![]() ![]() ![]() Less than a decade after 9/11, there was even more public hostility toward Islam than there is today few scholars of religion had mastered the rhetorical tools to thrive in the arena of public debate.Īslan, however, moved with facility among conservative Christians and liberal atheists, scattering data points and sound bites as he emerged as one of the most prominent Muslim-Americans in mainstream media. The caricature stung, but I feared he was right. ![]() “I honestly think that the best hope that we have is to foster a new kind of student, one who doesn’t spend eight years in the basement of Widener Library at Harvard poring over a thirteenth-century manuscript and writing a dissertation on the changes in the vowel markings of a sentence.” At the time, I was in the basement of Widener, examining half a dozen manuscripts and writing a dissertation on a fourteenth-century Arabic encyclopedia. “You can’t be trained to speak to the media in a weekend seminar before going on Anderson Cooper,” he said. A few years ago, a friend sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Reza Aslan is insulting you!” The message was an excerpt from an interview with Aslan, by then already a well-known commentator on religion, in which he was asked about the role that scholars should play in informing public debates about the Islamic world. ![]()
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