Reza Aslan's Believer programme does little to end bigotry and intolerance with it's Westernised views, writes Azad Essa.
It was a strange way to try and showcase our connectivity. Last week, American Hindus were outraged when Reza Aslan, the religious scholar and TV intellectual who is often on American cable television fighting off the gremlins of Islamophobia and bigotry, presented the first episode of his series, Believer.
The show sees Aslan visit different religious communities across the globe to explain how, at their core, faith and religions are very much the same.
Believer started by exploring a fringe Hindu sect in India called the Aghoris who reject the caste system and engage in a series of acts to prove humans are not to be categorised or classified. As part of the show, Aslan embeds himself temporarily to the bidding of his hosts, at one point joining one of the members in eating part of a cooked human brain. Later in the episode, Aslan finds a more “moderate” Aghori who runs a small clinic for lepers. Aslan rules this Aghori to be less frightening and more useful to his community.
Naturally, Hindus in America and in India were vexed with the decision to portray Hinduism through a prism of a fringe group that numbers no more than 100 people. He was criticised for sensationalism. That Aslan was rebuked by some Hindus is not altogether important. In a faith of one billion, it is hard to make everyone happy. But it's the nature of criticism that is important to note.
And the problem is clear in his opening line: “I have been studying the world’s religions for 20 years. And now, I am going to live them.” Later, when he encounters the caste system, he adds: “Hinduism is a beautiful religion. I have always been fascinated by it. I just can’t wrap my head around this notion that there are people who, simply because of their birth, or simply because they did things in a previous life, are then condemned to live life as an untouchable.”
The condescension is disingenuous, especially coming from a man of Aslan’s pedigree.
For those who don’t know, Aslan is an Iranian-American Muslim writer and pundit who has built an extraordinary media career dealing with Islamophobic trolls over the last five years. His quick wit and silver tongue has won him many admirers; his ability to trounce late-night hosts like Bill Maher or new-age atheists like Sam Harris over their simplistic views on religion and particularly Islam has brought him stardom. His responses have become the gold standard in dealing with bigotry.
But in this first episode with the issues of caste and the Aghoris, he turns into a quintessential tourist of native’s lands, where incomprehensible bigotry and cruelty take place. Even his vocabulary is reductionist and he oscillates with judgement. He squirms when he is plastered with human ashes and offers banal stereotypes when indulging in their customs. Crucially, he speaks of discrimination as though it is separate from the vast political milieu that makes up Indian society. Even if the caste system is integral to Hinduism, caste oppression continues today in India because it is politically expedient.
In so doing, Aslan becomes a parody of what he reviles most. His voice is neither enlightening nor relevant.
In a subsequent interview with The Atlantic, Aslan says his show was an attempt to take the viewer from “a place of discomfort and exoticism to a place where you’re familiar”. Atheist audiences seemed to be more enthusiastic about the show, he says, because they had nothing to lose.
Here, Aslan’s admission goes to the heart of the problem with the show. Faith-based audiences recognise when stories about religion or faith are told with condescension. And when watched by audiences, believers or not, with a perspective of overarching superiority, the end result is usually made from a toxic mixture of fear and othering.
In an environment where hostility and fear of the unknown are resulting in challenges for brown and black bodies in the US, zooming in on a peripheral group of Hindu cannibals is irresponsible. The producers of Believer make a lot of assumptions of the viewer; they assume that the world outside the television screen is equal where tangential practices or rituals will be viewed as part of a paradigm of diversity and not as an instrument to discriminate. This is an exceptionally hard task, given how many white Americans voted for Trump on a bogus, hate-filled agenda.
Ultimately, Aslan should know better. As a so-called religious scholar who has built his career on combating Islamophobia, the approach is ironic. Here, he subjects another faith to an undiscerning Western gaze, which is tragic. When an individual travels to these areas to “learn” more about these bizarre and strange practices, they will always be doing it with that Western gaze. There is always going to be a power imbalance: for it’s still the rational, modern Westerner looking to experience the “other”.
To paraphrase Scroll Magazine, Aslan does to Hindus what conservatives in America do to Muslims. And herein lies the greatest tragedy of it all.
* Azad Essa is a journalist at Al Jazeera. He is also co-founder of The Daily Vox.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.