Opinion Sense and Sensibility

The Beast compiled this collection after the weirdest Fox interview ever,titled ‘Spirited Debate’,went viral. In it,the channel’s religion correspondent Lauren Green tried to take down the Iranian-American religious scholar Reza Aslan but crashed in flames herself (Aslan is a contributing editor with the Beast). The reverberations are still echoing across the ether. In the course of a fairly long interview,Green had repeatedly questioned the right of Aslan,who is Muslim,to write the academic book Zealot? The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. The peculiar interview has powered the book to the top of the Amazon bestseller list,unseating JK Rowling’s The Cuckoo’s Calling,the publishing phenomenon of July in the US,while UK printers are working overtime to meet orders.

Green bombards Aslan with a series of suspicions raised by absent third parties. After each salvo of rubbish,she magisterially demands to know: “What do you have to say to that?” Aslan is patient and polite (he pointedly calls Green “Ma’am”),but he wonders out loud what his faith has to do with his writing,which is the product of two decades of academic work in religious studies,in which he has four degrees. He chucks in a desperate rabble-pleaser: his mother and sister are Christian,and his brother-in-law is an evangelical pastor.

Let us be generous. Let us assume that Green is not a complete twit but was being flown by wire by unseen

editors. Here at home,let us assume that Nawab Malik of the NCP was being puppeteered when he ticked off Shobhaa De as history-ignorant on CNN-IBN,for

tweeting jocularly that after Telangana,Mumbai could be spun off from Maharashtra. And that Vinod Tiwde of the BJP was only reacting to a mike thrust in his tonsils when he said that De would retract if she only knew that it had taken 105 martyrs for Bombay to be the capital of Maharashtra.

Let us be generous indeed. Let us fail to note that TV was scaring the viewer about Telangana this week. The day after the UPA decision,Times Now constantly flashed the next big demands: Vidarbha,Gorkhaland,Bodoland,Harit Pradesh. TV was canvassing Bimal Gurung and Raja Bundela’s opinions and licking its chops at the idea of covering piecemeal demands. It did not investigate the obvious need for another states reorganisation commission to formalise new standards for demarcation. Because,there’s no news value in common sense.

Pettiness sells better,so Lauren Green can reasonably ask why a Muslim is interested in the founder of Christianity. Sinister,isn’t it? Back in the Nineties,the finest intellects of the right (such as they are) had wanted news organisations to hire religion correspondents. If that idea had caught on,India would have been teeming with tropicalised Greens.

Strangely,the Fox fracas was ignored by Indian media though we are obsessed with the Muslim question,whatever that is. Only Abhinandan Sekhri,who wears the moustaches at Newslaundry.com,paid attention. But he wanted to know why Aslan,who was born Muslim,converted to Christianity at the age of 15 and back to Islam seven years later. Don’t know why this is academically important. Maybe Lauren Green knows. Or maybe even she does not know.

pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com