Eat the forbidden fruit

Eating human brains, burying one’s face in dead people’s ashes and publicly deriding the president of the United States as a ‘piece of shit’ are not among the activities usually associated with serious religious historians. But Reza Aslan is something else. An American academic born in Iran, brought up as a Muslim, converted to Jesus by the Jesuits and back to Islam through his own free will, he came to prominence following an interview on Fox TV to promote his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013). He was repeatedly asked how being a Muslim qualified him to write about Jesus, to which he responded by listing in pushful, indignant tones all his academic credentials.

He claimed to be a ‘historian’ (which strictly he isn’t); a ‘professor of religion’ (he is actually a professor of creative writing) and a ‘PhD in the history of religions’ (when actually he is a doctor of sociology). This interview, which reflected badly on both participants, went viral on YouTube under the title ‘The most embarrassing Fox News interview ever’, and in consequence, Aslan’s Zealot became a bestseller.

The excitement generated by the video, together with Aslan’s boyish good looks, led to his fronting a six-part religious series on CNN, called Believer, in which he ate the aforementioned brains, smothered himself with the char, and from which he was sacked for tweeting derogatively about Donald Trump.

Each episode featured the sensational and disgusting practices of fringe groups connected to Hinduism, Christianity and Judaism, which, unsurprisingly, offended mainstream Hindus, Christians and Jews who did not care to be associated in the public mind with their pee-drinking, brain-eating, death-worshipping sub-sects. No discreditable customs of any Muslim sub-sect were shown. Since Aslan has elsewhere gone out of his way to dismiss Islamic terrorism as less of a problem than ‘faulty furniture’; has described jihadism as a mere ‘pop culture’; and has denied any link between the Islamic religion and female genital mutilation, he soon found (no doubt to his delight) that he had sharply divided America’s liberal progressive movement.