Googled Muslim Statements against violence and found nothing. Guest can i use the word bs on tv . Could i use the word bs on cable . [laughter] really you muzzle shugrue gold then a council for islamic American Relations or the Muslim British Council and seven arabia and the grand ayatollah you the American Society for muslims advancement . None of those came up big your Google Search . There is something wrong with your google. Host our guest for the past three errors on booktv reza aslan. No god but god, the origins, evolution, and future of islam had 2005. Beyond fundamentalism a rigidly called how to win a cosmic war. International best seller zealot came out last year. You have been watching booktv on cspan2. Think you. I really enjoyed it. One of the problems is that when you do that, when you try to control everything either create composition and potential dissidents everywhere. If you tell all artists they have to paint the same way and one says, no, i dont want to paint that like to you have just made him into a political dissident. If you want to subsidize housing in this country and we want to talk about it in the populous agrees that it is of the we should popularize then put it on the Balance Sheet and make it clear and make it evident and make everybody aware of how much it is costing. Fannie mae and freddie mac, when you deliver the subsidy to open up to the Public Company with private shareholders and executives who can extract a lot of that subsidy for themselves, that is not a good way of subsidizing home ownership. Christopher hichens, and applebaum, and Gretchen Morgan some of our view of the 41 engaging stories in cspan sundays at eight now available at your favorite books of. For the next three hours a conversation with author and professor reza aslan on book tv in depth. The religious scholar talks about islamic fundamentalism, religious misunderstandings, and instability in the middle east. This nonfiction work includes no gun but god, beyond fundamentalism, and his most recent release a zealot. Host reza aslan, where does the phrase no god but god come from . Guest mohamad is god. It is essentially the phrase that initiates a convert into the muslim faith in. The phrase that initiates a 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. It is interesting. This in many ways is the same process that of great religions go through. You have a profit who is primarily a reformer, not a creator of religion. That is an important thing for people to understand. , we have this misperception that a profit is someone who invents a religion, but it is someone who reformers the religion and the cultural and social purview in which he lives jesus did not create christianity. He was as you preaching about your day is an. But it did not create buddhism. The was reforming hinduism. The think the same is true with the profit on it. To given to all the profits that came before. What happens is eventually the profit passes. And now it is the responsibility of the profits followers to figure out a way to make sense of the words and actions of this profit. That is when religion is first founded. And the religion is a manmade institution requires a power structure. Cahuenga awesome much and with the new the process are not put on how much you can accumulate about the traditions of the theology that was espoused by the profit. It has these massive institutions. But if you follow that time line on it doesnt take a long time for individuals to start complaining about that institution. Serve recognizing that there is a bit of a gap between what the institution had to say and what the profit has to say. That is when you have this crash between individuals and institutions that happens in of religious traditions over who gets to define faith. The term that scholars view for that crashes reprobation. And you write that religion is by definition interpretation and by definition of investigations, interpretations are pallid. People dont like that saying, when i said that. Religious people dont like it. Religious people like to think that there is one version of christianity, one version of islam, one version of judaism, but it is there version. The problem is when you are confronted with sacred such scriptures what you have in front of you did not really exist in the back backcountry scripture without interpretation it is just words on the page. Requires someone to encounter it, interpret it. And in doing so one cannot help but bring ones own preconceived notions, ones political and economic and social views, why are there a thousand different versions of christianity, a thousand different versions, precisely for that reason. And so as interpretation it becomes difficult to say this interpretation is wrong in this interpretation is right. Now, i do want to say one important thing. You can say that one particular interpretation is more reasonable. You can say it is more historically accurate. Use the same bible to argue their differing viewpoints. Theyve used the exact same verses to argue their viewpoint. That is the power of scripture and the power of religion. Now, and an institutionalized religion, one in which there is an authority structure, papacy, what have you, whenever you want to call it, that has a complete monopoly over the interpretation of faith. You can maintain the level of control. I mean, the pope can actually say to a catholic theologian, you are wrong. Your interpretation is not correct. 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 orgy day isnt, for that matter. There is no centralized religious authority. And what that means that anything goes. In the interpretation is now a valid interpretation. There is no one, no referee to know when to say you are wrong and you are right. And so it becomes a great shouting match. Again, i think paralleling yesterday is an and islam, the problem is that there are about 15 million jews. It is an argument that is happening not at the global stage. You have the oneandahalf billion muslims having this argument. When you look at the complex and the middle east, muslim democrats and muslim autocrats fighting against each other, peacemakers and lawmakers arguing against each other you are seeing is precisely the result of this reformation process, this individualization, the process where by the authority to define the state is being removed, cs, i should say from the hands of these institutions is that have crept it for most of the last 14 century and theyre now being led by any individual with a megaphone. Host what of the similarities . Guest there are two ways answer that question. Medically theyre very much representative of a single prostatic. Another risk of what youre seeing is an understanding. Something that can be passed on from profit to profit. Atom to atom. Moses pitbull of the prophet mohammad. That is certainly the way that is presented. It really cease this as a continuation and indeed a prophetic consciousness that is just sort of moving along through history, a sort of historical account of gone selfrevelations to humanity. That is one. Certainly the value and more are almost identical, the notion of mans responsibility, the idea of the relationship between creator and creation, the duty at that humanity has toward the creator through worship, praise him, to obey them. The concept of an afterlife is similar. Concept of the cosmos are similar. But i think more importantly what you see with these three religions is a desperate attempt to, i guess, i would say bring the expense between humanity and got closer together. There is this sort of mythic quality that god is physically appalled. If you want to put it in as simple way, the history of religion, the monotheistic religions are not. This attempt to create less of a distance between god and humanity, to bring this gap to a close. It is an attempt to say that there is no gap between humanity and god because god became human which is like christianity is so profoundly successful as a global religion. These faiths are intimately intertwined, medically, historically, morally really. Political books. A very good question. Im going to answer it a different way. This notion that religion and politics are separate things. A very new idea. N our religion in all parts of the world is far more a matter of identity that is a matter of belief and practices. Let me give you an example of what i mean by this. According to the q form about seven out of ten americans self identify as christians. Us think about that for a moment. Seven out of ten americans gutted church on sunday. Seven out of ten americans read the bible on a regular basis let alone actually follow its precepts. Seven of the ten americans will tell you anything about jesus except that he was born in a major and data across. Of course not. The vast majority when they say i was a christian, not making some much of faith declaration as a statement of identity. That is about who they are as individuals. How they see themselves in an indeterminate world. Your religion fills your politics and economic views, social glue. And always we only pretend that religion and politics of separate, but they are not. Theyre very much a part of the same multifaceted identity that individuals a spouse. What am i d politics are separate things, but they are not. They are very much a part of the same and with regard to this it is a very important thing to recognize that the phrase i am a jew, i am a christian and everyg else, its 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 theres 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 thei ummal katalb, the mother of books. Its 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. Thats 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 mohammads 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 thats 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 reinterpret the existing beliefs and practices of the commune,ni proving fresh setsf symbols and metaphors in which succeeding generations can describe the nature of reality. Indeed it is most often the prophets successors who take upon themselves fashioning their masters words into deeds into comprehendible religious systems, and muhammad never claimed to have invented a new religion. Guest right. Right. Again, its 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 worlds 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 im saying right now is that most rationalminded 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, theres 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 dont like to think about, muhammad was a product of his world, he didnt 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, muhammads 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 brandnew 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. Thats 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. Thats most certainly not historical an accurate date. The fact of the matter is inco 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 lets 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