty foot.   All the “good bits” had already been quoted in the reviews (yes, all of them — that’s how many there are), which obligingly glossed over the far more extended sophomoric sections.  But he did finally get me to laugh out loud when he makes the belated discovery that one of his grandmothers was half-Jewish (the shock!  the awe!), impelling the great atheist to go haring off to eastern Europe in sentimental search of his Jewish roots.  Oy vay.