The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is โWhat do these stories mean?
Reza AslanAuthoritarians tend to consolidate support by using fear, but more importantly by driving a wedge among the people that they want to control.
Reza AslanEven the Quran, which Sufis respect as the direct speech of God, lacks the capacity to shed light upon Godโs essence. As one Sufi master has argued, why spend time reading a love letter (by which he means the Quran) in the presence of the Beloved who wrote it?
Reza AslanWhen I was in the US, I felt that the discourse there surrounding Muslims as the other, problematising Muslims and Islam as the other was very similar to what we find in Australia, which is that the image of Islam is a constructed image in the West. We are starting from a point of view that Islam and Muslims - well Islam is a violent, misogynistic, hateful religion and that is where the debate always starts from - that presumption underlies the discourse.
Reza Aslan