The academic field is famously hostile to believers and Aslan has bucked that worldview. not treat religious people or faith the way a scientist would treat a microbe. I was confident in the notion that we cannot just treat like it’s something to be looked at under microscope. You know the saying, ‘Harvard is where faith goes to die.’ A lot of people enter Harvard with faith and leave with nothing. He says, “Unlike the majority of my colleagues, I am a person of faith.” He recalls his time at Harvard Divinity School, where “anyone who espoused faith would sort of be ridiculed for it. “Very few scholars of religion who are Muslim write about Christianity.”Īslan is refreshingly unique in another way. “About 90 percent of the scholarly historical study of Islam is written by Christians or Jews,” he told me. Perhaps the book is a sign that things are changing."Īslan concurs. In the field of Christian-Muslim dialogue there has been a shortage of serious academic scholarship on the historical Jesus or the New Testament generally written by Muslims. Matthew Anderson – who has worked in Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt and is currently a doctoral student in the field at Georgetown University – told me, “While I don’t affirm Aslan’s conclusions, from the perspective of inter-religious dialogue, his book can be interpreted as a positive development.
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