Reza Aslan: evaluation

Transcript context

…The Quran itself can be a divine body of sorts, right? Correct. The actual physical pages, the physical words themselves are endowed with divine authority. Jews — obviously more conservative Jews — believe the exact same thing, which is why you have to maintain the Torah in a box. You have to be careful who can touch it and who can’t touch it, and you can’t touch it with your hands. You get a lot of that with Islam as well. You can’t destroy the Torah, like you have to burn it. You can’t throw it in the garbage. It can’t touch the ground — all of those things. I think Christians look at that and think, “Wait a minute, it sounds like you’re focusing on the physical scripture instead of what the scripture itself says. ” That’s not incorrect, actually. It has a lot to do with the way that both Jews and Muslims understand the speech of God. The theory is this, that if the Torah, if the Quran is the word of God, then the word of God can’t be separated from the self of God. That means the word of God is God in some form. That’s why, no matter what language you speak, you have to learn to read the Torah in Hebrew. Same with Islam — doesn’t matter what language you speak. You have to learn to recite the scripture in Arabic, even if you don’t understand it. It’s the words themselves, the sound of the words, the recitation of the words that gives you divine power. Obviously, Christians don’t believe that. For Christians, it’s just words on the page, and who cares what language it is. It’s the meaning behind it that matters. The words themselves don’t have any power. It’s what the words mean that have power. You can really see this divide between Judaism and Islam on one side and Christianity on the other. What do you think of the Kenneth Cragg argument that, at least in many branches of Sunni Islam, the distance between man and God is simply too great, and there’s something cold or alienating about it?…

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