Unbelievably Believer

Reza Aslan, sir, you do not know me, nor should you ever, but I have been following your work for a while. You come often on television, and whenever you do, I envy your well-accented English and how beautifully you handle questions, and always, and I mean always, I maintain a running count of how many times you declare “I am an expert on world religions”. Your shtick is that no religion should not be treated as a monolith, that we should consider nuance and the overlaying of culture and national identity on the practice of a religion before criticizing it, and that Islam, the subject you are most asked to comment on, is misinterpreted by evil men for their own ends, it is not a fault of the religion or of the concept of religion itself that global Islamic terrorism and ISIS and Al Qaeda exist, and most importantly, anyone who suggests anything else, is an Islamophobe, a bigot, and a Bill Maher.

I am writing to tell you, sir, that there is someone who has stolen your face and even your name, and doing a show on CNN called Believer, that “believer” with a “v” not a “b”. In the first episode, in case you have not seen the show, this impostor goes to India to understand the Aghori sect within Hinduism. Unlike you, though, you being a scholar of religion for twenty years, this man seems to have even his basic facts wrong, which, as any PhD knows (I am a PhD myself), is a no-no for our clan.

For instance, he mis-translates “Ghats” as “crematorium” where, in real, it means steps that go down to the water. Also, when he stands in front of a picture of Shiva, Parvati, Ganesh and Kartik, he seems unable to identify Kartik in the picture, and we know this because he does not refer to him while talking about Shiva’s family. Maybe he thought Kartik was photobombing this nice family picture, I don’t know. Given that he is doing a show on Aghoris, and claiming to be a religious scholar himself, he does not point out the distinction between the Left hand and the Right hand of the Aghori way, so fundamental to their teachings, and which would have helped a Western audience understand why some stay in “Ghats” and do apparently crazy things and others don’t. If he was who he claimed, he would also perhaps have tried to explain that Aghori doing taboo stuff stems from their radical skepticism, they believe that breaking the most accepted of rules is the only way up the plane of transcendence, and that human flesh is full of the “life-force” that pervades the universe and thus consuming it,  is imbibing life force.

Or as another scholar said in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, which if you think of it explains Aghori principles better than the show on CNN.