Fox News, Brown People and Reza Aslan

When the Iranian-American scholar Reza Aslan went on Fox News last week to discuss his new book about Jesus, what should have been a straightforward, low-brow interview with the anchor Lauren Green ended up sparking a national conversation about media standards, academic freedom, and the very meaning of religious scholarship. For Iranians, of course, there was great irony in those excruciating ten minutes, during which the anchor vapidly challenged Aslan's very right to have opinions about Christianity: while Fox News demonizes the Iranian government for denying its citizens basic freedoms, its own journalism seems to operate on the same self-righteous level, extending the right to an opinion by religious creed and skin color. We turned to Aslan himself to put the controversy in perspective, and he talks to us here about the importance of academic work being accessible to the public, the American media's enduring wariness of Iranians, and why Jesus makes for pretty good reading.

Fox News isn't exactly known for erudition or basic receptivity to actual facts, for that matter. What were you expecting going into that interview?

I watch Fox news enough to know how they feel about brown people. So I knew that they were going to come after me swinging. What I didn't know is that the entire interview was going to be not about the arguments I make in the book, rather about my right as a scholar, who happens to be Muslim, to make them.

The Fox interviewer, Lauren Green, questioned your right as a scholar to write about another religion, arguing that as a Muslim you are somehow not qualified to engage with Christianity. This is a slightly bizarre argument, and I wonder what you think its logical extension is. That Muslims are bound to be biased and hateful, or that only Christians are permitted to study Jesus, or that no person is allowed to study beyond his or her personal faith system?

What’s truly bizarre about that argument is the fact that nearly every “expert” who goes on Fox to talk about Islam is, far from being a Muslim, usually a peddler of hate and misinformation, like Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, or Frank Gaffney. In fact, even Lauren Green, a conservative Christian, has written about Islam! She wrote a lengthy essay for Fox about why Islam is inherently violent. I think because Fox only provides the biased writings of mostly Christian writing about Islam, it assumes that a Muslim who writes about Jesus must be biased, too. It just doesn’t make sense otherwise in their warped worldview. But my book is far from a Muslim take on Jesus.

Do most non-academics even understand how disciplines like the study of religions deal with matters like historicity of religious figures? Do people understand that academic critique – in the secular tradition – involves suspending pious assumptions?

There is a deep strain of anti-intellectualism in the American media. But it’s not completely the media’s fault. Scholars have done a lousy job in communicating their ideas to popular readers. And people like myself who do, tend to get demonized in academia for it. We have to be better at breaking through the ivory wall and communicating our work with everyone else. This is especially true for those who study religion. We have to do a better job of making sure that people understand the difference between religion and faith. I think academics have a lot to offer the conversations taking place in our society about the role of religion in public life. If the media don’t understand us, if they are afraid of us, if they look at us with distrust, it’s as much our fault as it is the media’s.

Do you think your Iranian background factors into this quite stunning treatment by Fox? Would an Indonesian or Chinese scholar who happened to be Muslim have been challenged in this way?

It's funny, I often say that when I came to the United States from Iran in the 1980s it was a very bad time to be Iranian and Muslim in America. Thirty years later not much has changed. Fox News is built on a very simple business model: scare the crap out of your viewer so they have no choice but to tune in and then buy the Coke and Viagra you are trying to sell them in your commercials. They have spun anti-Muslim sentiment to ratings gold for more than a decade. Their newest target of fear and derision is Iran. So to have a brown Muslim Iranian talking about Jesus on their network is kind of a perfect storm for them. I think they assumed that they would just slam-dunk the interview, which is why they obviously did not prepare for it. Clearly they had not read the book. But it seems as though they did not even bother to read the book jacket.

The interview has gone viral on social media, and people seem very disturbed that a scholar of your prominence was essentially persecuted on national television on religious grounds, for being a sneaky Muslim. Do you come away rolling your eyes at Fox or does this reflect a wider culture of prejudice that can be observed elsewhere in the media, popular culture or academia?

In a sense this interview is no longer about me. Nor is it about Fox News. It has entered the Zeitgeist in a very interesting way and spurred a much-needed public discussion about matters such as journalism and media fairness, religion and society, scholarship and faith. As a writer and thinker, I am thrilled to have inadvertently launched this discussion. But at this point I’m just an interested bystander to it.

Can you elaborate on what you describe as a very personal obsession with Jesus as a religious figure?

We are talking about an illiterate, uneducated, poor Jewish peasant from the backwoods of Galilee who, despite having everything stacked against him, was nevertheless able to launch a movement that was so threatening to the established order of his day that he was captured, tortured and executed for it. That seems like a pretty interesting person. It’s certainly somebody that I want to get to know. I hope that other people would feel the same.

I have to ask you this, why does the Jesus on the cover of Zealot look like a blonde white guy, whereas the historical Jesus probably looked more like, I don't know, Amr Diab or you yourself?

Ha! It’s funny that you think that authors get to choose their covers. I will say this. I did insist that they try their hardest to at least darken Jesus as much as possible.