>> thank you. [inaudible conversations] ..

>> host: reza aslan, where does the phrase no god but god come >> guest: ing there is no god but god, and muhammad is god's messenger. it's, essentially, the phrase that initiates a convert into the muslim faith. convert into

the muslim faith. >> host: you also write it not look that now, islam is available to all muslims and every muslim can speak for islam. ..

>> guest: of scholars, the learned ones as they're known who have maintained a monopoly over the meaning and message of islam for most of the last 14 centuries. >> host: how did that evolve from muhammad into the freedom to interpret? >> guest: you know, it's interesting. this, in many ways, is the same process that all great religions go through. you have a prophet who is primarily a reformer, not a creator of a religion. i think that's the very important thing for people to understand. we have this misperception that what a rough fete is, is -- prophet is, is somebody who invents a new religion, but that's not what a prophet is.

a prophet forms the religion. jesus was a jew preaching about judaism. the buddha was a hindu. he was reforming hinduism. and the same is true of the prophet muhammad as the quran repeatedly reminds people. this is not a new religion, this is the same message that was given to all the prophets that came before muhammad, etc., etc. but what happens is eventually the prophet passes, and now it's the respondent of the prophet's -- responsibility of the prophet's followers to figure out how to make sense of the words and actions of this prophet, and that's when religion is first founded. and be religion as a manmade institution requires a power structure. and who becomes in charge of that religion? well, first it's the prophet's initial follow beers, and then it's the second generation, and then that power structure is

based not so much on whether you knew the rough fete or not, but on how much you can accumulate about the traditions, the theology that was espoused by the prophet and, hence, these massive institutions that we see of religion. now, if you follow that timeline on, it doesn't take a long time for individuals to start complaining about that institution and to start recognizing that there's a bit of a gap between what the institution has to say and what the prophet had to say. and that's when you have this grand clash between individuals and institutions that happens in all great religious traditions over who dependents to define faith. can who gets to define faith. the term that scholars use for that clash is reformation. >> host: and in no god but god, you write that religion is by

definition interpretation and by definition all investigations, all interpretations are valid. finish be how -- how does that play out in the contemporary middle east, especially some of what's going on in iraq? >> guest: people don't like that saying. religious people don't like it. religious people like to think that there is one version of christianity, one version of judaism, and it's their version, correct? but, of course, the problem is that when you are confronted with say sacred scriptures, what you have in front of you doesn't really exist in a vacuum. i mean, scripture without interpretation, it's just words on a page. that's all it is. it requires someone to encounter it and interpret it. and in doing so, one cannot help but bring one's own preconceived

notions, one's political and economic and social views. why are there a thousand different versions of christianity, thousands of different versions of islam? precisely for that reason. and so as interpretation, it becomes very difficult to say this interpretation is wrong and this interpretation is right. be now, i do want to say one very important thing. you can say that one particular interpretation is more reasonable. you can say that it's more historically accurate. but there's a reason why in this country's history just a couple of hundred years ago both slave owners and abolitionists not only used the same bible to argue their differing viewpoints, they used the exact same verses to argue their different view poips. that's the -- viewpoints. that's the power of scripture, that's the power of religion. now, in an institutionalized

religion, one in which there is a papacy, what have you, whatever you want to call it, that has a complete monopoly over the interpretation of faith, then you can maintain a level of control. i mean, the pope can actually say to a catholic theologian you are wrong. your interpretation is incorrect, and, indeed, if you continue to pursue your interpretation, i will excommunicate you, and you are no longer a part of this community. there is nothing like that in islam or in judaism, for that matter. there is no centralized religious authority. and what that means is that thinking goes. any interpretation is now a valid interpretation. there is no one, there's no referee. there's no one to say you're wrong and you're right. and so it becomes a great shouting match. again, i keep parallelling judaism and islam. the problem, of course, is that

there are about 15 million jr well,e well, s.. so it is happening not at the same global stage you have the 1.5 billion muslims having this argument. but when you have muslim democrats and muslim autocrats, muslim peacemakers and muslim warmakers arguing against each other, what you are seeing is precisely the result of this reformation process, thiss individualization of islam. the process whereby themusl authority to define this faith e is being removed -- seized, i should say, from the hands of these institutions that have gripped et for most of -- gripped it for most of the lastd 14 centuries and are now beinge led by any individual with a megaphone. >> host: be reza aslan, what are the similarities between the that mood, the quran and the bible? >> guest: well, there are, i think, two ways to answer thati

question. mythically, they are very muchka representative of a singlere v prophetic history. in other words, what you arere seeing is an understanding that prophetic consciousness, if i can use that phrase, is something that can be passed ono from prophet to prophet. sed on m prophet to profit, from adam to moses, from adam to abraham to moses to jesus to the prophet mohammed. that is certainly the way the koran presented. they see the prophet mohammed as a continuation and indeed aco is a prophetic consciousness that is just sort of moving along through history. sort of been historical account of god's self revelation to

humanity. that asserted the mythic element. sort of the values in the moore's are sort of identical. the notions of answers on stability to man. the idea of the relationship between creator and creation, the duty that humanity has towards the creator to worship, to praise, to obey, concept seven afterlife are very similar. concepts of the cosmos are very similar. more importantly, what you see with these three religions is a desperate attempt to i guess i was very brave between humanity and god close together. there's this a quality that is physically apart for months, the

highest god. i guess if you want to put it in its simplest way, the history of religion, be it the monotheistic religions, the history of religions is predicated upon this long arduous attempt to create less of a distance to train god and humanity, to bring this gap to a close. in many ways massachusetts represents is the incarnate god. it's an attempt to say there is no gap between humanity and god because god became a human, is why christianity is so profoundly successful as a global religion. but these three religions come in this abraham are intimately intertwined, mythically, historically, morally really.

>> host: kidneys three tax be read as political books? >> guest: that's a very good question and i'm going to answer it in a different way. this notion that religion and politics are separate things is a very new idea. i think it is important to understand that religion and i'm talking about on religion in all parts of the world is far more a matter of identity then it is a release and practice is. let me give you an example of what i mean by this. according to the pew forum, about seven out of 10 americans self identify as krishan. but think about that for a moment shall we? seven out of 10 americans? really seven out of 10 americans go to church on sunday? seven out of 10 read the bible on a regular basis let alone

actually follow its precepts? seven out of 10 americans can tell you anything about cheap success that he was born in a manger and died on the cross? the course. the vast majority about 70%, when they say i am a christian are not making so much if faith declaration. they are making a statement of identity. it is about who they are as individuals, how safe they see themselves in an indeterminate world. as a matter of identity, your religions assumes your politics from your economic views, your social views. that has always been the case and it is still the case now. what am i pretend religion and politics are separate things, but they are not. they are very much a part of the same multifaceted identity that individuals espouse. with regard to judaism, christianity and everything

else, it's a very important thing to recognize the phrase iem a jews, i am a christian, i am a month on has less to do with the circuit i believe commended for the rituals i followed than it does with this is how i see my self as a person. this is how i unders and my role in the world and my relationship to the creator. >> host: as far as our hominid whiskers turned, the jews and christians are people of the book. who is supposed to the pagans and polytheists of arabia worship the same god, read the same scriptures and share the same moral falla says muslim community? mohammed align his community with the jews and medina because he considered them as well as the christians to be part of hezbollah. what is oman? >> guest: ummah is a word that

unity. we are not exactly sure where the word comes from. bbc brew, maybe aramaic. nobody really knows. but there's no way to define that kind of new group, the church that they were trying to create. ..

the way that the prophet views the organization is that it was inclusive of other faiths. not poly theistic faiths. if were a pagan, your worshiped other gods, an outsider, you did not belong. but if you were people of the book, which by which it meant jews and christians and also included zorra austrians in the group, you were seen as part of the ummah, and that is really unique in the history of religions. in fact, the koran refers to something called thëi ummal katalb, the mother of books. it's saying that there is this kind of heavenly scripture, in

god, a physical book in heaven with god, from which all scriptures of the world come, and so, in other words, if you talk all the scriptures of the world, the torah, the gospel, the koran, the gotha and combine them together you get this one heavenly book. that's quite a remarkable statement for a scripture to make. not only is it validating other scriptures but saying something quite unique that all these religions are intimately connected. the koran says something along the lines of god could have given you one prophet and one scripture if he wanted to, but he chose to make you into different communities, quote, so that you may know one another. now, this notion of jews and christians as fellow believers did not last much longer after

the prophet mohammad's death. within a generation or so the scriptural scholars very quickly transformed jews and christians into unbelievers and separated islam from its parent religion as a way of creating independence, if you will, in other words, what they believed was that the koran annulled the previous scriptures. but that's not what the koran ever says. the koran says it completes the other scriptures, but it sees those scriptures as part and parcel of this larger mother of books in heaven. quite unusual in the history of religion. >> host: one more quote -- allings are bound to the social, spiritual, and cultural milieu from which they arose and developed. it is not the prophets to create religions. prophets redefine and

re-interpret the existing beliefs and practices of the commune,ñi provi>ng fresh setsf symbols and metaphors in which succeeding generations can describe the nature of reality. indeed it is most often the prophet's successors who take upon themselves fashioning their master's words into deeds into comprehendible religious systems, and muhammad never claimed to have invented a new religion. >> guest: right. right. again, it's people of religions who have the biggest problem with that kind of notion. first because, of course, they want to believe that their religious ideas, their values, their interpretations, can be linked directly to the prophet, whether it be mohammad or moses or jesus or the buddha or what have you and that is rarely, rarely the case. but most importantly, because home of religion want to believe

that their religious views are static, they are monolithic, you hear this a lot in large religions with multiple sects by christianity and islam. muslims and christians like to say their particular christianity, their particular islamism is correct and all the other ones are incorrect. but when you study the world's religions you understand quickly there is no such thing as correct religion. there is no such thing as islam. there is no such thing as christianity. there are only christianities and islams. and that there are almost infinite varieties through history in the beliefs and practices, the interpretations of these religions, and that each one of these varieties is inextricably tied to the cultural milieu, the political

milieu, out of which they arise. islam is important. by the way, what i find really unusual about what i'm saying right now is that most rational-minded people would say, well, of course, that sounds true. when you think about christianity, of course there are 100 ways of understanding christianity, but then when you make the same statement about islam, oh, no, no, no, there's islam is monolithic, but of course islam, like christianity, comes in every flavor that you can imagine. take a plane from new york to london, from london to baghdad, from baghdad to istanbul, from istanbul to jakarta, from jakarta to -- you will never see the same islam twice. >> host: who is the historic muhammad? prophet muhammad was a fascinating character.

he belonged to a very small, fairly insignificant clan, which was part of an enormous and extremely significant and wealthy tribe. so, if you will, he was part of this kind of ruling system but an outcast in that ruling system. he was an orphan, in a society in which orphans had no real protection whatsoever. a society that was deeply stratified between the very wealthy and the poor, and he hat sort of figure out through his own social and business acumen how to become a very successful merchant. in other words, by the time he became around 40 years old, he had figured out a way to use this system that had amassed enormous amounts of wealth at the top to its own benefit, its own advantage. he seems to have been a deeply spiritual man, to the his speier

to allity was steeped in the pagan culture of which he arose, something that muslims don't like to think about, muhammad was a product of his world, he didn't just drop from heaven and live in a vacuum for 40 years before he became a prophet. but eventually that spiritual longing led him to have a series of ecstatic experiences in which he claims to have had direct messages from god, condemning the economic disparitiy, the special disparity in his society. and you notice i keep using these terms, economic and social disparity, because the fascinating thing about the:k prophet, muhammad's message, ate least in the first decade or so in which he was receiving these revelations they had very little to do with theological or legalistic concerns. they were overwhelmingly a condemnation of the wealthy and

the powerful, a promise of judgment to those who exploit the poor and the marginalized, the weak, the dispossessed, a commandment to protect those who cannot protect themselves, the orphans, the widows, those who have been left behind by this mass accumulation of wealth, and what i think is very important for people to understand -- again, thissing is something that muslims just sort of have a hard time recognizing because they like to think of the prophet muhammad as purely a religious figure, someone who had this brand new idea there was only one god, which was not brand-new at all all. every area in the arabian peninsula heard this message a thousand times. one thing i write about in the book, which is new to a lot of muslims, prearabia were awash in religion.

hundreds of christian groups and jewish groups, and another group of preislamic mono theists, all of whom believed there was only one god, and in fact the pagans themselves more or less believed there was only one god. they just thought that god was just inaccessible and there were these other lower gods that you could go to for your sun mix faces. the phrase, there is no god but god, would have elicited a collective yawn from preislamic arabia, but the condemnation of the economic situation in arabia, the political situation, that was intolerable to the ruling powers and that is where the friction between the prophet, muhammad, and the massive tribe that ruled the mecca, originally came from. that is where the conflict and the clash came from, and by the way,88i that should sound familr

to people familiar with other prophetic histories, especially the history of jesus. jesus' conflict with the authorities of his time had far less to do with theological doctrine than social and economic issue. that's what a prophet does. a prophet is a reformer, not a creator, of religion. >> host: when did muhammad live, which century? >> guest: well, the traditions say he was born in the year 570, a.d. that's most certainly not historical -- an accurate date. the fact of the matter is inçó preislamic arabia, birthdays were not significant events so nobody knew when the prophet muhammad was born, and nobody cared until he was declared to be a prophet. but we go with 570 as the traditional date so let's just say near the end of the sixth century. then he died somewhere sort of in the first third of the

seventh century. this was really unique about the prophet muhammad when it comes to the prophetic hoyt that many people are familiar with, is that we usually hear about our prophets being failures. that is kind of the history of prophet-hood that one expects, a prophet gets a message from god. nobody listens to him. he usually dies in disgrace. and then after he dies, people say, oh, he was right, and we should have listened to him all along. what is unique about the prophet muhammad is that while he was disadvantaged and disgraced for the first half of his prophetic experience, the second half was enormously successful. he actually succeeded. he created a little statelet based on his revelations, and interestingly enough, it's that

success that i think creates the greatest amount of suspicion among nonmuslim, about the prophet muhammad. he couldn't have possibly been a prophet of god because he succeeded, because his message took, because people listened,

s. untiound st >> guest: of the fourth century when the emperor constantine converts to christianity and begins the process -- he doesn't do it himself, but begins the process of turning christianity into the official religion of rome. the problem for constantine, however, is that there are about a hundred different kinds of christianity, and you can't have christianity be the imperial religion of the world's host powerful empire unless it comes in one flavor. and so constantine quite famously takes the leaders of the christian movement, theisti bishops of the christian movement, he locks them up in a room in a small town, and hesent essentially says do not come out of this room until you figure out what christianity is, because it can only be one be thing. there are and, obvious, the bishops of the time come up with what is known as the nicene creed, defining more or less or orthodox christianity shall be.

but what happens immediately after thedi nicene council is tt all of the versions of christianity overnight becomet e illegal. and anyone who espouses those views has, essentially, threes choices; either get the t heck t of rome as fast as possible,ut convert to orthodox christianity or die. christianity -- orthodox christianity, or die. what happens is you have this flooding into the lands of the middle east, of this christian communities who want to maintai% their faith bus cannot do so in rome. so where do they go? they go to iran, to north africa, and they go to the arabian peninsula. so, 200 years later, by the time the prophet muhammad arises, he is living in a world that is full of christians but not the kind of orthodox christians that

you see in rome. certainly not the orthodox trinutarian christians. the are referred to as nostiy, who rejected the motion of the trinity, and so for the prophet muhammad, he would have been very familiar with this one particular version of christian thought. by the way, just as he would have been extremely familiar with judahism, because they were successful and well-established, all of this is to say that the prophet muhammad was born and grew up in a world steeped in jewish and christian thought, jewish and christian mythology.

there's a reason why, when you read the koran, when it sometimes restates the great stories of the hebrew scriptures, be it stories about jacob or joseph or moses or abraham, it often begins those stories with the words "recall" or "remember." recall when moses received the commandments. remember what happened to joseph when he fled from his brothers. the reason for that it is quite simple. the koran is repeating stories that it assumes its audience is already familiar with, and indeed they would have been familiar with it because these stories were part of the milieu of preislamic arabia. >> host: how political wasp]ç constantine's movement to christianity? >> guest: i get that question a lot. most scholars would say it was pure lay political decision.

after all, constantine was immersed in a civil war over other claimants to the throne of emperor, and that the sort of sudden conversion to christianity was whether it was intended to or not, the sort of -- the one element that pushed him over to the -- over the top and allowed him to claim the throne for himself. i'm one of these historians who tends to think we should probably just take people at their word. if constantine says he had a spiritual experience in which jesus came to him and told him to believe in him, let's just go ahead and take his word for it. were there political implications or perhaps political ideas behind this conversion? certainly so. but who are we to judge a person's soul? >> host: good afternoon and welcome to booktv's monthly

prom called "in depth." we talk to one author before his or her's body of work. this month we have international best seller, reza aslan. here are his nonfiction books. he began in 2005 with "no god but god, beyond fundamentalism." "beyond fundamental limp, confrontening religious extremism in the aim of globalization, came out in 2010. and "zealot" came out last year, the life and times of jesus christ of nazareth. also teaches creative writing at uc riverside, got his bachelors degree at accept clara, masters in divinity at harvard, masters in fine arts at the university of iowa's writers are workshop, and a ph.d at uc santa barbara and that was a religion ph.d, wasn't it?

>> host: that's right. i got my degree from the sociology department because my dissertation was' of the god of heaven and earth coming down in the form of a

child dying for our sins, this promise that all whoeli >> guest: shall also never die, but have eternal life. i had never heard anything like this before in my life. i immediately cop accelerated tr this particularly conservative brand of evangelical christianity and began preaching this gospel message as i had heard it to everyone whether they wanted to hear it or not,hr frankly. but when i went to university and began to study the new testament for a living, what i discovered was a great distance between the christ of faith, as i had learned about him in my church, and the jesus of history, as i was studying him at university. these were different individuals, and i know that that really disturbs a lot of people. both people of faith and people without faith. because we think that they are the same. that's the jesus of history and the christ of faith are the same person, but they're not the same

person. the christ of faith is devoid from the jesus of history, certainly -- derived from the jesus of history, certainly, but this jesus of history, this jewish, peasant, revolutionary who lived in the back woods of gala lee 2,000 years ago, was so much more accessible and appealing that while i left christianity as a faith i became absolutely obsessed with learning everything i could"uv about this man and found him to be so much more extraordinary and indeed i would say so much more worth following than the christ of faith. >> host: were you raised a muslim? >> guest: i was, i came from a fairly lukewarm muslim family in iran. we were culturally muslim, the way so many people around the world are culturally religious. when we moved to the united states in 1979, of course, this was in the height of the iran

hostage crisis and being a muslim was not the easiest thing to be in the united states. i and my family really sort of scrubbed our lives of anything that hinted at islam. for me especially it was way of absorbing into american culture. i was a seven, eight-year-old boy and i wanted to be normal. i didn't want to stan out in any way. but i always have been deeply interested in religion, despite the fact i didn't come from a very religious family or receive any kind of religious or spiritual edification in my household. i think partly it had to do with experience of revolutionary iran, those images of the power that religion has to transform a society for good and for bad, never left me, and created this indelible and deep desire to know more about religion and

spirituality, despite the fact i didn't have an opportunity to do so until i was 15 years old, and had an opportunity to express it. but i've always been interested in religion. i've always been interested in religious history, religious archaeology, religious literature, religious spirituality, things that fascinate me to no end. >> host: 202 is the area code, 585-3880. if you would like to participate in our conversation with afternoon, and you live in the east and central time zone, 5853881 if you live out west. you can also contact us at the phone lines are busy, through social media. e-mail,fta booktv@c-span.org, ad finally you can make a comment on our facebook page. facebook.com/booktv. you're shia?

>> guest: i do not accept any kind of sectarian designation at all. again, thick for me, -- well, let me put it this way. when you study the religions of the world it becomes very difficult to take any religion all that seriously. because what you recognize, what you discover very, very early on, is that all these religions are basically saying the exact same thing, they're expressing the same aspirations, the same desires, the same answers, often using the same mythology, to do so, but really what you see are different symbols and metaphors expressing the exact same sentiment. now, most of my colleagues would say, well, then, why bother choosing one of those? if they're all saying the same thing, let's just ignore it all. and indeed, i think what would surprise a lot of viewers about the study of religion, and scholars of religion like myself, is that we're all pretty

much athiests. but a few of us are not. i am an exception. i am one of these scholars of religion who also takes faith very seriously. most of my colleagues view faith the way that a biologist views a microbe. it's something to be studied from afar, from distance, not something taken personally by any means. i study the world's religions and i am a person of faith. and i follow something that the buddha once said, which is that if you want to draw water, you do not dig six one-foot wells. you dig one six-foot well. islam is my six-foot well. the path, the symbols, the metaphors i use to understand my place in the world and to experience the reality of transcendence. but what the buddha meant is

that while your well may be separate, you are&z drawing the water that every other well around you is drawing from. the water is the same. and that's something i never forget. my identity as a muslim comes primarily from my acceptance of islamic metaphors, islamic symbols, as a comfortable and viable way of expressing the inincomprehensible experience of the divine. but it's just symbols and met fors. they're not more true, they're not more right, they're just more appealing. that's all. >> host: how significant is the sunni-shia split and what has it created? >> guest: you know, it's a lot more significant now days than

it has been in the past. certainly as the main dividing line in islam, sunni, by the way, make up about 85% of the world's muslim. the shia make around 15%. very much historical shift like the catholic-pros tess stand shift, having as much to do with political and social issues and economic issues. shia tended to be far less economically successful than the sunni were. the sunni maintained the power and the structure of the first islamic empire. but nevertheless, in the same way that many christians would say, catholics, protestant, it's all christianity, and christians would say, no. catholics are right and protestants are wrong. it's an individual experience.

i have seen muslims who say these sects are irrelevant, and i have seen muslims say if you're a sheave ya, you're -- shia, you're an unbeliever. but ultimately the reason that these sectarian differences have riz on the forfront over the last decade -- well, let's say, around 2001, around the time of theuçi invasion of afghanistan - is because there has been this deep political divide in the middle east. there has been, in other words, political benefit from inside and outside forces to stoke sectarian tensions for one's own nationalistic concern. you see this, of course, a lot with the cold war between iran and saudi arabia. iran sees itself as the banner of aslea and muss lime and arabia, the banner of sunni and

islam, and they have been fighting for far more than a decade and have deliberately stoked sectarian tensions for their own benefit. now, in many cases those sectarian tensions have become no longer controllable, but in bahrain in lebanon, in syria, well, i would even -- even the united states has stoked sectarian tension in that region. there is this idea that you can control religious extremism, that you can use it to your advantage, and i'm hoping one day we're going to learn that that's just simply not the case. that you can't control fanatics no matter how hard you try. >> host: in your book, "beyond fundamental limp" what was the arm title. >> guest: "how to win a cosmic war." why does it change? a mystery of the publishing word that authors are never privy to.

it was a publisher's decision to change the title. >> host: well in the current version of "beyond fundamentalism. i confronting extremism" you write a cosmic war is a religious wore, conflict in which god is believed to be directly engaged on one side over the. others partitions the world into black and white, good and evil, us and them, in such a war there's no middle ground, everyone must choose a side, it is a simple equation if you are not us, you must be them, you are the enemy, and must be destroyed. >> guest: that's right.lñ and in fact, this notion of cosmic war is something that exists in all great religious traditions. in the west, of course, it can be traced right to the torah. this is precisely the kind of war that god demands of the israelites. a war in which the israelites

themselves are not even really participants in. the israelites are essentially nothing more than the pawns whereby god destroys his enemies himself. when you look at the great wars of the hebrew bible. the destruction -- or any of these tribes this israelites destroyed, the bible makes it very clear, these enemy is did not fall to israel. israel's arms, israel's weapons, israel's might was irrelevant. it was god that destroyed the armies, and it wasn't so much the god of the jews, the god of the israelites destroyed this tribes if it's that god destroyed the gods of these other tribes the very concept of divine war in the ancient mind has less to do with armies

fighting each other thanked did with god -- than when gods destroying each. others when israel destroyed the canyonites, the god of israel was destroying the god of cain, and to at the next level, when the babylonians destroyed the israelites it wasn't the two armies fighting each. others it was the god of babylon destroying the god of the israelites, and the notion of nonmow kneism, the notion there is just one god and no other, is fairly late notion in the bible. it doesn't really show up until after the babylonian cab different in 586 -- captivity in 586bc. abraham believed that his god was thetl highest god but there

were other gods. moses was not a mon ethist, he believed that his god was the highest god and by the way, moses' god was nat abraham's god abraham's galled was called el, and moses' god was called yawai. it's only after the babylonian cab different that el and yawai become a single god. el yawai as scholars sometimes refer to them, and the concept of mono theism is born. all of this is so say that notion of divine war, that we human beings are pawns in a cosmic conflict between the forces of good and evil, between angels and demons, that this battle is not really taking place on earth, it is taking place in the heavens. indeed it's an eternal battle,

one in which the forces of good will defeat the forces of evil. this is a phenomenon you fine playing itself out right now in a large part of the conflict around the world, not least of all in the middle east. it's the conflict that al qaeda is fighting. it's the conflict that isis is fighting. it's the conflict that a great many jewish extremists in israel are fighting. it's a conflict that many people in the u.s. military themselves think they are fighting. a war between the forces of good and evil, not between the armies on earth. that's a cosmic war, and the great fear about cosmic wars, as i say in the book, is that they are unwinnable. >> host: paul e-mails in from los gatos, california, how can islam ever be at peace with the western democracies when one

goal of islam are for all the world to be ruled by islamic law. the koran says, quote, and fight with them until there is no persecution and religion should be only for allah. >> guest: that is not a goal of islam. this notion of --údñq whole world has to be under islam, and that verse in the koran is a historically contextual verse. what is important to understand is for the latter half of the prophet's life he was at war with the pagan tribes of arabia. secondly, also important to understand that as a faith, that muslims believe that their message should be viewed by all people, all faiths believe this, but the notion that islam is a religion that is spread by the sword is actually historically incorrect. indeed, for the first 150, 200

years of islam, not only was conversion not mandatory or forced upon people, it was discouraged because there were financial benefits of conversion that created a situation-the first islamic empire which ruled not 750a.d., actually made it very difficult for people to convert to islam because you had to pay fewer taxes if you were a muslim, and they didn't want people to pay these taxes. that said, i think it's important to understand that this notion of a conflict between islam and western democracy is a figment of the imagination. a third of the world's muslim lives in democratic states. the largest, most populous muslim country in the world, indonesia, is a democracy. the second most populous muslim country, poise, is a democratic,

bangladesh, malaysia, a democracy, indeed of the ten most populous countries in the world -- populous muslim countries in the world, five -- technically seven but two of them are not very good democracies, egypt cannot be called a democracy -- are democracies. so this notion that islam is somehow inherently antidemocratic is simply factually historically, empirically inaccurate. but one could make the argumentx that all religion, because they rely on a notion of absolutism, are antidemocratic. i mean, let's be honest. we live in a country in the united states, in which -- again, according to pew, about a third of americans, 100 million of us, fall under the designate of religious nationalists.

dominions, christians who believe in the united states as a christian nation, founded exclusively on christian values and principles and should be, as rick santorum has repeatedly said, as mike huckabee said on the campaign trail when he was running for president, should be predicated exclusively on biblical values and to paraphrase mike huckabee, the very constitution of this country needs to be changed so it aligns with biblical values. one can say that is an antidemocratic view because it is essentially prioritizing religion and one version of religion, one interpretation of religion, over all others and over civil society. so, in a sense, all religions are both antidemocratic and democratic, which goes back to what i have been saying for the

last hour. which is that religion is nothing more than interpretation. religion is what a religious person says it is. islam is what any muslim says it is. my version of islam is as valid as osama bin laden's version of islam. i would love to sit here and say that his version of islam is incorrect, and my version is right. except that's not true. we are both right and we're both wrong. you have the christian abortion bomber, his version of christianity is as correct as desmond tutu's version of christianity. they're both right and they're both wrong. so, if you have muslims who say, antithetical to islam, they're right. if you have mulls hims who say democracy is absolutely compatible with islam, they're right.

so, stop saying islam is this or that. christianity is this or that. there is no such thing as this or that when it comes to religion. it's always what an individual says it is. >> host: reza aslan in zealot, this the dedication for my wife, jessica jackley, and the entire jackley clan, whose love and acceptance have taught me more about jesus than all my years of research and study. >> guest: anybody who saw that famously uncomfortable fox interview knows my wife is a christian, as is my mother -- i'm the one who converted my mother to christianity and is a very devout christian, and my wife and i have twin boys that we joke are undeclared but who will grow up in all great religious traditions and will decide for themselves what they want to believe. the reason i made that dedication is because my wife's

family comes from a very devout evangelical christian background, and for a lot of people, that seems incongruous. how could it be that this devout conservative evangelical family, my brother-in-law is an evangelical pastor, can have in their family a muslim of all people, and while they will freely admit when they discovered their daughter was dating and about to marry a muslim man, they were confused. they'd never met a muslim before. my mother-in-law, humorously says, the only thing she knew about islam is what sean hannity told her, and yet within five minutes of meeting me all of that went ain't away and what they displayed towards me was a love and acceptance and

compassion that is the best expression of christianity. not the expression of christianity that we so often wee from our politicians, a religion of exclusion, a religion that is all about who is not part of us, who does not receive salvation, but the christianity that is about inclusion, about love and acceptance, and they taught me, they really taught me, what true christianity is about, and i am forever grateful for it. i am as much a part of their family as anyone else. we have an amazing relationship, and i have learn as much from them as they've learned from me. >> host: we have two hours left in our program today on booktv. rosa aslan is our back. now it's your turn to talk to

him. michael, you're up. >> caller: thank you tremendously. dr. aslan, i want to apologize sincerely on behalf of us christians forot what and other islamics have heard too often in the united states. allah is a false god. and our brothers worship the only real god. i can't stand that coming out of local teachings from local -- what is it called -- talk radio down here. let's be honest. it's protestant radio. we don't get the television network -- >> host: cue give us your religious background and are you a person of faith today? >> caller: don't anybody call me -- please don't anybody call me a conservative. i'm conservative on moral andth that values, especially big hollywood, big nashville, big

marble and dc comics... .. >> guest: that you could be an extreme libe that you could be an extreme liberal evangelical christian like my friend jim wallace or

you can be an extreme conservative evangelical christian. you may have the same beliefs and practices but they can be expressed in diametrically opposite ways. the editing michael strahan die appreciate what you were saying, i have gotten as much love from christians as saying iran hate. it does back to individuals. the way individuals think for themselves. the problem for me, i have been saying earlier we should not confuse religion with face. they are different things. religion is not faith. faith is mysterious, it is inevitable, deeply individualistic. if you believe in god you believe in something that is by definition impossible for the human mind to comprehend. god is if anything utterly

transcendent. we do not have the ability to understand what god is, to express what god is. what is religion? the language that helps us express it. that is it. it is a language of symbols and metaphors that gives us the opportunity to express to ourselves and like-minded people the inevitable experience of faith. the danger comes when people confuse religion with faith. when they think that religion is the destination, not the path to a destination. when they think religion is the ends, not the means to an end. and if we did a better job, people of faith, in recognizing that my particular religion is just a unique way of expressing similar sentiments as other people of religion, we would

have far greater peace, far greater understanding than we do now. unfortunately, most religious people be the jewish or muslim or christian or buddhist or hindu or whatever, most religious people tend to believe in their religion, not in what their religion tells them to believe. in other words your faith is not in god but in your religion. that, i think, is attracted tragic mistake. >> host: are your books available in your home country, in israel or the more volatile arab countries? >> guest: my books especially "no god but god: the origins, evolution, and future of islam" have been translated into hebrew and are quite popular in israel. in arabic, "zealot: the life and times of jesus of nazareth" will be available in arabic in the next year. it takes a while to do the

translation. we of course have very strict sanction laws against iran. the treasury department makes it very difficult to translate and sell english material in farsi to and iranian audience and iran makes it difficult for material like this to be spread out. what i have done is i have paid for my own version translations of my books and if you are not in iran you can go to amazon and by them incursion but if you are in iran you can go to my web site, reza aslan.com conlan and download a free version in farsi of my books. "no god but god: the origins, evolution, and future of islam" is available right now. the persian translation of "zealot: the life and times of jesus of nazareth" is finished and we are in the process of putting it on line so any farsi speaker anywhere in the world can have free access. >> host: because of your writing have there been any thoughts

wants against you, muslim, christian or jewish? >> guest: sure. as i like to say fought whats are dime a dozen. give me an hour i will get you a to on any subject that you want. they thought what --fatwa has achieved supernatural dimensions in the united states because of the violence, it is nothing more than a juristic opinion by a legal scholar who has achieved a number of training is in islamic law. the mechanism is an opinion, there is no sort of in fallibility to attend what is fascinating about fatwas is no fatwa can overcome another

fatwa. if you have two imams in this room and one issues once and coke is evil in drink pepsi and the other issues one saying pepsi is evil, drink coke. there is no mechanism to decide to which is correct. you as a muslim get to simply decide if you like this imam. if you don't you follow the other guy. most don't have a single imam they follow, they follow what ever fatwas they like so they follow one imam when it is about marriage or purity, they will follow imam b. when it comes to fatwas about living in a certain way or let's say foreign issues. that is the thing about islam.

the previous caller, it is a quintessentially democratic religion, that is really up to do. >> host: john is calling in from washington, you are on booktv. >> caller: my question is do you see the future of religions continuing to diversify and grow in number or do you see a future where religions coalesce and maybe become one unified religion? >> caller: >> guest: fantastic question and this is something i'm interested in when i write about religious traditions because i do believe you can move forward in the timeline the history of religion and make certain predictions and this will sound weird but both of your two possibilities of religion are becoming true. religion is becoming far more individualistic. it is becoming fractured into

greater sects and schisms. primarily this has to do with the internet. sociologists refer to this process taking place over the last decade as posts materialism. that is just a fancy way of saying the very definition of community is altering right before our eyes. think about it this way. for all of human history, ever since we were 9 and a false living in caves, for all of human history the definition of community was the people around you, the people in your cave, the people in your tribe, the people in your village, the people in your city, people in your country, the people in your nation, geographically defined what it means to be in the community. in the blast decades that definition has been shattered by the internet because now

community is no longer geographically constrained. indeed a kid in indonesia, a christian kids in indonesia may have more in common with a muslim kid in los angeles because they share the same love of music, love of movies, the same interests, the same values than either of those kids may have been common with their and geographically defined communities. this is what mean mean by post materialism. it is no longer save the or sustenance or shelter that defines a community. it is these post materialist values and religion has been utterly shattered. the definition has been utterly shattered by these new community for nations with is why we are seeing more sort of limited sects popping up on line. people don't meet in actual

churches but in chat rooms. that is one future of religion. the other future of religion is one in which science and religion are starting to become closer and closer to each other. religious and scientific people go mad when i say this but the truth of the matter is the more science begins to redefine the nature of reality the more it starts to use religious language to do so, certainly mystical language to do so. the idea that all matter is the turtle, it has always existed and will always exist, that makes me what i am, the same thing that makes this table what it is. these are mystical religious ideas that have been around for thousands of years, as we look at these trends and move into the future we can start making

some very interesting predictions of what religion will look like 1,000 years from now. what i can tell you with some confidence is religion will not go away. we have been talking about the death of god for 100 years. at the dawn of the 20th yesterday half of the world's population defined itself as eager christian, muslim, jewish, hindu or buddhist. 100 years of secularism and scientific advancements, economic development, that number is known two thirds bluejeans seems people are becoming more religious, not less religious and i don't think there's a reason why this trend is going to reverse any time soon. >> host: mary conlan atlanta accompli is going ahead. >> caller: i have to say i admire any person who can put a

sentence together that has fatwa and capable at the same time. brilliant. i you familiar with the center for action and contemplation? >> guest: i have heard of it. >> caller: he is the type of catholics, a franciscan monk, i am palestinian, a episcopalian, i am not a catholic, he preaches the way the new pope does. very inclusive. and where i want to get, to come up -- i like where you went with symbols and metaphors but i am looking for actionable consequences of those metaphors and i am not looking for work. palestinians need no more of

that. i am looking for -- take jesus as one, preaching, feeding, taking care of sisters and brothers of all colors and face. and is there an actionable quote? >> before i begin to answer that question, i want to talk about my love for pope francis. everyone loves pope francis for a host of reasons but what they don't realize is pope francis is the first jesuit pope which if you understand anything about catholic history and the jesuits' you understand what a remarkable statement that is, how earth shattering it is to have a jesuit pope at the vatican and as a proud product

of a jesuit education. the jesuits' first taught me about religion and first taught me about the historical jesus. i couldn't be prouder or happier to have pope francis in the papacy right now because at the heart of the jesuit ideal is the preferential option for the pork, the notion that jesus's message is about the poor and for the poor and the only way to live up to jesus's commandments is to also have a commitment to the fore, to the dispossessed, to the marginalized and pope francis has learned a valuable lesson from his predecessor pope benedict which is the catholic church is two things. it is a bureaucracy and a church and you can't reform the bureaucracy. pope benedict realize this but you can reform the church and the way to do so is to just

simply live out the commandments of jesus and hope everyone else follows and that is what pope francis has done and i am so proud to be omega, jesuit education and someone who supports this pope and what he has been doing so that is my $0.02 on the pope. this notion of the things religions have in common is incredibly important. at the heart of it is this idea that is found in all religious transitions which is most familiar to him jews and christians as do to others as you have them do to you, the golden rule exists in every religious tradition, religions that code far back before judaism, the code of hammer robbie, the oldest, most ancient code of ethics we have has the golden rule in it. the idea that there is a way of

treating other people regardless of their race or ethnicity or religion or nationality, how you yourself want to be treated seems so basic but at the heart of it is the notion of compassion, we are to have compassion for one another, we ought not to focus on our differences but the things we have in common. i will be the first to admit that this is very difficult to do for the reasons i mentioned before because people confuse religion for face so they focused on their religion rather than the faith that unites us and also because we tend to focus on something that i call interfaith dialogue, if we could all come together, if a jew and christian and muslim can come together and talk to one another about their religions, it will create a greater bond.

it is a beautiful idea and i am not dismissing it. if not enough, interfaith dialogue is not the end all and be all and the advice i have for the great churches and synagogues and mosquess who want to have greater connectivity and cooperation with people of other faithss it is not enough to come together to talk about the things that unite you. what you need is interfaith action. i am a great supporter of wonderful american organization called interfaith youth corps founded by my friend in chicago, the interface used car has a simple message, rather than getting young people of different religions to sit in a romance talk about the things that unite and divide them, instead they go out onto the streets and clean the streets, help build hospitals, feed the

poor and the needy, close of those who are naked and they put their shared values in action. regardless what religion we are, we have the same ideals, the same morals, and care for those who cannot care for themselves. you want greater connection, greater peace, between religious traditions, stop talking about things you have in common and go put those things in action. >> host: david in rochester, new york, go ahead with your question for reza aslan. >> caller: you mentioned earlier in this program--it has been so

long zoroastrianism. i believe that was the religion of persia before it became iran. what i was wondering is are there any vestiges left of this religion in present-day iran or anyplace else? or is it a completely dead religion? >> guest: f fantastic question. i love when people ask me about zoroastrianism because it is one of my favorite religions and probably i would say the most important religion in the history of religions and i am not saying that lightly. he probably lived in 1100 b.c. that is the best guess. zoroastrianism was the first monotheistic religion. zarathustra was not the first monotheistic, the first modesty is was the egyptian pharaoh of

the 9 --akhenaten who believed in aten. sarah su straw was the first what we return to as the reveals profit. an individual who claimed to be receiving a direct message from god. zarathustra was the first one. not abraham, not moses. what is fascinating about this message is begins with this statement there was only one god. not that there is up i got and other gods that are lower than god which was the prevailing sentiment in mesopotamia and the near east that there is just one god, a got that zarathustra referred to as the lord mazda. all the other gods were not god's.

in fact he designated them as something that had never been said before. he said that they were what he referred to in our modern parlance as angels and demons. zarathustra invented the concept of angels and demons. those are not the only things he invented. deal also invented the concept of heaven and hell. before this time there was a notion of the afterlife but the afterlife was just a mirror of the life in prison. if you are a warrior in this light that you die you are a warrior in the afterlife. if you are a slave in this life you die and you are a slave in the afterlife. zarathustra was the first profit to argue that what your role was in the afterlife had nothing to do with your position in this life, but had to do with your moral choices. good thoughts, good words, good deeds.

if you accumulated enough good thoughts, good words and good deeds in this life then you went to a good afterlife, heaven. if you did not you went to a bad afterlife, held. zarathustra had such a deep impact on what we now know as religion because the first great iranian empire of cyrus the great was a zoroastrian empire and those who remember your ancient history was cyrus the great deliberated the jews from babylonian captivity, send them back to israel but in deed the jews thanks cyrus the great in the hebrew bible by naming him messiah. indeed what we know as christianity can in many ways be

understood for judaism. it is not a dead religion but is a dying the religion. it is a dying for. and because it is a village and you can't convert to. any religion you can't convert to eventually dies out. it is a shame because it is an important and historic religious tradition. >> host: why do religions seem to consistently degrade and persecute within? >> guest: because they are patriarchal institutions. they are man-made, literally all religions are man-made. when it comes time to interpret a religion is going to be interpreted in ways that benefit men. this is true of all religious tradition. >> host: you write in "no god but god: the origins, evolution, and future of islam" fact is for 14 centuries the silence of

koran commentary has been the exclusive domain of muslim men. it brings to the koran his own ideology and his own preconceived notions, aged not be surprising to learn that certain reverses have most often been read in their most misogynist interpretation. >> guest: that is true of all religions. >> i find when you are talking about absolutely fascinating. a major in theology, why did you gloss over jihad, i heard that you neglected to mention one of the first attacks was on mecca, november 20th, 1979, when they took mecca for two weeks. you didn't mention that at all, the february 1st strike they took against the united states,

we became the infidels, we were focused with hostages in tehran and it got glossed over in didn't make the news but you didn't mention anything about that and i am curious, i am a sociology major and sino about it. i am curious why you made reference to the last decade this has been an uprising when if you do know history, started in fed to 79 in mecca. >> host: if you would, also include where did jihad come from? >> the sectarian conflict between sunni and shia has been exacerbated. jihad is a very specific and new

phenomena in. and it can probably be traced to 1989 and the soviet invasion of afghanistan. jihad is a transnational movement. it is a movement of radical muslims who believe that the concept of the nation's state is anathema to islam. they want to reconstitute the world as a single thing under their control. the reason i go through this important terminology is we conflate jihadists and islamists as if they are the same thing when they are opposite things. islam is a nationalistic idea, a political philosophy, predicated on an islamic state. islamists are not global lists. they have a distinctly geographically nationalistic

lead defined objective. jihadists do not. they want to get rid of all borders, all boundaries and to reconstitute the world's under their command. al qaeda is a jihadists organization. isis is the jihadists organization. the muslim brotherhood is an islamist organization, hamas is an islamist organization. is important to get these terms right because they require vastly different responses and islamist organization wants something concrete, something measurable. whether they have what they want or not there is room for negotiation and discussion. jihadists organization is fighting a cosmic war, they want nothing to. al qaeda cannot be negotiated with. isis cannot be negotiated with because what they want is impossible to achieve in this

world so they require a completely different response. fortunately this administration has been better at understanding the difference between the organizations but the media has not. the media conflates these all the time. i was watching meet the press and isis was referred to as an islamist organization. that is factually incorrect. terms matter when what is at stake is our national security. >> host: from "no god but god: the origins, evolution, and future of islam" the path to creating a genuine islamic democracy are not the traditional list of jihadists terrorists. but more destructively those in the west who refuse to recognize the democracy, if it is to be viable landon during it can never be important.

an e-mail from sandra, reza aslan's in-laws are watching, we are his biggest fans and wanted to let everyone know we are honored and blessed to have reza aslan as our family. he is an amazing man and we loved him. we are proud to call you hours. end of commercial. jim, go ahead. >> caller: thank you for this wonderful program. this makes it great to have things like this on. went to seattle public library and it was overwhelming and you were probably overwhelmed too. now i get this great opportunity to ask you now. i have a historical question about jesus and the christian movement. i will ask you and hang up, here is the question. of all the messiah one of thes

before and after jesus why did jesus stick as a messiah where others did not? the second part is why did the gentiles find this jesus movement and the new religion so appealing? the jews didn't but the gentiles did. thank you so much. >> guest: as i right in the book, there were many messiahs who came before and after a jesus, some are far more successful in their lifetimes and jesus was but 2,000 years later all of those have been forgotten about and only one person is still called miss i am and that is jesus of nazareth. that partly has to do with jesus himself. he was an extraordinary individual and his social teachings separated him from his fellow messiahs, teaching about

picking them of god, a new world order in which those on the top and those on the bottom would change places and the board and the rich would exchange places and the first shall be last, the last shall be first. people did not talk like this in first century palestine. what we absolutely know about the early jesus movement is after jesus's death it wasn't so much the things that jesus did but the things that jesus said that were passed from community to community and follower to fall were. his teachings survived his death. to put it in the simplest way, the reason jesus is still called messiah where those others were not, has less to do with anything jesus said or did that what his followers said about him. in light of the resurrected experience however you want to define that the disciples had to deal with the fundamental problem which is according to everything judaism has ever said about the function of the

messiah jesus was up -- he didn't do anything the messiah was supposed to do. he didn't recreate the kingdom of david, didn't liberate the jews from foreign occupation and so confronted with this fact, by the definition of messiah jesus wasn't the messiah, they simply changed the definition, made the messiah something celestial, someone who performs his functions not in this world but in the next world, someone whose kingdom is not an earthly kingdom but heavenly kingdom. as you imagine for a great many jews who were familiar with masai and expectations this didn't work for them. they didn't accept this new definition of messiah. but the more this definition spread into the roman empire, into the diaspora the more non jews found appealing, certainly the notion of jesus as the son

of god which would have been unusual to jews was not that unusual to gentiles after all. caesar was the son of god. it is not that weird of the notion. so very soon after jesus's death, within two or three generations the non-jewish conference far outnumbered the jewish ones and christianity began to divorce itself from its jewish parent and become something new, something independent as it is today. >> host: you probably rocked some christian worlds with "zealot: the life and times of jesus of nazareth," jesus not born in bethlehem, new interpretation of punches pilot and his role but you do write this in your book, perhaps the most obvious reason not to dismiss the disciples's resurrection experiences out of hand is that among all the failed messiahs who came before

and after him jesus alone is still called the messiah. was precisely the fervor which with shot of the followers of jesus believe in his resurrection that transformed this tiny jewish sect into the largest religion in the world's. >> guest: the resurrection itself is not a historical phenomena in. is something historians have no business talking about one way or the other. the claim to the resurrection, the resurrection claimed by the disciples is a historical phenomenon, and unquestionable historical phenomenon. is simply a fact that very soon after jesus's death his disciples believed and preached that he was risen again. was the reason again? that is a faith statement. i personally as someone who believes in god is open to some pretty absurd possibility so i won't denied jesus was raised from the dead. it is not my business as a

historian but what cannot be denied to is what ever happens, this ecstatic experience by the disciples is more and anything else transformed this small jewish movement into the world's largest religion and that is reason enough to take it seriously. >> host: however, you write there's this nagging fact to consider. one after another of those who claim to have witnessed the risen jesus went to their own gruesome death refusing to recant their testimony. >> guest: many jews went to their deaths for their jewish beliefs and what they preached, but again it is important to understand that this wasn't an idle statement, belief in jesus risen from the dead wasn't a joke to these followers. it was something they were willing to die for and again,

let's not be so quick to simply dismissed that experience whatever it was. >> host: an hour-and-a-half left with reza aslan, author of god: the origins, evolution, and future of islam," "beyond fundamentalism: confronting religious extremism in the age of globalization," professor of creative writing at the university of california riverside, one of the things we do is ask our guests what are their influences, what are they reading, their favorite books. here is a look at reza aslan's list. ♪ ♪

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♪ >> host: reza aslan, one of your favorite books, salman rushdie. >> guest: i remember clearly the first time i read satanic versuss, i must have been 20. i had heard about it obviously and never got around to reading it and saw it on a friend's book shelf, let's read this thing and it was incredible, it really was -- the idea that you could write about these deep spiritual ideas in a work of fiction to make it come alive, it influenced me as a writer.

along with garcia marquez and dostoevsky, this is what i want to be. >> host: and what is this the view are currently reading? >> public by not a very well known political philosopher it teaches in iowa. it is a book about the way to start thinking about things, the creation of what we call money rose to facilitate gift exchange, you needed and i would give it to you ain't you would give me something valuable that i needed but as the transaction became more complicated,

trinkets rose, thank you for the chicken, i don't have anything of value to give you, and later on you can give me is this trinkets and give you something valuable. what has happened in the modern world is this trinket has all of a sudden become intrinsically valuable. it is not about what this trinket gets me but the trinket itself and that more often anything has lead to uncontrolled greed and the wealth gap we see around the world and trying to create a sense and understanding that returns to its original notion of a sacred thing that is nothing more than an exchange between individuals for goods and services. >> host: if you would like to participate in our conversation with reza aslan, the phone lines are jammed, you can contact us

by social media blitz our e-mail address is booktv@c-span.org, you can leave a comment on twitter, and make a comment on our face book page, facebook.com/booktv. alexander in ocala, fla. you are on the air. >> caller: thanks for having me on the program. i am constantly hearing self-proclaimed profits and television ministers constantly saying that we should not listen to the educated academia scholars who are concerned with theology. there's a premise behind that. what i your thoughts about that and i will take this off air. thank you so much again, thank you. >> guest: we do tend to blow it a lot. this suspicion of academia and

scholarship which is widespread by the way is really our own fault. is the fault of academics and scholars. we spend so much of our time talking among ourselves, pontificating in our dusty office libraries. and so little time trying to communicate our ideas to a popular general audience that it is no wonder we are seen with suspicion particularly by religious people. this is something i have faced all my life. i decided early on in my career that i never wanted to be the kind of academic who spends all of his time for in october of the markings on some 8 century arcadian text. i wanted to take this information that i was learning, information i found to be extraordinarily interesting and

package it in an appealing and accessible way for everyone else to enjoy. i simply assumed if i find this stuff interesting other people would too. you would be amazed at the push back i have received from my colleagues in departments of religion around the world. the truth of the matter is academics are not just discouraged from writing popular books, they are punished for it. to this day i have young students tell me what they should do, how they should achieve the kinds of popular success that i've achieved and my answer to them is get tenure first because it doesn't help to have a new york times best selling book, it actually hurts you in academia. i think this is changing. i think young scholars especially who are products of a media age, particularly of digital media h.r. becoming more

adept at navigating social media, navigating popular media. when you increasingly see historians of contemporary russian history on jon stewart joking and talking about vladimir putin, young scholars see that and say i can do that. i can write a book about my particular field that people outside my fields would enjoy. it is changing for sure but this general distrust of academic, theologian, scholars is something that really i blame ourselves for more than anything else. >> host: how long did you work on "zealot: the life and times of jesus of nazareth"? >> guest: the writing of it, four years. the research two decades. it really began with that first course in religious studies that i took at santa clara university

and the first time that a professor showed me the difference between a historical look at jesus and a theological look at jesus. i would say two decades of really delving deep into the origins of christianity, four years of writing. >> host: do you right at home or your office? >> guest: i have a home office. it was easier and to my twin 2-year-olds arrived to right at home. now i have to escape. i will go anywhere that i can have a few solid hours of uninterrupted work. >> host: coffee shop? >> guest: absolutely. coffee shop, an external office which sometimes helped. as any writer will tell you a book comes out and if you are lucky and if it is a successful book that results in a never-ending book tour.

it is time to sit down and get to work on the next book. >> host: from "zealot: the life and times of jesus of nazareth," 2,000 years later the crisis of paul's creation is utterly subsumed the jesus of history. >> guest: yes. of all the comments i received about "zealot: the life and times of jesus of nazareth" the one that is most common and most surprising is what happens in the decades immediately after jesus's death and this rivalry that pops up between paul, the great sort of preacher of christianity to a gentile audiences and a far lesser known but perhaps more significant figure, james, the brother of jesus. some of your listeners may not be aware of this but jesus had four brothers, james, judas,

simon, until number of sisters who are not named in the new testament. one of his brothers, james, became the leader of the jesus movement after jesus's death. they hand-picked designated successor, he was known as the bishop of bishops, head of the jerusalem assembly. they didn't use the word church back then but assembly. assembly that was in charge of all the other assemblies. james was, according to all the historical documents we have at that time, the undisputed head of what can be called christianity for a good 30 years after jesus's death. this is remarkable. jesus was in charge of the jesus movement for three years. james, his brother, was in charge of it for 30 years and yet he has been almost holy writ

now of christian history for a very understandable reason. james had what can only be described as a limited view of this new movement. he believed this was a jewish movement fringes. james was okay if the non do wanted to join this movement as long as he became a jew first and until the year 57 that included circumcision. in the year 57 he removed circumcision as a requirement but nevertheless change the purity and dietary laws. this was as far as james was concerned a jewish expression, jesus was a jew, preaching judaism to other jews and therefore to follow jesus truly, you had to follow the law of moses, the torah. paul had a completely different view of the movement. paul converted to the movement after jesus's death, never spoke

to jesus but was in what he describes as direct communication with the risen jesus and he says the risen jesus gave him a completely new message, a message of universalism. not only did paul say you didn't have to follow the law of moses but you shouldn't follow the law of moses. he said chrysler was the end of the torah. this was a message not only that it was not just produce but for every one. to truly follow this new movement you had to divorce yourself from judaism, you were to become what paul referred to as, quote, a new being. when that was neither june nor greek nor syrian or arab but something else entirely, part of a brand new creation. a new creation like jesus was a new creation as far as paul was concerned. what i am describing will sound

very familiar to christians because it is called christianity. what really surprises christians to learn is that in the lifetime of these two men, james and paul, paul was an outcast. he was marginalized. he was a fringe figure. this version of christianity he was preaching was to save the least. on numerous occasions, paul was summoned to jerusalem to answer for his heretical teachings about christianity. answer directly to james. as i sometimes joke, you can't win an argument with james. how do you win an argument with the flesh and blood brother of jesus? what are you going to say that is going to beat a man who can say i bunked with jesus and that

is not what he meant. you can't win an argument against the brother of jesus and so paul lost that argument. paul dies in the year 66, james guys in the year 62. at that point paul's views by the minority view to say the least. but here it is the difference between paul and james. james, like his brother jesus, was an uneducated illiterate peasants from the backwoods of galilee. he never wrote anything down. he couldn't write anything down. paul was an educator, urbanized, cosmopolitan roman citizen from one of the wealthiest port cities in the empire, he wrote everything down. everything that he believes, he

wrote down. with the destruction of jerusalem in the year 70, the death of both men and the transformation of judaism into no longer a distinctly jewish religion, one that is preached instead to romans, what that generation discovered is a dozen or so letters from paul, outlining this vision for a universal version of christianity as opposed to the more nationalistic version of christianity preached by james and the man who was derided and disregarded in his own lifetime becomes in many ways the creator of what we now know as christianity. look at the new testament. we have one letter by james, it wasn't written by james. it was written by his followers

but one letter by james, the undisputed leader of this movement, the brother of jesus himself. we have two letters from peter, the first of the apostles, the rock upon which jesus built his church, we have three letters from john the beloved disciple, one of the triumvirate that wolves over the early christian movement along with peter ranch james, and we have 11 letters from paul. nearly half of the new testament is either written by paul or attributed to paul or about paul. that tells you the enormous influence that this man ended up having. if you are a christian, for the better. lot of people say what if james had won? what if james had won that argument with paul? there would be no such thing as

christianity today. let's be honest, christianity would be a small, probably in significant jewish sect somewhere in the middle east but james didn't win. paul won and christianity became a universal religion that anyone could join regardless of their ethnicity or nationality or religious persuasion and that religion has become the largest religion in the world. >> host: what do we know about when and how the gospels, matthew, mark, luke and john were written? >> a lot. there's a great deal about the debate about the particulars but the prevailing theory, the overwhelming majority of scholars agree goes something like this. not long after jesus's death, 30, 33, somewhere around there,

his teachings began to be spread around orally, not his actions, his teachings. with the exception of the last supper, the crucifixion and resurrection which were liturgical events those were passed along but the followers of jesus really cared about the things jesus said, not so much the things jesus did. some time around 50s those teachings began to be written down. we don't have access to this document any longer, we referred to it quickly as you which means source. but imagine the jesus quote book. that is what we're talking about. this quote books existed some time around a 50s. in the year 70 as a result of the jewish revolt against rome, jerusalem is destroyed, the temple is destroyed and the first church, the church of

james, is destroyed. all that exists on the letters of paul and this hypothetical text that we call queue. not long after 70 a.d. maybe almost immediately after, some time around 70, 71, 72, an early christian, roman christian by the name of john mark, that is what we think his name is any way, in rome, sits down and gives birth to this brand new genre called gospel. what he tries to do is take this traditional biography, the sacred biography of the caesars, that is very common, and he adapts it to jesus and he writes the gospel of mark as we now know it. for many christians that is an

unsatisfying gospel. there's no narrative, jesus all the sudden shows up on the banks of the jordan river to be baptized by john. there is no resurrection appearance in the original gospel of mark which ended at al shabaab verse 8, jesus dies, is buried in a tomb, three days later when the come to wash his body and the tomb is empty and there is a man in white who says jesus is risen, tell the rest of the disciples and the gospel. that of course becomes the first gospel but as i say it is somewhat unsatisfying especially as christianity starts to expand, before more -- more hellenistic. 20 years later some time between the years nighty and 100 two of the gospel writers, matthew and luke, writing and a distance from each other and interestingly and be announced

to one another, this -- decide as to where to update mark's gospel so they take mark's gospel and have at their disposal this other document, q, the sayings of jesus and they have their own tradition, their own individualistic particular tradition and they be right the gospel landfill in a lot of that missing material so there are all these infancy narrative this, what happened to jesus's early years before he was baptized? what about ollie's resurrection appearances? these stories that don't exist in mark, now you have the gospel of matthew and luke which mark called the synoptics because they very much read the same and present a similar kind of narrative about jesus, a singular chronology. .pulling, ten years later, ten

years as late as 120, and the gospel of john, and that gospel is written at a time in which there is no longer anything jewish about this religion. it has divorced itself from judaism. mark is a deeply jewish texts. .. of jewish affinities. at the very least, they explain the jewish things that jesus does. john begins his gospel not with an infancy narrative, not with jesus' miraculous birth to a virgin, it begins at the beginning of time. [speaking in native tongue] john says, in the beginning was the word and the word was with god, and the word was god. right away john says something brand new. you see, matthew, mark and luke never, ever called jesus god.

ever. they called jesus the son of god, which is actually a title, not a description, it's a title for king. they certainly intimate that there is a divine quality to jesus, and certainly postresurrection there is a divine nature to jesus. but at no point in these three gospels does jesus say i am god. the first verse of john says jesus was not a man, he was an eternal, divine being who was responsible for -- now here's his story. so right away what you see in john is something completely new, totally different. now, what we know, of course, is that these four gospels were not the only four gospels, that there were many, many more gospels that were written; the gospel of thomas, the gospel of phillip, the gospel of mary magdalene, the gospel of the

egyptians. these gospels were lost to us as a result of constantine's creed, all these other gospels were eventually destroyed. fortunately, we found them about 60 years ago in a village in upper egypt. we now refer to them as the knostic gospels. your readers, you can go to barnes & noble and buy copies. they're quite fascinating. but nevertheless, what's important to understand about what i just said is two fundamental facts about the gospels. and, indeed, about every word ever written about jesus. number one, they were all written by people who never met or knew jesus. let me say that one time. every word ever written about jesus, every word, was written by people who did not meet or know jesus. his disciples were illiterate.

they never wrote anything down. the first words about jesus were written by paul. he never met jesus. the toes pell of mark -- gospel of mark was not written by a man named mark. these are not eyewitness accounts of jesus' words and deeds. these are theological reflections about who jesus was written many years after jesus' death. matthew was not written by someone named matthew. these are very common in the ancient world to title books in such a way to indicate that they are written by someone, you know, who knew the prophet but, but in reality that's just an homage, if you will. with the exception of luke. luke very likely wrote the gospel of luke. but the rest of the gospel writers were not, they were not -- these gospels were not written by the people after whom they are named, in other words. so that's a very important thing to keep in mind when trying to figure out how to extract

historical information from the gospels. these were written by people who were the second and third generation of christians, not the first generation. >> host: and from "zealot," the kingdom of god is a call to revolution, plain and simple. the prophets banded zealots and messiahs of jesus' time all knew this which is why they did not hesitate to employ violence in trying to establish god's rule on earth. the question is, did jesus feel the same way? there may be no more important question than this for those trying to pry the historical jesus away from the christian christ. arvelle, dallas, texas, thanks for holding on. you're on with reza aslan. >> caller: hello, thank you -- >> host: thank you, sir. >> caller: nothing would please me more than to sit down across a long dinner table with you, a couple of bottles of wine and discuss these.

i think you're brilliant, and i look forward to reading your books. i'm aware of your writings. i've worked in the middle east on three different occasions over 20 years from 1994 until now. i have some very strong viewpoints about islam. i think it is -- i have just two things. i know you have a whole lot to do and say today. how do you, how do you come to terms with the murder of some 600, 800 jews that mohamed participated in after the battle of -- [inaudible] around 630? >> guest: very, very good question. actually, i write a lot about this topic in "no god but god." and, of course, part of it has to do with this mythology that rises about mohamed's time in me deep that, mythology that depending on whether you're a jew, christian or muslim you're going to interpret in your own way. what i try to do is remove religion from the issue altogether and really analyze what was happening in mecca at

the time n mecca and ma dean that at the time -- medina at the time of mohamed. in the case of maine dean that, you're talking about various tribes, jewish, pagan and muslim who are all living under the single constitution called the constitution of medina which i talk about at length in the book. a constitution that required every cig that story to -- signatory to defend medina against the member can invasion. and many of the jewish tribes did. but there was a tribe that in the middle of the battle of the trench changed sides. they actually decided to start fighting on behalf of the meccans against the medinans. this wasn't the first time that a tribe had done something like that. it actually had happened a couple of times beforehand, and both times the punishment for those tribes was exile. and so those tribes, if they

weren't going to defend medina against its external enemies, were not allowed to live in medina any longer. this third time, however, the prophet mohamed -- and, by the way, it wasn't his decision, it was an arbitrator who dash traited between -- who arbitrated between them -- decided that punishment for treason against the constitution would be that the men would all be killed. which was, of course, tribal justice. that's how it worked. now, it's very important to understand that this tribe was killed not for religious reasons. in fact, jewish tribes continued to live in medina in harmony with the muslim and pagan tribes for generation after the prophet muhammad's death. it was really not until -- [inaudible] in which the jewish tribes were expelled from the arabian peninsula. but during the prophets'

lifetime, the jews maintained cordial relations with muslims and with the prophet muhammad's community. indeed, one great scholar has shown that for at least 200 years after the death of the prophet, muslims were required to read the torah alongside the quran as a single document. so it wasn't for religious reasons that the members of the tribe were executed, it was simply for treason. now, you can say that's barbaric. you may be right. we are, of course, talking about the seventh century and, you know, seventh century morality is a little bit different than, i think, 21st century morality. and you can certainly judge the prophet muhammad for the actions of agreeing to the execution of his political enemies in medina. but it's important to understand it as a historical event, not a religious event. that's, i think, what i would

say about that. >> host: shirley e-mails this to you, professor aslan, please speak about why muslims such as yourself do not forcefully speak out against the violence some muslims carry out in the name of god. >> guest: how does shirley know that i don't speak out against violence against, you know, by muslims? how does shirley know that there are muslims who do not speak out against violence? i'm going to tell you something. i'm going to let you in on a little secret. shirley is not asking a question. okay? she's making a statement. and it's a absolutely false statement, one that is so imperically proven false, it would take five seconds for shirley to do a google search -- and i'm just going to assume that shirley has heard of google -- and she can just simply go to google right now, shirley, and punch in muslims'

statements against violence. try that. try that for a moment. and what you will see is hundreds of thousands of fatwas, of declarations by institutions, by clerical groups, by individuals, by imams all over the world condemning violence in the name of islam. indeed, don't take their word for it. go to gallup, if you will. gallup did a very interesting survey two years ago among american religious communities. they asked every religious community in the united states, including atheist groups, ten simple questions about the use of violence. in all ten questions, muslims were by far the religious community that was least accepting of violence in the name of religion.

in fact, by sometimes 20-30 points over christians and jews. in fact, the only community whose tolerance for -- or lack of tolerance for violence came close to muslims were atheists, as a matter of fact. this notion that i hear all the time, why aren't muslims condemning violence, is absurd. in fact, as i say, it's not a question. you are not asking me a question, shirley. you are just similarly regurgitating something that you have been told over and over and over to again. something that can be proven wrong with almost no effort on your part. at all. so instead of asking me that question, ask the question of yourself and find the answer. >> host: from reza aslan's 2010

book "beyond fundamentalism: confronting religious extremism in an age of globalization," he writes: by treating the global war on terror like a cosmic war, we have not only played into the hands of these radical muslim militants, we may have set the groundwork for a new and terrifying age of religious war. >> guest: and i think we're there. as i said earlier, what these jihadists are fighting is a war of the imagination. i'm not saying that it's not bloody and brutal and catastrophic and destructive. it is. but it's not a war for land. it's not a war for money, it's not a war for political gain. it's a war for the triumph of good over evil. when we in the united states begin to adopt that same rhetoric, when we refer to the war against al-qaeda as a battle between good and evil,

when we begin to infuse our political rhetoric with the same kind of theological rhetoric that one hears from these that gnattics -- fanatics who are fighting these cosmic wars, we empower them. because by adopting their language, we are also legitimating their world view. we're saying, you're right, this is a battle between good and evil, except that we're good and you're evil. that is an unwinnable conflict. we have to understand that we will never outthat gnat size these fanatics. what we need to do is bring this cosmic conflict back down to earth. we need to address the very real grievances that create support for these cosmic groups like al-qaeda, like isis, and we have to recognize -- whether we want to hear this or not -- that

these militants, these al-qaeda militants, these isis militants are not fighting a real war. in other words, they don't want anything concrete. what they want is unachievable in this world. and so the only response is their destruction. we must wipe out al-qaeda, we must wipe out isis. but it's not enough to just simply kill militants. we have to get rid of the ideology that supports them, and the only way to do that is to address the grievances that these militants use to draw people to their cause. >> host: ali e-mails in: what would happen to you in the airport if you decided to fly to tehran tomorrow? >> guest: i'd be let in without any problem because i have, you know, the proper paperwork. whether i'd be let out -- [laughter] that's a different issue.

you know, iran -- and i hate to use this word -- is a third world bureaucracy. and like most third world bureaucracies, there is no opportunity to appeal to some kind of rule or some kind of law, you know? the rule, the law is in the hands of the bureaucrat sitting across from you. if he's had a bad day or if he's fought with his wife, you're not going home. if he's in a good hood, you are going home. -- good mood, you are going home. you could protest all you want to. you could say, but i have the paperwork that says x, y and z. it's not that kind of country. it's not the kind of country in which the rule of law is what matters. and so, look, i mean, i'll just be honest with you, it's a crap shoot. you show up and hope that you can just sort of go under the radar, that nobody will notice, that people won't make a big

deal and that you'll get to leave. that's what happened to me my last trip there, and, you know, when i go back -- which i will, certainly, in a couple of years with my family -- i just kind of cross my fingers. [laughter] >> host: have you visited israel? >> guest: oh, many times, many times. yes, i've been to israel a large number of times. you know, i've done research there, i've gone there for vacation, i've done a lot of work there. you know, i -- i'm not trying to toot my own horn, but i'm fairly well known in israel. i've had a lot of articles written about me in israel. as i say, my books have been published in israel. and so i think people think that because i am very critical of this israeli government, the government of benjamin netanyahu and his party and the disturbing right-wing lurch of the knesset

that somehow that makes me anti-israel. it's such an unsophisticated, you know, way of talking. i mean, it's like saying that if i criticize american policy, then i'm anti-american. or if i criticize barack obama, then i'm racist. it's, frankly, idiotic. i think that the reason that i'm so critical of israel is because i truly do believe in israel. i do believe in the promise of what israel was supposed to be, what it can be. but this 40-year, brutal, unjust, immoral occupation of the pal the stint january people -- palestinian people, an occupation that is accelerating, not decelerating, an occupation that is nothing less than collective national suicide on the part of israel itself, has

sullied everything that israel was supposed to be. everything that it sets itself up to be. and until that occupation is dealt with, then the promise of israel is going to be nothing more than just a promise. it'll never be fulfilled. >> host: what's it like going through ben-gurion airport? [laughter] >> guest: well, it's not easy as an iranian, it certainly is not. i'm an hearn citizen, but it -- an american citizen, but it doesn't really help. as i say in "beyond fundamentalism," i don't blame israel for its paranoia. i mean, look, it's received a real battering by people who look just like i do. but i also understand that if israel wants to truly have the peace and prosperity that it deserves, that most of its seem want unconditionally, then it has to figure out a way to live

side by side and in peace and in equality with its palestinian neighbors and its palestinian citizens. what is happening right now in israel is an abomination. it's an abomination to human rights, to constitutionalism, to what we expect among modern democratic states. but most of all, it's an abomination to everything that is true and good about judaism and the jewish people. >> host: from "beyond fundamentalism," the problem is not with israel, the problem is with me, with the sum of my identities, my citizenship as american, my nationality, iranian, my ethnicity, persian. my culture, middle eastern, my religion, muslim, my gender, male. all the multiple signifiers of my identity, the things that make me who i am, are in one way or another viewed as a threat to the endless procession of

perfectly pleasant, perfectly reasonable immigration officers whose task it is to maintain a safe distance between people like them and people like me. even so, throughout the entire exercise i could not help but thinking of the famed french theorist, ernest rennon, who years ago defined the nation as, quote, a group of people united in a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors. nowhere is that sentiment borne out her tully or with more -- fully or with more force than among the relatively new nations scattered along the broad horizon of the middle east. mary in tucson, arizona, you are on with reza aslan on booktv on c-span2. >> caller: hello. i'm really appreciating this very simple, extremely articulate conversation. earlier in the program you had mentioned that there is no completely wrong or completely right religion, and so my question for you is that would

that not exclude christianity? because christ himself had said i am the way, the truth and the light, no man comes to the father except through him, me, he said? so since jesus is the very cornerstone of christianity, would that not make christianity completely wrong or completely right? >> guest: no. [laughter] not at all. there are, of course, multiple ways to understand jesus' saying that i am the way, the truth, the life, no one comes to the father except through me. the first way to understand it is its historical way. i would say it's not jesus who said that, it's john who said that. that verse is from the gospel of john, as i was talking about earlier, the gospel of john written sometime between 100 and 120 a.d. has a completely different understanding of who jesus was than matthew, mark and luke. john, as i say, thinks jesus is literally god which is not what matthew, mark and luke say about

jesus. and the synoptic gospels, there is no phrase in which he says he is himself god. whereas he says this in john all the time. that doesn't mean it's incorrect. that's a faith statement. a christian can be as much a christian in believing that jesus is literally god incarnate as he can be if he believes that jesus is just a man. there are many, many christians -- the aryan christians are many of them -- who believe that jesus was not god. by the way, there are many, many christians who believe that jesus was not a man. the copts, for instance, in egypt believe this jesus was pure -- that jesus was pure god, that he had no human nature whatsoever. so that verse which seems, in your mind and in the minds of many, many christians around the world, to be self-explanatory and to require no kind of

interpretation, that it can only be understood in one way, in reality has been understood in hundreds and hundreds of different ways. so i ask you again, how do we decide which way is right? how do we decide which interpretation of that saying is correct and which is not? now, i would posit that there is no way to decide, that there is no arbitrator, there is no one who gets to say your interpretation is correct and that person's interpretation is incorrect. religion becomes a deeply individualistic thing which is, of course, why there are so many different sects and schisms of all religious tradition. that may seem uncomfortable. i totally get it. i really understand why that statement may make people of faith uncomfortable, because there is something comforting this believing that what -- in

believing that what you believe, your particular interpretation of scripture, is the correct one. in fact, it's the only one. and that anyone else who interprets that verse differently is simply wrong. that's a comforting thought, but it's historically inaccurate. it's empirically inaccurate unless you believe that just you and anyone who agrees with you is a christian and anybody who doesn't agree with you is not a christian, and i'm certain, mary, that you don't believe that. so we have to come to the opposite conclusion which is that every one of the multiple ways in understanding that verse are equally valid. maybe they're not equally reasonable, maybe they're not equally historically accurate, but they're equally valid. >> host: majiv is calling in from lancaster, california. good afternoon. >> caller: good afternoon, sir. first of all, i would like to

commend you on the distinction you made earlier between the -- [inaudible] of religion and faith. i am from africa, so i have a little bit of a english accent. if you don't understand anything, you can always ask me to repeat it. >> guest: i understand you perfectly. [laughter] >> caller: all right. so my question is simple and short. in islam there is this notion from the quran that there is no compulsion in religion. yet we know what happens when -- [inaudible] people try to, i don't know how you -- [inaudible] to honor their religion. is it this notion, this son sent of -- concept of there is no

compassionate religion, does it not have any significant meaning in islam? >> guest: of course it does. but that means is, once again, contingent upon whatever your political or social or cultural persuasions may be. you're right, the quran says this black -- in black and white there can be no compulsion in religion, to you your religion, to me my religion. indeed, as i said earlier, the quran over and over again calls jews and christians part of the uma, part of the larger community, what i refer to as monotheistic pluralism. it validates the torah and the gospels. but you wouldn't believe that, you wouldn't know that if you listen to a lot of muslims talk about kris chaps or jews -- christians or jews. this is the problem with scripture, is that it can mean whatever you want it to mean. why is it that we still pay

attention to writings that were composed 5,000 years ago? it's not because they are true, although their truth has very little to do can with the facts that they espouse. it's because they are infinitely malleable. the torah addresses every aspect of the human condition. the same torah that says love your neighbor as yourself also says slaughter every man, woman and child that does not believe in yahweh. the same gospel that says turn the other cheek also says that jesus did not come to preach peace, he came to preach the sword. the same quran that says there can be no compulsion in religion, that if you kill one person, it is as though you have killed all of mankind also says find and slay the believer

wherever you may find them. you see, scripture can mean thinking you want it to mean because it has everything in it that you need. if if you are a misogynyst, you will find plenty of evidence in all the scriptures to validate your view. if you are a feminist, you will find plenty of material in the same scripture to validate your view. if you're a believer in peace, you can use the quran, the gospels and the torah to argue your view. if you were a believer in war, you could use the same exact scriptures to argue your view. be this becomes fundamentally a problem that, you know, there is a conflict between the scripture and interpretation, the way that we approach scriptures. so unfortunately, it becomes almost impossible to appeal to

scripture when trying to argue against misogyny, against totalitarianism, against violence because those who espouse those views can simply use the same scripture to argue for them. instead, all we can do is argue our particular interpretation with the same full-throated confidence as the hi song wrist -- my song wrists -- misogynysts and the war amongers do. i think a lot of people would say, look, if religion is responsible for a lot of these acts of violence, let's just get rid of religion, and the violence will go away. no sophisticated person actually believes that will be the case. if you w57b9 to combat religious bigotry, you need religious pluralism. if you want to combat religious violence, you need religious peace, religious tolerance. if you want to combat religious hatred, you need religious love.

so it depends on all people of faith around the world to really latch on to those aspects of their religion that promote compassion and tolerance and love and peace and to argue for those views, for those values with the same intensity as the extremists argue for their particular interpretation. >> host: dr. ike rah him e-mails in to you, dr. aslan, it is interesting to listen to your interpretations of religions and your beliefs. what is your position on who are the international muslim brothers movement and what they are doing all over the middle east? >> guest: if you're referring to the muslim brotherhood, i think it's important not to view them as an international movement. yes, there are muslim brothers in tunisia and egypt, hamas used

to be part of a muslim brotherhood organization. one can say that even the ruling party in turkey had its roosts in the muslim brotherhood. there are muslim brothers in sake saudi arabia, there are muslim brothers in venezuela. but it is a mistake to think that these different groups represent one giant, connected umbrella organization. they do not. the muslim brotherhood in egypt has nothing to do with the muslim brotherhood in turkey or the muslim brotherhood even in neighboring due tease ya. -- tunisia. again, the muslim brotherhood is an islamist organization. and as i mentioned earlier, islamism is a nationalistic ideology. it is solely concerned with the nation-state. that's why when you hear scholars and media professionals refer to the muslim brotherhood, they will always say the egyptian muslim brotherhood or

the tunisian muslim brotherhood or the algerian muslim brotherhood because they are different. the algerian muslim brotherhood only cares about algeria. they couldn't care less about egypt. the muslim brotherhood in egypt only cares about egypt, they don't care about turkey. their concerns are nationalistic. jihadistism, the opposite of islamism, jihaddism is a transnational organization. that's a movement that can be seen as having a kind of umbrella ideology even when they are against each other. i've mentioned isis and al-qaeda a couple of times because those are the two most famous jihadist organizations. but what is really fascinating is that they hate each other. that isis and al-qaeda actually see each other as the enemy. isis began as an al-qaeda

movement but was divorced from al-qaeda because it was too violent, too extreme even for al-qaeda, if you can imagine that. >> host: next call for you comes from andrea in palm springs, california. hi, andrea. >> caller: yes, hello. thank you for the privilege of talking to you, professor. i just have a comment or a question here. have you any thoughts on the emerging studies in neuroscience that are indicating there may be a hard wiring in the brain for one to be predisposed to either fundamentalist or conservative beliefs and behaviors versus a liberal, the liberal shades of gray type mentality and how that might impact the concept of faith? >> guest: yes, yes. very good. so there are actually two emerging studies, and they're interconnected but sort of separate. one of them says that the very conception of faith, faith experience is a product of

chemical inducements in the brain. and, indeed, there have been hult billion studies in which -- multiple studies in which those chemicals were affected by scientists to produce a spiritual experience. connected to that are these other it'ds that show -- studies that show there may be a genetic component that is maybe even hard wired in our dna that predispose us to extreme beliefs, what could be termed fundamentalism if you'd like, as opposed to more skeptical or perhaps one can even say as you put it, more liberal beliefs. let me address these two studies separately, because they are scientific studies. they are absolutely true. there's no reason to deny them whatsoever. but i don't think that we should exaggerate the significance of them. to the first one, what you hear

from a lot of secular-minded people -- scientists, so-called new atheists -- is that this notion that faith can be proved to be a chemical experience, therefore, denies the reality of faith, that it means that religion and faith is nothing more than a human construct, and so it doesn't need to be taken seriously think longer. any longer. that is kind of a ridiculous statement. after all, every experience, every experience without exception is a result of chemical experiences. everything that you see, feel, understand, everything that happens to you, everything that you know or have ever experienced is a result of chemicals in your brain. love, faith, these are, of course, a result of chemical experiences.

i don't understand why knowing the mechanism whereby one has an ecstatic experience negates the experience. that doesn't make any sense at all. of course it's a chemical experience. everything is a chemical experience. so that's my thought on the first study. the second study, i think, goes to what i've been saying all along about identity, that religion is not about the things yo i do or the things that you believe -- that you do or the things that you believe, it's about how you define yourself. and much in the same way that you hay be predisposed to certain world views because of, say, the world in which you live, the culture out of which you arose, your dna, your genetics is also going to have a great impact on your identity. so, again, it's not, i don't

think, surprising or unusual that how you interpret scripture, whether you interpret it more liberally or more conservatively, how you experience your faith, whether you do so in hutch more, treatment ways or in more sort of, you know, let's say secular ways has as much to do with nurture as it does with nature. i don't think that that's unusual. but i do think it's important not to go to extremes in trying to intercept this scientific data. it doesn't really say anything about the legitimacy of faith, it just says the he can nhl whereby -- the mechanism whereby people experience faith. >> host: sandra fox tweets in, will you be writing a book tracing mohamed leading to the writing of the quran? >> guest: well, that's what "no god but god" is. the world that gave birth to

muhammad and the world that he left behind. if you are interested in that topic, i suggest "no god but god." >> host: are you working on another book? >> guest: i am, or i'm supposed to be working on another book, let me put it that way. yes, i am. i'm work only a book -- working on a book that is about the very origins and evolution of our very concept of god. i've been fascinated with the origins of religion for a very long time. "no god but god" is about the origins of islam, you know, "zealot" is about the origins of christianity. what i'd like to do now is to expand that search and talk about the very origin toes of god -- the origins of god, the origins of religion. so i'm going back about 125,000 years and starting with the sort of first trace, the first notion that there is something beyond, something other than this world. and how that notion eventually became what we now call god.

>> host: jeremy, lawrence, kansas, you are on booktv on c-span2. please go ahead. >> caller: thank you, c-span, so much for the time and space to have such a thorough thinker elucidate his open-hearted ideas. so i want to get your take, mr. aslan, on my assertion as a jewish-american religion major that what has come of islamic jihaddism is very similar to what was done to the historical jesus' offering of both rooting out the corruption within his own group and offering a spiritual alternative to the roman empire. and that became a con tan stint january, a co-opted form of the jesus narrative by the roman empire in what ultimately became zionism, jewish and christian zionism. and so similarly, i wonder whether you think that it's similar that jihaddism has

actually been utilized by the empire, empires of the west and the jewish and christian zionists to divide the natural alliance between islamists and arab nationalists -- >> guest: yeah. >> caller: -- and the natural alliance with progressives in the west. >> guest: yeah, yeah. >> caller: and what we have seen is that the war on terror is not constructed in the middle, in afghanistan or in iraq. it was constructed in many ways in tel aviv, in london, in washington, d.c., and we can actually see that it is a greater israel plan. and the usage of what our assets of western imperialism -- including al-qaeda, including isis -- to be used to destroy the alliance of islamists and arab nationalists. >> host: all right, jeremy, a

lot there there. >> guest: yeah. it's a very sophisticated question, jeremy. it is true that jihaddism as an ideology is an attempt at a sort of puritanical conception of islam. jihaddism's theological roots, of course, go back to a particularly saudi sect of us ram called -- islam called wahhabism. it's an ultra pure tan call -- puritanical idea. it's a notion that says islam has been corrupted by its various sects and varian i can'ts and that -- variants and that it has to be a return to some sort of unadulterated, perfected and, frankly, totally imagine their past. wahhabism, as any student of contemporary history knows, was

exploited by the british to take control over the oil of the arabian peninsula. it was exploited by the cia to fight be the soviets during the cold war and in particular in afghanistan, and it really, you know, gave birth to al-qaeda as we though it which then came back and bit us in the butt as it always does when you think that you can control religious extremism for your own purposes. but you're right in that this notion that i'm just going to continue to refer to as puritanicallism is a widespread phenomenon, in christianity, in judaism. this notion that, you know, the way that most people understand judaism and that most people understand christianity is wrong, and it has to be returned to some perfected, idealized path. we hear this all the time this traditionalized religion.

so i think there is a great deal of connectivity in that regard. you're also right this that american -- in that american foreign policy has, you know, over the last two decades benefited from promoting these kinds of transnational organizations. perhaps not necessarily against islamist groups, but certainly for our own needs and desires. i told you earlier that i would trace the origins of jihaddism to about 1989, 1990 and the soviet invasion of afghanistan because if you recall what we did with coordination with the sakis and the pakistanis -- saudis and pakistanis is collect failed islamists from all around the middle east, from syria, from are lebanon, from palestine and egypt, other parts of north africa, and ship them to afghanistan in order to fight the soviets. well, in afghanistan they did something remarkable. they won! they beat one of the two

superpowers in the world. how did they do it? they did it by with putting away their nationalistic ambitions and focusing as a global force. it didn't matter if you were syrian fighting for syria or egyptian fighting for egyptian. these were syrians and egyptians fighting side by side for afghanistan not against their own governments, but against a far enemy, and it worked. and that's where al-qaeda was born, by that victory. the idea that if you set aside your nationalistic concerns, if you come together as a global force and have a transnational or global agenda, then you can succeed. that was born in the battlefields of afghanistan thanks to american foreign policy. so all of those things are correct. that said, let's not bog

ourselves down in kind of moral equivalency arguments. there is no moral equivalency between a group like isis which is slaughtering men, women and children, crucifying people, cutting off heads, really taking part in what can only be described as ethnic cleansing of the shia in iraq. i mean, the genocide is what they are taking part in with even the worst extremists in israel or the worst extremists in the united states. sure, the religious sentiment hay be the same, but let's be -- may be the same, but let's be careful about the way we ascribe any kind of moral equivalency when it comes to action. >> host: tom lindo, tucson, ads. e-mail: what is your advise on how to respond to or deal with the jihadists as you describe them? >> guest: so as i say, it's a

two-pronged attack. number one, understand that there are very real, legitimate differences that these groups have is and that they use to draw people to their side. address those grievances in order to take away the op began da value -- propaganda value, in order to take away what is appealing about these movements. address these grievances, and you remove their audience. but the fighters themselves, the couple of thousand or so according to the cia, the perhaps 10,000 or so members of isis, about 1,000 of them are are currently embroiled in the war in iraq. these individuals do not have real grievances.

they exploit the preefnses of people in iraq and syria and large parts of the middle east in order to draw them to their side, but they themselves are not fighting a real world as i have said. they are fighting a cosmic war. they don't want anything concrete. they don't have any kind of measurable goals. what they want is the world. what they want is to remove all nation-states, all borders, all boundaries and to reconstitute the planet as a single thing under control, under their control. that is laughable. that is an impossible goal to achieve. and by the way, they know it's impossible which is why, despite widespread perception in the west, they never talk about those goals. they never talk about the global caliphate. we talk about the global

caliphate. they never talk about their agenda, their ultimate goals because their agenda, their ultimate goals are laughably impossible to achieve. instead, they focus their agenda on the celestial plane. they talk about the triumph of good over evil, the battle between darkness and light, between the angels of truth and the demons of darkness. and that kind of rhetoric really rings true to people. but when your military -- you're a military force that is not interested in land, not interested in politics, not interested in economic gain, when you are fighting a war of of -- there's no room for negotiation, there's no room for discussion. how do you have a conversation with someone who wants the world? you don't. the militants of of al-qaeda, the militants of isis require a

singular response: destruction. that's it. that's the only way to deal with them. but what's important to understand is that simply killing these militants does not do away with jihaddism. the way to do that is to tackle the root grievances that give it sustenance, and that includes a more robust engagement with the israeli/palestinian conflict, a more social and economic progress for sunnis in iraq, for instance. finish a greater emphasis on political participation and political freedoms in the middle east. all of these things have to be addressed in the political realm in order to remove that which is appealing about jihaddism. but jihadists themselves, there is only one response to them. >> host: from "no god but god,"

fundamentalism in all religious traditions is impervious to suppression. the more one tries to squelch it, the stronger it becomes. counter it with cruelty, and it gains adherence. kill its leaders, and they become martyrs. respond with despotism, and it becomes the sole voice of opposition. try to control it, and it will turn against you. try to appease it, and it will take control. david felty e-mails in to you, professor aslan: i am surprised how literalistic and dualistic reza lance is. few -- aslan is. few experts in literary criticism in the last 50 years would accept his absolutist bifurcation between history and faith, history versus religious and historical versus theological. >> guest: i'm not sure where he has studied, but that's really the foundation of religious

study. i'm, i mean, i just have to say that, you know, day one, day one of religious studies is understanding the difference between sacred history and regular history, understanding the difference between faith and religion, understanding underste difference, of course, between faith and history, so i would have to say i humbly disagree. >> guest: my dream "in depth" would be a discussion between dr. as lab and dr -- aslan and dr. michael shermer. have you ever appeared with him? >> guest: as a matter of fact, i've appeared on a couple of events with him. i like michael shermer. a very -- he's a famous skeptic. he's the editor-in-chief of a magazine called "skeptic," of course. i think skepticism is great, but skepticism can itself become a kind of ideology.

in fact, this is probably my greatest complaint about the so-called new atheist movement. i'm not saying michael sherman is an atheist, but this movement that's become popularized by sam harris and the late christopher hitchens. my biggest problem with the new atheist movement, frankly, is that it gives atheism a bad name. understand that some of my greatest intellectual heroes are atheists, but they're philosophical atheists. even huxley who would call himself an agnostic but nevertheless, i think that atheism is different than what these new atheists are ascribing to. i refer to the new atheism is scientism. it's an attempt to replace

religion with science. that's not the role of science, to replace religion. more importantly, however, it's become a new kind of religion itself. indeed, a new kind of fundamentalist religion. i mean, i'm not the first person to note the strange parallels between religious fundamentalism and atheist fundamentalism. they both have this intense sense of siege when you hear atheists talk. they're constantly talking about how their rights are being trampled upon and how they are under siege by a religious society which is not exactly, i think, true. just because, you know, your money says "in god we trust" doesn't mean that you are under siege. they have a far more literalistic reading of scripture than any literalist i know. sam harris is quite famous for this. he really reads the scriptures in the most literalist sense,

and then if he is confronted by people of faith who don't have the same literalist view of the scripture that he does, he simply says that they're not really jews, they're not really christians, they're not really muslims because they don't take their scripture literally. and certainly, they have the same sense of sole access to the truth. that is the, fundamentally -- or i should say the defining characteristic of fundamentalism for many of these new atheists, particularly richard dawkins. a person of faith is not just wrong, he's stupid that anyone who disagrees with him is not just incorrect, but, you know, dumb. that religion itself is nothing more than pure evil. as christopher hitchens used to like to say. that religion is responsible for all the evil in the world and so, therefore, religion has to be excised from humanity to

achieve peace and prosperity. as i reminded christopher hitch ps when he was alive, the most bestial acts of human destruction over the last hundred years, perhaps in all of human history, have been in the last hundred years, and they have all been in the name of unabashedly, avowing secular itself ideologies. stoll lainism, maouism, communism, marx schism. -- marxism. these are all secular ideologies, and indeed, in some cases they're anti-religious ideologies. and these are ideologies that have been responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people in the last hundred years. so religion doesn't have a monopoly op violence. let's just not forget that. >> hosndhat. >> host: under the title "another response to reza's

diatribe against shirley, i did as the professor suggested and googled muslim statements against violence and found nothing. >> guest: can i use the word bs on tv? >> host: we're cable. [laughter] >> guest: really? you googled the phrase "muslim statements against violence," and you didn't see the council for american-islamic relations, the islamic society for north america, the muslim-british council, the grand mufti of iraq, the grand mufti of saudi arabia, the grand ayatollah in iraq? you didn't, you didn't hear the american society for muslim advancement? none of those things came up in your google search? i think there's something wrong with your google. >> host: reza aslan has been our guest for the past three hours on booktv's "in depth." "no god but god," came out in

2005. "beyond fundamentalism" originally called "how to win a cosmic war" came out in 2010. the international bestseller, "zealot: the life and times of jesus of nazareth," came out last year. you've been watching booktv on c-span >> c-span, created by america's cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. >> this week booktv takes a look at the weekly standard's online book shelf to see what that publication is recommending. on the shelf this week is turing's cathedral as well as the great war by peter hart and james hall's cultural history of

the self-portrait. "the spanish civil war" is an analysis of the spanish republic and its complex political history. diary excerpts from louise saw adams is on the shelf as is the metamorphosis of fat, paying particular anticipation to the role of science -- attention to the role of science and public health campaigns. also a collection of essays and an idea whose time has come, todd purdum's account of the passage of the civil rights act of 1964. and finally the weekly standard has jane ridley's biography on edward vii and e charles murray's the cur message johns -- curmudgeon's guide to getting ahead. tune into booktv this weekend for the harlem book fair with discussions on

multicultural book publishing and the black arts movement. live coverage starts this morning at 11:45 eastern on c-span2's booktv. >> here's a look at some books that are being be published this week. 2008 libertarian party vice presidential nominee wayne alan root argues in his latest book that the obama administration is destroying the middle class in the united states. in "the mockingbird next door," former chicago tribune reporter shares her experience as one of the few journalists able to get access to the famous author of "to quill a mocking -- to kill a porking bird." be -- mockingbird. and in "factory man," journalist beth macy tells the story of a small town virginia furniture maker who successfully be fought to safe his company and hundreds of jobs from chinese competition. look for these titles in

bookstores this coming week and watch for the authors in the near future on booktv and on booktv.org. >> next, charles kurzman, author of "the missing martyrs," questions why in light of continued anger over u.s. foreign policy on the part of young muslims around the world recruitment levels for terrorist organizations have gone down since 9/11. he was interviewed about the topic on the campus of the university of north carolina at chapel hill for booktv's college series. >> host: well, booktv is on location at the university of north carolina in chapel hill where we're interviewing some professors who are also authors. joining us now is charles kurzman. his most recent book is "the missing martyrs: why there are so few muslim terrorists." professor kurzman, you write in your book: the bad news for americans is this: islamist terrorists really are out