- [Narrator] Production and distribution of City Club forums on Ideastream Public Media are made possible by, PNC, and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.

(bell dings) - Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It is Friday, June 16th.

I'm Jeff St. Clair, host and producer at Ideastream Public Media.

Today's forum is the inaugural Siddiq Forum on the Islamic World.

The Annual Forum will celebrate leaders, thinkers, visionaries, and advocates whose work ensures the future of our democratic republic is truly inclusive and multicultural.

In that spirit, we're joined this afternoon by Reza Aslan, author of "An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville."

His latest book, Reza tells the extraordinary journey of Howard Baskerville, a young missionary from South Dakota, who studied at Princeton, and in 1907, landed in the middle of a democratic revolution in Persia, which is now Iran.

If the title of the book wasn't enough of a spoiler, Baskerville does die, during the siege of Tabriz.

He was declared an American martyr for the country.

Using Baskerville's life as a touchpoint, Aslan examines the power and allure of freedom and democracy, and examines how Americans view these ideals outside their own country.

Reza Aslan is a renowned writer, commentator, professor, Emmy and Peabody nominated producer, and scholar of religion, a recipient of the prestigious James Joyce Award.

He's the author of three international bestsellers, one of which we are discussing today.

Aslan is also co-founder of BoomGen Studios, a studio and production company.

It's focused on bringing stories from and about the Middle East to American audiences.

His production credits include the acclaimed HBO series, "The Leftovers," and the CBS Comedy, "United States of Al," set in Columbus, Ohio, by the way.

He's also co-host of the podcast "Metaphysical Milkshake" with Rainn Wilson.

If you have questions for Reza Aslan, you can text to the number here.

It's 3305415794, okay?

3305415794 for text.

You can also tweet your question @thecityclub, and City Club staff will try to work it into the second half of the program.

Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Reza Aslan.

(audience applauds) - Thank you.

- I just wanna get started.

You're from Iran.

You were born in Iran.

Your family moved here after the Islamic Revolution, but tell us a little bit more about your background, your life, your history.

- Yeah, we left Iran in '79, post-Revolution '79, before the creation of the Islamic Republic and that sort of post-revolutionary chaos, where I think a lot of Iranians were wanting to leave to figure out what was going to happen.

And my father was certainly one of those people.

My father was a very anti-religious man.

He was someone who never trusted anything that anyone wearing a turban had to say about any topic.

And so I think when Khomeini returned to Iran, he thought to himself, "Let's leave for a while just to see what happens."

And of course, that was 40 something years ago and my father was right, which he reminded me about pretty much every day.

- Yeah.

(audience laughs) - We came to the US, we actually arrived in Oklahoma at first, and I think that was because my father had done a semester abroad at a university there, and he just kind of assumed Oklahoma was America, which isn't wrong necessarily.

But after a couple of years realizing America is actually quite larger than just Oklahoma, we headed west like so many do.

And I grew up mostly in the Bay Area in the 1980s, which wasn't the best time in the world to be either Iranian or Muslim in America, as opposed to now when it's fantastic.

(audience and Jeff laugh) And this was at the height of the Iran hostage crisis, 444 days, in which Americans were being held hostage in the embassy in Iran, and as a seven year old boy trying his hardest to just kind of fit in, it was not easy.

In fact, I've mentioned this a few times, but I spent a good part of the 1980s pretending to be Mexican.

- Yeah.

- Which tells you how little I understood about America.

(audience laughs) - Not much better?

- It didn't help at all.

It didn't help even a little bit.

Years later, a friend of mine said, "Why didn't you say Italian?"

I was like, "Yeah, it didn't occur to me."

But it was an interesting experience being here and growing up Iranian and Muslim in the US and really understanding the way in which identity and culture and religion, ethnicity, nationality, all these different markers, and the ways that we sort of define who we are, how malleable they can be, and how much they are indebted to the way that others look at you.

And that's something that's always kind of infiltrated my mind.

And it's a thing that I've always wanted to write about and think about and study.

I knew from a very early age that I wanted to be a writer.

I don't have a memory of ever wanting to be anything else, but this may seem familiar to some people in the audience.

It's very difficult as an immigrant to say to your mother, "I would like to be a writer."

That's not a real job.

You can be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer.

Yeah.

And so I said, "Well, okay, I'll go and study religion.

I'm fascinated by religion.

I'll become a professor.

My mother can still introduce me as doctor."

(audience laughs) It's not real, but still.

And so that's what I did.

I kind of began this life of studying the world's religions, the way in which faith and culture interact, and writing about these great religious figures, whether they be prophets or whether they be missionaries.

It's always been something that's been very fascinating.

I am fascinated and drawn to people who, when confronted with injustice or oppression, activate their faith to do something about it.

That's the story of the Prophet Muhammad.

That's the story of Jesus Christ.

It's the story of Howard Baskerville.

- We'll talk religion in a moment, but I guess we'll first talk a little bit about politics and history.

That it's safe to say very few Americans have ever heard of the story of Howard Baskerville.

- Yeah.

- But growing up in Iran, he was a well-known figure.

- That's right.

- I guess before the Islamic Revolution.

Did that inspire you to write this book?

- Certainly, when I grew up in Iran, Howard Baskerville, his name was everywhere.

There were schools named Howard Baskerville.

There were auditoriums named Howard Baskerville.

There was a street not far from where I grew up in Tehran, called Howard Baskerville.

His tomb is still in Tabriz, the city in which he lived and died.

His death date, April 19th.

It's celebrated April 20th in Iran.

It was a kind of holiday.

People would travel from all over the country to visit his tomb and lay flowers.

There's a museum in Tabriz that has this beautiful golden bust of him and a painting of him.

Baskerville's name was part of our consciousness.

He really was this almost legendary American hero who gave his life for the freedom of Iranians.

Now, I will say you're absolutely right.

Since the '79 revolution, his name has been more or less erased from Iranian consciousness.

All the streets have been renamed, the schools have been renamed.

His tomb is still there, though it's not as frequently visited, as you can imagine.

I told a story backstage, in which I had some friends of mine visit the museum where the Baskerville wing is, and they were being shown it by the docent.

And they asked the docent to tell them a little bit about Howard Baskerville, and the docent couldn't.

The docent didn't really know who Baskerville was, claimed he was some kind of American military advisor.

This is the docent.

This is the person who works at this museum.

So his name has really kind of disappeared, and that's by design.

One quick quota to this story, real quick, is that a friend of mine told me recently, my cousin told me, that there's actually a chain of very popular coffee shops in Tehran called Baskerville, Baskerville Coffee.

- It's a good name.

- Yes.

And it's very popular with Gen Z.

But again, I can't imagine those kids who are sipping lattes there have any idea.

Any more so than we know who Starbucks is?

- Right, from the novel.

- But it's a real shame.

But I will say, what was really shocking, and to your point, is that when I came to America, no one had heard of Howard Baskerville.

I just assumed that he was as lionized a figure in his home country as he was in Iran.

But no, his story had been completely excised from American history.

- Well, you talked about people inspired by higher ideals.

I'm not sure that Baskerville went to Persia at that time, when it was called...

In 1907, knowing that he would become a martyr for that country.

- No.

- Tell us a little bit about how he landed in this incredible time in the history of Persia and Iran, where he ended up joining this revolution.

- Well, he's a 22 year old Christian missionary, born in Nebraska, raised in South Dakota.

And he graduates from Princeton with a degree in Christian ministry.

He's supposed to go back to South Dakota and follow in the footsteps of his father and his grandfather, and his uncle and his older brother, all of whom are Presbyterian ministers.

But he wants this sort of grand adventure first.

And so he decides to apply to become a missionary.

He desperately does not want to go to Persia.

He wants to go to China and Japan, 'cause he's read all these wonderful things about how great everything is there.

Meanwhile, he's reading these dispatches from missionaries in Persia, basically calling it the worst place on earth.

My favorite is a quote from a missionary named Justin Perkins who says that, "All the sins of the decalogue are ever present in Persia."

And so this 22 year old kid, this is the last place he wants to go, of course, he gets assigned to Persia.

So he goes there kind of kicking and screaming, just does not want to have anything to do with the country or its people, and this kind of beautiful moment, he arrives and almost instantly realizes that everything that he had heard was a lie.

He... - [Jeff] He falls in love with the country.

- Absolutely falls in love with the country, the culture, the people, the food, obviously.

I mean, it is the best cuisine in the world.

I think we all can agree on that.

And he instantly becomes the most popular teacher at this missionary school where he is teaching.

Partly that has to do with the fact that he is by far the youngest teacher there, but still.

And he has this grand adventure that he had always dreamed of.

And meanwhile, as you rightly say, he, unbeknownst to him, shows up in the middle of this revolution, the very first democratic revolution in the Middle East.

A revolution that had begun five, or I'm sorry, two years earlier in 1905.

A revolution, the purpose of which was to create a constitution, a progressive document that laid out the rights and privileges of all Iranians, and to elect a parliament to have a legislative body that would have the ability not only to pass laws, but much more importantly to curb the unchecked authority of the Shah, the King of Iran.

And those things happened in the end of 1906, beginning of 1907.

Iran ratified a constitution.

It's an incredibly progressive document, and had its first election for a legislature.

Just to kind of fast forward on this story very quickly, because it doesn't end there, the Shah who signed that constitution and allowed for the legislature died three days later, and was replaced by his 37 year old son, a man by the name of Muhammad Ali.

Not that Muhammad Ali, obviously.

And this guy, not a good guy.

(laughs) We've had some miserable, miserable people on that throne, and this is kind of one of the top.

He immediately launches a war against the revolutionaries, tears up the constitution, rolls his Russian cannons to the House of Parliament and destroys it with the parliamentarians still inside.

In fact, it was in the middle of a session.

- Yeah.

- And then begins this war where he uses his Russian trained troops to take back the country for the crown.

Every city, every province, except for one.

This one small city in the northwest called Tabriz, and that is the city that Howard Baskerville suddenly arrives in, in the midst of this entire sort of historical moment.

- Yeah, let's take it up to...

I mean, the title is The Martyr.

So I think the key, the climactic moment of the book, really is the siege of Tabriz.

- Yeah.

- Where the parliamentary forces are being starved out by the Russian backed Shah's army.

- Yeah.

- Surrounding the city for months and months and months.

- Months.

- They're starving, they're eating grass and stuff.

This young American is placed in charge of these like 16 year old freedom fighters.

- Yeah.

- Take us up to that moment of... What inspired Iranians to remember Howard Baskerville?

- Well, he'd been there for about a year and a half, and during that year and a half he was told repeatedly by the church that had sent him there, by the missionary program that was employing him at the school, by the US government that controlled him, that whatever was happening around him, was none of his business.

That he was there to save souls, not lives.

That he was supposed to teach his classes, put his head down, and have nothing to do with this revolution that was taking place around him.

And this was very difficult for him.

And he tried his best, like I said, put his head down and taught, but he couldn't help but be drawn in to this conflict.

And when the siege of Tabriz happens, when he is literally walking over corpses in order to get to class, something just breaks within him.

And he eventually stands before his classroom and he says, "I can't do this anymore.

I cannot ignore the suffering on the streets and come here and teach you, and pretend that everything is okay.

It's not okay.

The only way that I know how to serve this country and the people that I've come to love, is to quit my teaching job, to abandon my missionary post, and to pick up a gun and to go join the fight against the Shah."

And as you rightly say, in this kind of made for Hollywood moment, his students stand up and follow him into the battlefield, which is not good for the school.

- No.

- That's a very bad thing.

And so they try very hard to talk him out of this, but he's resolute, he truly believes that it is his obligation as an American, and most importantly, as a Christian, to do something about the suffering that he is facing, and to fight back against it, to put an end to this suffering.

There's a sort of beautiful moment where the US government sends the consul general, the US consul general onto the battlefield, to talk some sense into this now 24 year old kid.

And the consul general says to him, "You can't do this.

This is not your country.

These are not your people.

This is not your fight.

It's time for you to get on a ship and get back home right now, or we'll have no choice but to arrest you for treason, for going against American interests in the region."

And Baskerville quite famously sweeps his eyes across the battlefield, these people who have come from all over the world to fight in this fight for freedom.

And he says, "The only difference between me and these people, is the place of my birth, and that is a very small difference."

And then he pulls out his passport and hands it over.

At the end, as you rightly say, they decide that they have to try to break this siege.

There's no more food in this city.

People are dying by the dozens every day.

And so he and his students make a fairly full hearty, some would say even suicidal attempt, to break through the siege in an early morning on April 20th.

And they don't get very far.

Baskerville gets shot in the heart.

But the international, sort of, news that comes from that, the story of an American who was killed fighting for the freedom of these Iranians, is so huge and so embarrassing, not to the Shah, the Shah couldn't care less.

But it's so embarrassing to the Russians and the British who were supporting the Shah, that they ultimately forced the Shah to declare a ceasefire to allow humanitarian assistance into the city.

The revolutionaries very smartly take advantage of the ceasefire to march on Tehran and to bring the Shah down from his throne, reestablish the Constitution, rebuild the parliament., and the very first act of the new parliament is to declare this 24 year old Christian missionary from the Black Hills of South Dakota, to be a martyr and a hero for Iran.

And for a hundred and something years that's what he has been.

- Yeah, it is interesting that his sacrifice essentially, even though he was killed and lost that skirmish, did lead to the lifting of the siege.

- It did.

- And the revolution at that time would've died out.

They were losing, they were starving, but it gave them new life, and they ended up establishing a constitutional government that lasted a few years until World War I, which, there were problems.

But it brings us to the bigger question of American ideals of democracy versus the practice.

- Right.

- The government at the time said, "No, we're backing our colonial powers.

We're not gonna get in a tiff with Britain and Russia over this.

We're not gonna get in the way of that."

Decades later, 1953, America backed a coup of the democratically elected government, reinstalled the Shaw, that sort of thing.

This is part of what you're talking about.

- Yeah.

- Is the... And maybe let discuss this a little bit further, what the meaning of this story is for you.

- Well, it's interesting, during the 1905 revolution, the constitutional revolution that Baskerville fought in, I think the Iranians, what they understood about America was that this was a country that had fought for its own independence from a villainous dictator.

And they couldn't understand why America would not support that in Iran.

They just assumed that they would.

And they were told in no uncertain terms that America wanted nothing to do with this conflict.

Not because America had some vested interest in Iran, this was 1907, to be perfectly frank, I don't know if anybody in the State Department could have found Iran on a map.

We didn't care yet.

We didn't care yet.

You're absolutely right.

We certainly didn't want to get in the way of Russia and Britain.

Russia and Britain were on the side of the Shah, "Well, they must have a point."

But the State Department issued a memo essentially saying that America cannot have any interest in supporting the revolutionaries in this conflict.

Again, not for any sort of economic or national security interest, but because as this memo laid out, the idea, the notion that a democracy could actually arise in a Muslim majority country was so absurd, was so beyond the pale, that no American could possibly support it.

And so for that reason, not for any interest, but just 'cause it was dumb, there was no way that any American could support this conflict.

And that is an idea that I think is still very much present in the way that the US government sees, not just the Middle East, not just Muslim majority countries, but much of the world.

- Right, and here's where we get back to religion, where the politics and the religion definitely overlap.

And especially in modern day Iran, it's I guess a theocracy or what, I don't even know.

A Islamic Republic.

- Yeah.

- Our current relations with Iran are not very good.

- Yes.

No, not very good.

- We were concerned about the nuclear program.

We're concerned about their influence on other Middle Eastern countries or in Iraq and Israel and so on.

And then recently the sort of the feminist uprising or whatever's going on, in response to the killing of Mira- - Mahsa.

- Mahsa Amini.

So in this context, we have a better historical understanding, maybe, of America's perspective on Iran.

How does that, I don't know, perception that Islam and freedom are incompatible.

How does that influence where we are moving forward?

- I think it's still very much a prevailing sentiment in the State Department, regardless of who's president or what the political winds have to say.

I think that we have had in this country, in the United States, many centuries in which we have defined ourselves, which is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do in a country made up of immigrants.

We have defined ourselves, primarily, in opposition to others.

It's very difficult to say what it means to be American, but it's pretty easy to say what it isn't.

It's that, we're not those guys.

We're not these guys.

And so it has allowed us to, I think, have this elevated sense of self, an elevated sense of our own democracy and of the stability of our democracy, which, if there's anything good to have come from the last five years or so, it is that it has shattered that sense of self.

That we now understand, "Oh no, no, no.

This is not nearly as stable as we think it is.

That it could go away like that."

- You're talking about American style- - I'm talking American democracy.

That's right, I'm talking about democracy in this country.

That it's extraordinarily fragile and that when it comes to sort of those standards that we ascribed to ourselves, that our commitment to them, here in the US, turns out not to be as strong as we all assumed it was, let alone our commitment to spreading these things to other parts of the world.

And I think that that is a message that was always resonant in large parts of the Middle East, but it is as clear as it's ever been, nowadays.

And I think that when you look at the conflict in Iran, certainly the uprising that is still very much going on right now.

You really can draw a straight line from it to the 1905 revolution.

This was the revolution that Howard Baskerville took part in.

Really set the stage for creating, what I think most global observers would say, is the most robust political culture, certainly in the Middle East, if not in the world.

This is a population that has undergone three major revolutions, major, earth shattering revolutions, and countless, countless uprisings, strikes, protests.

Obviously we're very concerned about what's happening in Iran, ever since the death of Mahsa Amini.

But a few six months before that death, there were mass uprisings across Iran that had to do with the crumbling economy.

So again, I think we from the outside see Iran as this sort of monolithic place where there is this autocratic regime that is absolutely dominating the lives of all Iranians.

And that is partly true, but it does, I think, mask the enormous complexities, the complexities of political thought, the complexities of religious thought that exist in Iran, and that, God willing, will one day give the Iranian people the freedom that they have been fighting for more than a century for.

- We're gonna go to questions in just a few minutes, but I'd kind of like to wrap up this part of the discussion and looking for maybe a solution.

The journalists that are in prison now in Iran, the activists who have been executed over the protests, are accused of being influenced by outside forces.

They're still saying that American agents or whatever, are fomenting the unrest in Iran.

What can we do?

What should maybe American policymakers or thinkers or people who are reading this book, how can we envision a stance in America perhaps, that would benefit the people of Iran?

What could we do?

- It's difficult.

Four and a half decades of mutual animosity and distrust are not going to be resolved very easily.

One can make an argument that America probably doesn't really have a role to play in Iran, but there are countries that do.

There are a number of European countries that have maintained, not just interdependent trade relationships with Iran, but open lines of communication.

And we have great relationships with those countries.

And so I think that a direct American role in Iran at this stage can't do any good, honestly, for anyone.

But working with our allies in the UN and in the European Union, to make sure that there is a mechanism to punish Iran for its poor behavior, but also a mechanism to reward it for behavior that actually does promote the freedom and the loosening of restrictions on its people, that that is how we've always managed to change the behavior of countries that we don't agree with, right?

The way that the United States has managed to maintain relationships with countries that it doesn't have similar interests with, is through the carrot and stick approach.

But we have no carrot in Iran.

We have never had a carrot in Iran.

All we have had for four and a half decades is a stick that just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

And when that is the policy that you have towards the country, it doesn't matter what country it is, you have very limited resources, very limited avenues, for actually affecting any kind of behavior from that country.

So I think for me, the real key to influencing Iran is working through the international community.

That is what President Obama did with the historic P5+1 nuclear agreement.

Got the world to actually agree on a path forward to getting rid of Iran's nuclear weapons capabilities, and possibly even opening up that country to the rest of the world, allowing the people to have that connection that they need in order to actually be empowered to change their own government, to change their own countries.

But obviously we have stepped away from that possibility now and are trying to figure out ways to recreate it in some meaningful way.

But again, I don't think that bilateral relations of any kind, between Iran and the United States, are anywhere on the horizon.

Because of the last four and a half decades.

- Yeah, I have many more questions on sort of that line, but I think we need to open it up to the audience and to our listeners who can text, again, let me give that number.

I'm Jeff St. Clair, just to reintroduce myself, from Ideastream Public Media, and we are talking to Reza Aslan, author of "An American Martyr in Persia."

It's the inaugural Siddiq Forum on the Islamic World , here at the Cleveland City Club.

And we welcome questions from everyone, City Club members, guests, students, and those joining our live stream at cityclub.org.

If you'd like to tweet a question right now, you can tweet @thecityclub.

You can also text at 3305415794.

That's 3305415794, and we'll make sure your question gets taken.

So we are ready for our first question.

- I'm the first one.

- You are.

- Always.

I'm Mr. Malik.

So we've come a long way from the 10 years ago interview with Lauren Green, and you explaining why you wrote a book about Jesus, so thank you for doing that.

- I appreciate it.

- So my question, I know you mentioned something about Islamophobia and almost eradicated from the world and so that aside, but what can we do as Muslims in America to help with that eradication and take it to that next level?

- That's a very good question.

Look, in some ways it goes back to what I was saying before, about the malleability of the American identity.

We have always in our history, defined what it means to be American by finding some other within us, to define ourselves against.

At the dawn of the 20th century, it was mainstream political rhetoric to say that you could not be Catholic and American at the same time.

You cannot possibly have allegiance to both the Pope and the President.

That was standard conversation, political conversation.

We had an entire political party in the United States.

We passed laws in the United States to curb Catholic migration into this country.

But of course, after many, many decades, Catholics are as much a part of the American religious and cultural fabric as you can imagine.

We had a very similar conversation about Jews in mid-century, that being Jewish meant that your allegiances were subject to questioning that you couldn't truly be a American.

We've always found someone within to define ourselves against.

And it's no secret, that over the last couple of decades, that someone has been Muslims.

We are only about 2% of the population of the United States, very small percentage, but we're an active population.

As an immigrant community, the highest levels of literacy and education of any immigrant community in the United States.

And, I hesitate to say this, 'cause it's somewhat gauche, we are absurdly wealthy.

The median household income for a Muslim household in America dwarfs the median household income for a non-Muslim household.

The advertising giant, JWT, last decade said that the disposable income for the Muslim and Middle Eastern community in the United States is almost $2 billion a year.

I say that because, if you're familiar enough with how this country works, money matters, right?

Money matters.

Money is voice apparently now, according to the Supreme Court.

And so I do think that to your question of what do we do?

How do we do it?

It's twofold.

Number one, we do need to be smarter about the way that we use our money/voice, for better or worse, they're the same.

In order to promote the ideals of our community to make sure that the values that we hold dear, which are very much the same as the values of the United States, are promoted in our politics, be they on the national stage or on the local stage.

And conversely that we punish those in the political community, in the business community, who denigrate and dehumanize others because of the color of their skin, because of how they worship, et cetera.

We have the ability to do that, we should do that.

But secondly, and more importantly, when I think about the way in which Catholics and Jews overcame that sort of marginalization that they underwent, they did so by focusing on marginalized communities outside of their own.

When you think about who was at the forefront of the anti-war movement, it was Jews.

Who was at the forefront of the civil rights movement?

Standing hand in hand with black Americans, who were demanding their most basic rights?

Jews.

Who were part of the sort of the groundswell of support for the women's movement, for the LGBTQ movement.

We have to learn as Muslims, that the most effective way to integrate into what it means to be American is to stop thinking about ourselves, and our problems, and our marginalization, and our oppression, and focus on everybody else's.

And we have the means and the ability to do so, but until we learn to take everyone else's cause as our own, we'll always have that sort of patina of otherness.

In this country, the way that you become American is by fighting for other Americans.

- Wow.

Interesting.

Another question?

- Salaam, Dr. Aslan.

My name's Sammy.

So I wrote up my question.

In these sorts of forums, we can talk geopolitics until the cows come home.

But given your training as a sociologist of religion, I'm wondering if you can instead comment on the fact that on one hand, the Iranian people are inheritors of the Persian spiritual tradition, which is arguably the pinnacle of Islamic heritage.

And on the other hand, the tyranny that they face is in the name of a fundamentalist brand of that same religion.

And as a result, you see the increasing abandonment of the Muslim faith, and you have Iranian converts to Christianity named Mohammed.

- [Reza] Yeah.

- I'm wondering what significance that deracination has on the Iranian nation, and more broadly on the Muslim as a whole, in your mind.

- Yeah, it's a great question.

I think on the one hand, it's not that complicated.

In the fifties, sixties and seventies when the Shah was implementing an aggressive secularization program on Iran.

Program in which you couldn't wear the veil in public forums, in which men with beards were being forcibly shaved on the streets.

The opposition to the Shah became Islamic opposition, it became religious opposition.

You suppress religion, guess what happens?

Religion exerts itself in a very muscular form and in this case, ultimately brought the Shah down.

But the flip side is also true.

You're in a situation now in which religion, and a particularly oppressive, draconian version of religion is forced upon the population.

Guess what happens?

It's not complicated.

If you are a parent you know what happens at this point.

- [Jeff] Well, your father, for example.

- My father's a great example of this.

So it is important.

I'm glad that you asked this question, because I think people don't understand how un-Islamic the population of Iran is.

Particularly young Iranians, who have absolutely no interest in religion at all.

It is a deeply irreligious population, but of course it is.

Of course it is.

They are being fed this absolutely hypocritical version of religion.

It is political autocracy in the name of religion.

And so they're turning away from it.

By the way, this is partly why there is this...

It's not really talked about that much outside of Iran, but there is this kind of backlash to religious control, the Islamic Republic, that's happening in the seminaries amongst the younger clerics, who are openly questioning the very, sort of, legitimacy of the Islamic Republic, let alone the value of it.

And even those who may sort of not necessarily disagree with the theology behind it, recognize how destructive it has been in creating an entire generation of Iranians who want absolutely nothing to do with Islam at all, want nothing to do with religion.

So, will those conversations eventually erode clerical control?

I hope so, but I do think that it shouldn't come as a surprise to find out how absolutely irreligious the population in Iran actually is.

- Yes.

Assalamualaikum.

- Walaikum Assalam My question is basically, first of all, let me say this, that you have enlightened us about the historical background of the people of Iran who went through many, many difficult period.

Similarly, today we see in Pakistan, same thing is happening.

And what is your opinion about what might happen down the road?

Thank you.

- Maybe repeat the question.

- Well, the question is, in a lot of ways the conversation that we've been having about Iran, we could have about Pakistan as well.

Pakistan also, from its very beginning, had this problem.

When you call yourself an Islamic republic, you then have to define what you mean by Islamic.

This is a conversation that we're having here in the United States, right?

A third of us, that's more than a hundred million of us, are self-described Christian nationalists.

We believe that America should be a Christian nation.

Until you start saying, "Well, what does that mean?

What does it mean to be a Christian nation?

What does it mean to be an Islamic republic?"

Well, on the one hand, it means that the laws and the mores of the country are steeped in traditional Islam.

But even then you have to stop and say, "Well, what does that mean?

What is traditional Islam?

This is a 1400 year religion that comes in a thousand varieties.

That we don't have anything like a Muslim pope that gets to decide what is and what is not proper Islamic behavior.

Who is and who is not a Muslim."

So again, what we're seeing in Pakistan over these decades, is fundamentally an attempt to define and reconcile this sort of original idea that gave birth to the country in the first place.

Does it mean that it's a Muslim majority country?

Is that all it means?

Does it mean that the laws have to be vetted by some monolithic conception of what Islamic behavior is supposed to be?

Nobody knows.

This is, I think, the problem when you start to mix religion and nationalism, is that religion is infinitely malleable.

Religion is almost by definition whatever a religious person says it is.

Ted Kaczynski is as much a Christian as Martin Luther King is a Christian.

They have almost nothing in common with each other, but each one of them would call themselves Christian.

And how do we sort of reconcile that?

How do we deal with that?

Yeah, I think that the one thing that I feel somewhat optimistic about when it comes to Pakistan is that it has had many, many years of a deep experience with popular sovereignty and with political participation.

And yes, it is true that in each one of those iterations, the military has been the dominant force regardless of who's in charge.

But what that has created is a young, globalized, educated population that has certain expectations that its voice will actually matter, and will not give up that expectation.

And if there is any kind of hope for what the future of Pakistan can be, it really rests within that young generation.

- [Jeff] Another question.

- Assalam Alaikum, thanks for being here.

So as an immigrant coming here as a young kid, this was seen as a land of opportunity, the democratic nation to go and try new things.

You've talked about how a martyr helped a democratic movement and allowed that process to occur.

And you've also shared about using our money and our voice here in this nation to help make change, positive change that we think that we need to see.

But what we're seeing right now in the political climate is laws around anti-BDS movements.

So you're not allowed to use your money or your voice to go counter things.

We're seeing a lack of educational funding.

We're seeing things like alternative facts and people questioning what the actual truth is, no matter how much actual data is available to talk about it.

Knowing all of this in the current climate and your knowledge of world democracies and rises and falls, what can we as Americans do now to try to save our democracy, especially as some of us, or many of us might see it crumbling around us?

- Yeah.

- And if we don't act, there's a high risk that this nation that's lasted for so long might not be in the same state.

- There's no question that we are in a moment of existential crisis in the United States.

And I would say it's even far, far worse than we give ourselves the freedom to think about.

And I think that we are on a precipice, there's no question about it.

I mean, these next couple of years are going to be pivotal in deciding whether this very brief experiment in democracy is actually going to work or not.

That said, I do think it's important to understand how we got here and why we are here.

I've said this now, I think, two or three times.

America is unique in the sense that as a nation of immigrants, we cannot define our identity based on any kind of homogeneity, the way that you can in much of the world, right?

We don't all speak the same language, we don't all have the same ethnicity, we don't all have the same culture.

We come from different places, different worlds, different identities, and I think that in many ways, that is part of the strength of what this country has become.

At the same time, that diversity, which is becoming greater and greater every day, demographers tell us we are a decade, maybe a little bit more, from becoming the first nation on earth to be majority minorities.

That's extraordinary.

I think sometimes even if you've heard that sentence before, I want you to think about it for a minute.

The first nation on earth to be majority minorities is...

If you wanna know how crazy that fact is, take a moment and try to think of what the Second nation would be.

Which is the second?

I mean, it's hard to say.

That's how extraordinary it is.

But at the same time, you can understand how threatening that fact is to people who have had the experience of majority forever, and who have just assumed that this is what it will always be.

They feel as though the privilege that they have taken advantage of, that has been part of their everyday experience for as long as they can remember, is being taken away from them.

They believe that diversity and equity and equality are zero sum games.

That if you get extra rights, then those rights must come away from me somehow.

That I must be giving up my rights in order to give you more rights, which is absurd on its face, even as I say it, you know how absurd it is, and yet this is a very real belief amongst this population.

In those moments, what we always see, whether here it's in the United States or elsewhere, is a kind of snapback.

We see a moment in which when the majority is being confronted by the fact that they will soon no longer be the majority, what do they do?

They react sometimes in violent ways, in extreme ways, in order to maintain what they believe is an existential issue.

So from the very narrow point of history, where we stand right now, I don't want to deny the fact that we are in trouble, but expand your point of view just for a moment.

Look at this moment in time from a historical lens, and what you see is what it actually is.

The death of a white supremacist movement, the last gasps of it, the last attempt to use any mechanism available to it, and because of the system that we live in, there are some mechanisms, in order to maintain that control for as long as possible, knowing that it's over, it's over.

This is not the country of their grandparents any longer.

There's no "Making America Great Again."

There is no going backward.

It's done.

What is about to happen in 10, 12, 15 years is going to happen, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

So I'm not saying don't be afraid, be very afraid, but broaden your perspective a little bit and you'll see that what you are actually witnessing right now is the inevitable progression of American society.

This was in the seeds that created this thing in the first place.

It's just taken 250 years for it to fully sprout.

- So let's wrap things up, Dan Walther.

- The last question comes from a listener via text and brings us back to Baskerville.

"Baskerville's story sounds like it could be a Hollywood movie.

Considering your experience with film and production, should it be?

And is our society ready for it?

- Yes, I think so.

I think the story of a young, idealistic American whose identity is challenged, whose sense of self is challenged, whose idea of a America is challenged, and who, given the opportunity to take advantage of his privilege and go home and be safe, gives up all of his privilege and says, "The suffering of any one person anywhere in the world is the responsibility of all peoples everywhere in the world," and then is willing to die for it.

That's a message that we need today more than ever.

- We need some Baskerville coffee shops.

(all laugh) Well, we've talked religion and politics.

We didn't get to money, but we've hit the two of the big three.

Thank you all so much, and especially, thank you Professor Reza Aslan.

(audience applauds) This was the inaugural Siddiq Forum on the Islamic World, made possible with support from the Siddiq family, thank you so much.

It's also part of the City Club's Authors in Conversation series in partnership with Cuyahoga Arts & Culture, and the Cuyahoga County Public Library.

Thank you to our partners.

Next Tuesday, June 20th, you can catch the City Club back in public square.

Amy Eddings with Ideastream Public Media will lead a conversation with representatives from the city, Greater Cleveland Partnership in downtown Cleveland, to discuss our urban core as a thriving neighborhood.

On Friday, June 23rd, Sam Zarifi, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights will join the City Club for a discussion about the organization's work on reproductive rights, Ukraine, and more.

You can learn about these forums online at cityclub.org.

That brings us to the end of the forum.

Let me find my gavel here.

Thank you once again to Reza Aslan and all of you here.

This is WKSU Ideastream Public Media.

(bell dings) (audience applauds) - [Narrator 2] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

- NR Production and distribution of City Club forums on Ideastream public media are made possible by PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.