{"id":108,"date":"2010-11-09T14:01:15","date_gmt":"2010-11-09T14:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/11\/aziz-ansari-non-muslim.html"},"modified":"2010-11-09T14:01:15","modified_gmt":"2010-11-09T14:01:15","slug":"aziz-ansari-non-muslim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/11\/aziz-ansari-non-muslim.html","title":{"rendered":"Aziz Ansari, non-Muslim"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ansari.jpg\"The president’s Gandhian pilgrimage<\/a>
\nto India has got me thinking about the way prominent Indian-Americans
\ntend to efface their religious past. OK, so maybe there was no way Bobby
\nJindal could have gotten elected governor of Louisiana as a Hindu or
\nNikki Haley governor of South Carolina as a Sikh. But what about
\ncomedian Aziz Ansari, who has half a million people following his
\nTwitter feed? He famously jokes about doing unspeakable things to
\nfoodstuffs but try to invoke his Muslim antecedents and it’s like you’ve
\ntrespassed against all that is holy. <\/p>\n

Michael Schur (of the NBC sitcom in which Ansari appears) was quoted by David Itzkoff as doing just that In a New York Times <\/i>piece<\/a> last June–prompting excision of the offending line with the following correction:<\/p>\n

In an earlier version of this article, Michael
\nSchur, the co-creator of “Parks and Recreation,” partly described Mr.
\nAnsari as a Muslim. Mr. Ansari describes himself as an atheist<\/span>.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Better
\nan atheist than a Muslim these days. What Ansari wants to be known as
\nis just “South Asian,” and that’s all that Kalefa Sanneh tags him with
\nin his November 1 New Yorker<\/i> profile<\/a>. So Ansari grew up “South Asian” in South Carolina? That’s it?<\/p>\n

Or take the following passage:<\/p>\n

It
\nwas a hot summer day in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and Ansari was
\nsquinting at the lanes of traffic on Old Fort Parkway. “I thought I was
\ngoing to die crossing the street to go to Chick-fil-A,” he said. Ansari
\nwas in town to perform at Bonnaroo, the annual music-and-arts festival,
\nwhich draws nearly a hundred thousand people to a square mile of
\nfarmland half an hour down the highway, in a town called Manchester. “In
\nObserve and Report,” the film starring Seth Rogen, Ansari played a
\nmoisterurizer salesman named Saddamn, who responds to an accusation of
\nterrorism with a reasonable question: “Why the fuck would I flow up
\nChick-fil-A? It’s fucking delicious!” It turns out that Ansari agrees
\nwith this assessment (the line in the film was his idea)…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since Park51 blew over, Murfreesboro has become ground zero of anti-mosque agitation<\/a> in America, but Kafela passes up the chance to make a connection.<\/p>\n

My
\ncolleague Homayra Ziad, who has made a study of Muslim comedians, notes
\nthat American culture does not yet have a place for the “cultural
\nMuslim.” That goes for the “cultural Hindu” and the “cultural Sikh” as
\nwell. Cultural Jews there are aplenty. I say it’s time for the South
\nAsians to step up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The president’s Gandhian pilgrimage to India has got me thinking about the way prominent Indian-Americans tend to efface their religious past. OK, so maybe there was no way Bobby Jindal could have gotten elected governor of Louisiana as a Hindu or Nikki Haley governor of South Carolina as a Sikh. But what about comedian Aziz…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nAziz Ansari, non-Muslim - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/11\/aziz-ansari-non-muslim.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Aziz Ansari, non-Muslim - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The president’s Gandhian pilgrimage to India has got me thinking about the way prominent Indian-Americans tend to efface their religious past. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}