An Evening With Reza Aslan

On Monday evening I went to hear Dr Reza Aslan, ex-Christian, Muslim revert and author of both a history of Islam and Zealot, a bestselling book about the life of Jesus Christ, speak at Trinity College Dublin.

Aslan is man with a colourful history. Born in Iran into a family of “lukewarm Muslims and exuberant atheists”, he moved with his parents to the US in 1979 to escape the Islamic Revolution. As a teenager in the US, he converted to evangelical Protestant Christianity. At university, however, he abandoned Christianity and eventually returned to the Islam of his ancestors. He is now Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California at Riverside. His new book claims that Jesus was a Jewish freedom fighter and not a divine Messiah. It has had a mixed reception; the Irish Catholic (20 March) enthuses that is “has been described as a meticulously researched biography of Jesus”, while ChristianityToday says it “relies on outdated scholarship and breathtaking leaps in logic”.

Arriving at the College, I made my way to the Graduate Memorial Building chamber where the talk was to take place. Despite the fact that I hadn’t seen any posters on campus announcing the event, there appeared to be around a hundred people present. With a twinge of dismay I noted how young the students seemed. I bought a copy of Zealot, which was on sale by the door, and took a seat. Dr Aslan strolled in, accompanied by the meeting’s chairman Prof Benjamin Wold, and things got under way.

Aslan told us that he became a Christian in his teens, but began questioning the truth of evangelicalism when he went to study Religion at Santa Clara university. Astonishingly, he also told us that his Jesuit teachers “encouraged me to go back to the faith of my fathers” when his faith in Christianity began to wane. (Nice work, Jesuits!) Eventually, he decided that he could not conceive of one man as God, because God cannot be described in terms of human attributes. “My God is not a human being.” So it was that he returned to Islam.

The striking thing about Aslan is the charming and sophisticated way in which he comes across. A small, clean-shaven man in a black suit, with an American accent and the top three buttons of his shirt suavely undone, he does not look like the dangerous apologist for Islamism that some in the Counter-Jihad movement consider him to be. His message was well pitched for his audience. He stressed the subjective aspect of his search for religious truth and the individual nature of his own faith. In Islam, he says, he found “a central metaphor for God which was not merely emotionally satisfying, but which I already believed.” He told us that he had never asked an Imam’s opinion or advice about anything. He said he welcomed recent polls in the US which showed increasing numbers of young people describing themselves as non-affiliated religiously.

All this went down well with the middle-class students who had come to hear him. A fire-breathing fundamentalist Imam, like one of those the British government always seems to be vainly trying to deport, would not have cut much ice with them. But an urbane, exotic-looking academic who came out with things like “For me, the symbols and metaphors of Islam have profound meaning” was something else altogether. And it was clear that what Aslan had to say fell on fertile ground. The girl sitting next to me giggled with pleasure whenever he made a dig at the American right. When, at the end of the talk, I asked him to sign a copy of Zealot, he greeted me warmly, shook my hand, signed the book with a roccoco flourish, handed it back and – I’m not kidding – winked at me. In fact, he was so very charming, he made me feel clumsy and loutish.

At one point, Aslan mentioned findings of a poll by the Pew Research Centre, which in 2012 found that one fifth of US adults, and one third of US respondents under the age of 30, claimed to be religiously “unaffiliated”. As far as I could tell, this basically seemed to mean that they were “spiritual but not religious” – they believed in something, but preferred not to be associated with a particular religious structure. Aslan explicitly said that he thought this was a good development.

I was reminded of something that the author Christopher Caldwell said in his book about Muslim immigration, Reflections onthe Revolution in Europe. Part of Islam’s appeal lies in its simplicity. It has a simple theology, no sacraments, no clergy in the Christian sense of the word. It has no religious hierarchy. This means that Islam is potentially attractive to people who dislike, or think they dislike, “institutional religion”. It also means that Islamic groups, whatever they may call themselves, cannot claim to speak on behalf of all Muslims. This week, it was reported that a butcher in Cologne was repeatedly threatened by young Muslims who felt “provoked” by a plastic pig in his shop window. It was cold comfort when a Muslim organisation, DITB, assured him that the youths had “misunderstood” their religion.

Aslan may well think that a rise in the unaffiliated, a weakening of the tribal links that tie many Westerners to Christianity, will be good for Islam. Judging by the warm reception he received in Trinity College on Monday evening, and the absence of challenging questions from the floor about his critique of Christianity, he need not fear much resistance.