Sects, Cults, Cannibals: Reza Aslan on His Controversial Fringe Religion Show

Religious scholar explores independent Scientologists, Hawaiian doomsday believers and Israel's Ultra-Orthodox community on 'Believer'

Eric Thurm
Rolling Stone
March 24, 2017

The reaction to the premiere of religious scholar Reza Aslan's new CNN series Believer was, to put it mildly, zealous. In one particularly intense scene, Aslan eats human brain matter as part of his attempt to understand the Aghori, a sect of Hindus who use such shock tactics as a way to disrespect the caste system. The sequence drew ire from Hindu groups, including representatives of India's ruling nationalist party and American Representative Tulsi Gabbard.

Aslan assiduously maintains, however, that this was merely a representation of what certain people believe – he had, after all, been asked to consume the material. "We let the people involved do the talking," he tells Rolling Stone.

Still, it's not surprising that Believer would provoke this kind of response; the series is practically designed to draw criticism. Each episode of the six-part series focuses on Aslan investigating a particular religion by adopting its traditions and rituals. The faith in question is depicted via one rather extreme, high-profile sect, and subsequently other milder, more humane adherents. By moving from the fundamentalists to the more recognizable, secular practitioners, Believer makes its central argument: that, ultimately, conflicting religions are not so different.

But this seemingly mild thesis has proven, ironically, to be the most controversial thing Aslan could have said. Though the host dismisses much of the controversy over the Aghori episode as the result of both "knee jerk critics" and the series' sensationalist ad campaign, even he was somewhat taken aback by the response. In particular, he's received a surprising number of death threats – a form of correspondence he has to keep cataloged in a file. Aslan says he used to be able to "shrug it off," but with a family and children, having a thick skin – and approaching this kind of work with a sense of fearlessness – has become harder.

It's true that in the episode itself, Aslan repeatedly says that the incident is a misrepresentation of Hinduism, and isn't in line with what he's trying to do in the series – but the segment still aired. The ads are cut to highlight the most insane, lurid part of the episode in an attempt to draw largely non-religious eyeballs, but does that really alleviate all responsibility? Doesn't all television come with a mandate to seek out the most gripping images possible, even, perhaps especially, when presenting sensitive topics? Certainly, grappling with that ethical territory should – though often is not – part of the territory of airing something on a network like CNN.

Part of the problem is that, while Aslan's focus is almost entirely on the nature of belief and how it connects people, it's difficult to extricate faith from its consequences. (Other roughly anthropological shows like, another of CNN's shows, Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown, tackle similar material without drawing the same criticism – almost certainly because religion is far more central to individual conceptions of identity.) Some of Believer's subjects are members of small communities, like a doomsday cult based out of Hawaii, run by a self-proclaimed prophet named Jezus with a "Z." But others, like Haitian vodou practitioners battling with Evangelical Christians, encompass far larger political conflicts.

The Aghori episode might not even be the most controversial hour of Believer. That depends on the reception to the episode that focuses on the haredi, the extreme wing of Israel's Ultra-Orthodox community. Aslan describes this as "the least hopeful" episode of Believer, which seems like an understatement.

During the episode, Aslan talks to Yakov Litzman, a member of the knesset (Israel's parliament) and the government's minister of health who is originally from Brooklyn, and who once compared LGBT Israelis to the "sinners" who danced around the golden calf. During an uncomfortable conversation with Aslan, Litzman flat-out refuses to even pretend he cares about secular Jews, let alone non-Jews. He can afford to, thanks to Israel's rapidly changing demographics and the haredi's place in the ruling coalition of the knesset.

One of the secular Israeli Jews Aslan interviews recall being shouted at, blockaded from her, and attacked with bags of urine. Aslan talks to her from her car, because they would both be attacked by Ultra-Orthodox children upon getting out. One of Believer's own producers refused to believe the full extent of the Ultra-Orthodox community's political power in Israel, and CNN's Jerusalem bureau chief was brought in to fact-check the episode.

One such child – the son of a couple who has invited Aslan into their home – excuses himself from the dinner table at 9 PM to return to studying, after a ten-hour day at yeshiva. Aslan admits that, as a father, the encounter made him uncomfortable – and it doesn't help that the boy's father, when asked point-blank about the possibility that his son might not grow up to sit around doing nothing but studying Torah, refuses to even consider it – but Aslan hears him out nonetheless.

What are we to do when confronted with this kind of community? Aslan's commitment to humanizing people is noble, to the point of discomfort. (In the episode, he describes the haredi's commitment to following the Torah as "beautiful.") But it also smacks of forced naivete. Asked whether he thinks there's a line beyond which the faithful are no longer deserving of his empathy – if their commitment to zealotry, oppression, and murder in the name of God ever make his quest to paint religions with the same brush dangerous – he sidesteps the question, trying to instead highlight what makes expressions of faith appealing even when they lead followers to monstrous actions.

It's an approach that works shockingly well in the series' Scientology episode, which was something of a pet project for Aslan, who sees Scientology not as a dangerous cult but as, simply, a religion. (Are the things Scientologists believe any more ridiculous than the things other religious people believe? Aslan compares Scientology to Mormonism's early reception as the "punchline to American Christianity.") Intriguingly, Aslan focuses on independent practitioners of Scientology, whose existence he compares to the Christian Reformation.

The fissures within Scientology appear to have happened surprisingly quickly – the Reformation happened after over a millennium of Christianity, while Scientology has been around for just over 60 years – but Aslan sees them as the natural result of modern communication: "The greatest threat to a church's control over its orthodoxy is the availability of information." In this respect, the schism reflects Aslan's approach to these religions: increase the availability of information so the uninformed can understand their doctrines.

In the show's second season, Aslan plans to investigate several newer religions. There's caodai, a monotheistic religion in Vietnam that dates back to the 1920s and that Aslan describes as a "distinctly Vietnamese spirituality that is syncretistic with all other elements of Vietnamese spiritually." There's the neo-druid movement in the United Kingdom, which Aslan describes as of a piece with the "nationalistic fervor" that produced Brexit. And there's the John Frum cargo cult, worshipping a soldier from the Second World War who may or may not have existed, and a sort of messianic figure foretold to bring wealth to an island.

The John Frum cult is the sort of religion that, with a different host, could be easy to exoticize. But understanding Aslan's approach, it's not hard to see how Believer will approach it. If we're supposed to come away thinking Scientology's beliefs aren't as strange as we may think, is it really that odd for believers to have their own Christ figure be an American G.I.? And like Scientology, the John Frum cult appears on the verge of splintering, consumed with its own sectarian conflict. "No matter how small a religion is," Aslan says, "there will always be people within it who find some reason to break away and make it even smaller," a process that, of necessity, ultimately means conflict.

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/reza-aslan-on-sects-cults-cannibals-fringe-religion-show-w473446

Tempest in a teapot: A rebuttal to Reza Aslan's critics from someone who's lived with Aghoris

Aghoris

If the remaining episodes of Aslan’s mini-series ‘Believer’ are as provocative as the first one, they should not be missed.

Vikram Zutshi
Scroll.in
March 18, 2017.

Several years ago, wandering through Varanasi late at night, I came across a group of ash-smeared sadhus sitting around a bonfire near the banks of the River Ganga which runs through the ancient city. I had gone there after spending several months in a Buddhist monastery in Pokhara, Nepal.

One of the sadhus beckoned me to join them, patting the spot beside him. They were passing around a chillum, a clay pipe, packed with a potent mixture of charas (hand rubbed hashish) and tobacco. They sang a folk tune, accompanied by percussive tapping on a tabla. The smoking, singing and drumming under the stars made for a heady brew. I pulled out a bottle of whiskey from my backpack and offered it to my companions. Each took a swig and passed it on – it was out after one round of the circle. Soon I was singing and jumping animatedly around the fire along with a couple of clapping sadhus.

Over the next few weeks I attended a number of similar gatherings at locations around Varanasi. It was a radical and refreshing departure from the austere and sedate environs of the Buddhist monastery and most of the ashrams I had stayed at over the course of my extended pilgrimage.

One evening, a group of tourists from Delhi passing by, stopped and walked toward us. On seeing the intoxicated revelry, one of them, in a fit of moral outrage, ordered us to put our chillums away or he would call the police. The threat did not go down well with the holy men. Tolaram, a tall sadhu clad in black with red-rimmed eyes and a mop of wild dreadlocks, rose up and let loose a stream of invectives in Hindi which effectively meant this: Get lost or I’ll stuff a chillum up a very painful place. The other sadhus scooped handfuls of red-hot coal and flung them at the tourists. The bunch scurried away – never to be seen again. All of us laughed uproariously at the spectacle.

My friends were members of Aghor, a sect of renegades who proudly reject the trappings of social propriety, sectarian labels and the world of appearances. Their secretive lifestyle, which includes ritual consecration and consumption of human flesh, and even sexual rites amidst burning pyres, is designed to shock the perceptual framework so as to break the barriers between what is considered sacred and profane, the holy and unholy – all rigid dichotomies that dominate the bourgeois middle class.

In Tolaram’s view, most Hindus worshipped Shiva and Kali as a cultivated social requirement, but what the deities actually demand from their followers is not acceptable to the vast majority. Aghors are the only ones willing to please Kali, by “ripping the veil off reality and jumping straight into the abyss”, with no thought to self-preservation or the laws that govern polite society.

The Aghors I fell in with emphatically rejected Vedic notions of ritual purity, scriptural dogma and priestly mediation between the world of the mundane, the so-called impure and the divine. They seek to cultivate a state of consciousness, known as Aghor, in which one transmutes and ultimately transcends base sensations like fear, hatred, disgust or discrimination. On attaining this state one does not view the world in dualistic terms of good and evil, sacred and profane, pure and impure – instead relating to all of manifested reality as attributes of the Great Mother, MA.

Given all this, I was not surprised at the outrage from sections of the Hindu-American community (and their self-appointed representatives) following the debut of Believer, a CNN mini-series on the fringe and fascinating religious sects around the world. The show’s inaugural episode was filmed in Varanasi, and half of it is devoted to Iranian-American religious scholar Reza Aslan being immersed with a group of Aghors engaging in various shocking acts, including eating cooked human brains and ingesting faeces.

Since the first snatches of the episode came out, Aslan has been accused of everything from Hinduphobia and bigotry to being an agent of “Abrahamic crusaders” attempting to undermine Hinduism. His critics feel that by depicting the Aghors, Aslan has somehow emasculated Hinduism.

The Hindus most offended by the CNN segment are exemplars of the class who like to portray a homogenous, sanitised and sparkly version of their faith. They either forget or paper over the fact that the Aghors, Naths and other heterodox Tantric sects pay scant regard to the institutionalised hierarchies and lifestyles propagated by bourgeois Hindus, the ones most offended by unconventional approaches to the divine.

When I asked Tolaram about his opinion on Hindu canonical texts, he related the story of a priest from the hallowed Kashi Vishwanath temple who had once gifted him a copy of the Bhagwad Gita. Not knowing Sanskrit, and not being remotely interested, he used the dry pages to kindle his bonfire. When I remarked that he may have been incarcerated as a blasphemer for his actions in some Islamic states (and possibly in the prevailing climate in India), he turned his eyes skywards saying, “1-2-3-All-India-Free” and guffawed loudly, presumably at the rank idiocy of the world of men.

As Professor Debashish Banerji, a scholar of Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies, observes, “With the expansion of the middle class in India and its mass mobilization, along with the upper classes by the right-wing ruling party, modern Hinduism has developed into an identity construct, a national orthodoxy of social and religious norms. This threatens to erase the unauthorized culture of spiritual seeking, with innumerable variant and hybrid methods, customs, practices and social attitudes, that forms the millennia old history of religion in India.”

Aslan is no stranger to controversy. His last book, the bestseller Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus, miffed a whole bunch of conservative Christians who took to attacking him on Fox News.

The NRI Hindus I spoke to were especially offended by Aslan’s stated revulsion at the thought of taking a ritual dip in the Ganga. “This is one of the most polluted water bodies in the world,” he said. “There are millions of litres of untreated human waste. Yesterday I saw a guy take a shit directly into the water. It’s basically a giant toilet.” This may sound harsh and politically incorrect, but it is also the unvarnished and sad truth. Similar thoughts had crossed my mind during my maiden visit to Varanasi.

Admittedly, the inaugural episode of Believer is a mediocre example of documentary filmmaking and Aslan makes serious blunders, like calling Varanasi the “City of the Dead” (It is in fact the “City of Light”). Also, a television promo screaming “Cannibalism” was a cringe-worthy editorial decision by CNN.

Still, to this writer, reactions to the show were far more illuminating than the show itself. The rumpus revealed a lot about the diaspora and nationalist insecurities. Aslan’s observations on the caste system are fairly accurate and clearly too close to the bone for some people. There’s no denying that tasks like cremating the dead and manual scavenging are reserved for members of the Dalit community, those at the very lowest rung of the entrenched hierarchy, and have been so for millennia.

Indeed, caste is a social construct, but one which cannot be separated from religious or political beliefs of a billion-plus Hindus. In Aslan’s own words, “I define religion as an identity, not a set of beliefs and practices. That’s probably postulate number one for me. People tend to think that, ‘Oh religion is just something you believe in, right?’ Well, not for most people, actually. The vast majority of people who raise their hand and say, ‘I’m Jewish,’ ‘I’m Christian,’ or ‘I’m Muslim’ are making identity statements much more so than belief statements.” He added, “So, if religion is a matter of identity, then it encompasses every aspect of your life. It can’t be divorced from your politics or your social views or your economic views. It’s all wrapped up together as one.”

Reform and resistance against the rigidities of caste and gender are as old as Hinduism itself. Basava (1106–1167), a progenitor of the Lingayat or Virashaiva sect, was a prominent member of the Bhakti movement along with iconic social and spiritual reformers like Akka Mahadevi and Allama Prabhu. The Bhakti Movement called for a profound shift in the socio-cultural ethos of Karnataka with its vociferous opposition to the caste system, rejection of Brahminical supremacy, abhorrence to ritual sacrifice, and unmediated access to the divine through devotional worship to the One God Shiva. Social reform has continued into the 19th and 20th centuries with giants like Jyotirao Phule and Bhimrao Ambedkar leading the way.

Aslan seems to acknowledge this: “In almost every interview I did about the show I talked at length about the issue underlying the episode, including the fluidity of the caste system, the problems inherent amongst the untouchable class, and how devout Hindus of all stripes are working tirelessly to overcome both.”

Discussions on politically explosive issues, be it caste or nationalism, can turn violent quickly. In late February, a seminar on nationalism at Delhi University was set upon by a mob – members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, to which Prime Minister Narendra Modi belongs. Scores of professors and students were trapped as the mob rained bricks and stones and as the police stood by as mute spectators.

The NRIs with their knickers in a twist about Aslan’s show somehow never speak out as vociferously against the egregious violations of free speech and human rights in their home country.

The allegation that Aslan’s Varanasi episode perpetuated negative stereotypes, potentially leading to hate crimes in the xenophobic climate in the US, has an ironic twist. The assailant who shot at two Indians recently, killing one, was under the impression that they were Muslims – he was emboldened by the Muslim travel ban enacted by Donald Trump, a ban endorsed by a number of Right-wing Hindus, including Shalabh Kumar and the Republican Hindu Coalition, who berated CNN for airing the show.

As Sigal Samuel writes in the Atlantic:

“Reza Aslan’s new show has come at the best possible time and the worst possible time. Some say the show makes various religions seem less foreign, a corrective that Americans desperately need under Donald Trump. Others say the show exoticizes religious minorities, a danger we can ill afford under, well, Donald Trump… Both views are right, to some degree. Oddly, the two contradictory effects spring from Aslan’s single stated goal: to show that all religions are, at their core, expressions of the same faith and the same existential questions. That makes Believer an interesting object lesson in the risks of trying to make religion relatable.”

In the second half of the segment, we see followers of Aghoreshwar Bhagwan Ramji tending to the vulnerable and disenfranchised, including lepers and orphans. In the Aghor tradition, a sadhaka who has gone through all the stages of Aghor and then returned to society for the benefit of others is called an Aghoreshwar – a concept similar to that of the Bodhisattva in Buddhism. Even though an Aghoreshwar remains above and beyond all social and material illusions, distinctions and categories, they can still bring social reforms into effect. They work for the benefit of all sentient beings, especially those on the margins like underprivileged women and Dalits.

The outrage over Aslan’s was basically a tempest in a teapot which shed light on the chasm between the anodyne Hinduism propagated by sections of the Indian diaspora and the infinitely more complex and gritty reality on the ground. It’s time for myopic NRIs and votaries of Hindutva to embrace the teeming cauldron of contradictions that is India and engage with it on a visceral level, or risk being frozen in permanent stasis. I for one look forward to seeing the mini-series in its entirety. If the remaining episodes are as provocative as the first one, they should not be missed.

https://scroll.in/magazine/831947/tempest-in-a-teapot-a-rebuttal-to-reza-aslans-critics-from-someone-whos-stayed-with-aghoris

CNN film on obscure sect angers some Hindus in US

Times of India
Chidanand Rajghatta
March 7, 2017

WASHINGTON: With their matted locks, naked ash-caked bodies, and bizarre rituals that purportedly includes cannibalism, the secretive and mystical Aghori mendicants constitute a miniscule fraction of professed Hindus in India, barely even known within the country.

Bumped into prime time by CNN to ostensibly showcase the 'world's most fascinating faith-based groups,' a documentary on the mystical sect that opened the series on Spiritually Curious Believer with host Reza Aslan has aghast many Indian community leaders and Hindu organisations in the US. They say it comes at a dangerous time for immigrants when they are already unfairly caricatured and misrepresented.

"It is unbelievably reckless of CNN to be pushing sensational and grotesque images of bearded brown men and their morbid and deathly religion at a time when the United States is living through a period of unprecedented concern and fear," Vamsee Juluri, a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco, wrote in a commentary as outrage swept through the Hindu Indian community in US over the documentary.

Accusing the network of perpetuating a 'very racist, colonial era discourse of dehumanization and even demonization,' Juluri said it was callous on part of CNN and Reza Aslan, who is an Iranian-American religious studies scholar, to be 'oblivious to the kind of discomfort and even danger that images like this could create for South Asians, Sikhs, Muslims and other brown people in America.' Several immigrants from India have been attacked in recent weeks in the US, and civil liberties groups have reported a spike in hate crimes.

Calling for all Hindus worldwide to boycott CNN, which he called 'Clinton News Network,' Shalabh Kumar, the Indian-American businessman-supporter of President Trump, characterized the program as 'disgusting attack on Hindus for supporting @POTUS.'

On his part, Aslan maintained that the show was about the Aghori and not Hinduism. But that did not mollify Hindu commentators, including members of the Hindu-American Foundation (HAF) who had an opportunity to preview the film, and who pointed out that it devoted 'copious footage to highlighting stereotypical and sensationalized presentations of Hinduism.'

But after the producers indicated they intended to proceed with the screening despite anticipating protests from the Hindu community leaders, the HAF apparently advised its members to watch the documentary and respond civilly and appropriately, an approach that agitated the more hardline members of the community.

In fact, in its interaction with Aslan, the HAF asked him if there would be an episode of Believer showcasing Aslan's own faith, Islam. Aslan's response: the producers originally intended to shoot an episode featuring the Ashura festival in Pakistan. Everything was scripted, scouted, and ready to go. But no one would insure the production to shoot — at least at a price that didn't break the show's budget. The episode was abandoned.

If and when there's a second series of Believer, Aslan assured them that Islam would definitely be included.

But it was not just Hindu-Indians who panned the documentary; at least one TV critic also lit into it from a professional perspective. "Many of the groups and leaders featured here are so fringe that their bizarre philosophies and theatrics distract from Aslan's main mission- to demystify lesser understood faiths and find a commonality that makes us all believers in something," wrote LA Times reviewer Lorraine Ali.

"The research and scene-setting- in this installment, where Aslan explains the caste system, its relation to the Hindu religion and interviews scholars and people on the street- is when the show is at its best. But when it leads to him hanging out in a meditation den, lit like a rave, with an attention-seeking guru who drinks honey out of human skulls, the journey is more about sensationalism than true discovery,'' she added.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/cnn-film-on-obscure-sect-angers-some-hindus-in-us/articleshow/57500159.cms