The fallout from the notorious Fox News interview with noted academic Reza Aslan continues. The ten-minute segment in which host Lauren Green repeatedly quizzes Aslan as to why he, a Muslim, 'would be interested in the founder of Christianity' is mind-boggling in its casual religious persecution.
Buzzfeed calls it 'the most embarrassing interview Fox has ever done', Slate says it is 'cringe-worthy', and The Washington Post is calling for Fox to apologise to Aslan, who was promoting his new book Zealot: The life and times of Jesus of Nazareth. Aslan has benefited from the publicity, hitting number two on the New York Times best sellers list and number one on Amazon.
Green has been roundly criticised for implying that Aslan, despite his numerous degrees in religious studies including a PhD, is incapable of providing an objective and scholarly account of Jesus because of his Muslim faith. While much of the criticism centres on the right of someone to write about a group to which they do not belong, in reality, this goes far deeper than that.
The most troubling thing about Green's performance was not that she had an issue with a non-Christian writing about Jesus, it's that she had an issue with a Muslim doing so. In Green's world of privileged western Christianity, a Muslim, even one who has dedicated his working life to studying major world religions, cannot possibly write about Christianity without an ulterior motive.
While Fox is not representative of the entire US population, this distrust of Aslan is symptomatic of a culture, helped by movies and TV shows such as Homeland, that still continues to paint every Muslim as a potential threat.
Unsurprisingly, Green has no issue with Christians writing about Islam. Her 2011 interview with Barry Van, a Southern-Baptist minister and author Puritan Islam, was spent discussing the stealthy ways Muslims with terrorist sympathies 'can be your neighbours ... they can be in a suburb of Cincinnati ... they can be medical doctors'. But that is how privilege works; it is the assumption that what applies to other, minority groups does not apply to you.
Aslan is not alone in experiencing this type of persecution. Huma Abedin, one of Hillary Clinton's closest aides, is the focus of an attack by former Republican presidential candidate and congresswoman Michelle Bachman, who, along with four other Republicans, is accusing Abedin — who, like Aslan, happens to be a Muslim — of having ties to the