Reza Aslan (, ; born May 3, 1972) is an Iranian-American scholar of sociology, writer, and television host.
A convert to evangelical Christianity from Shia Islam as a youth, Aslan eventually reverted to Islam but continued to write about Christianity. He has written five books on religion: No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam; Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization; Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth; God: A Human History; and in 2022 An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville.
Aslan has worked for television, including a documentary series exploring world religions on CNN called Believer, and served as an executive producer on the HBO drama series The Leftovers. Aslan is a member of the American Academy of Religion and the International Qur'anic Studies Association. He is a professor of creative writing at University of California, Riverside, and a board member of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).
Background Aslan's family came to the United States from Tehran in 1979, fleeing the Iranian Revolution. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Aslan says that he "spent the 1980s pretending to be Mexican" due to the amount of discrimination faced by Iranian Americans.The Washington Post He attended Del Mar High School in San Jose, and graduated class of 1990. In the early 1990s, Aslan taught courses at De La Salle High School in Concord, California.
Aslan holds a B.A. in religious studies from Santa Clara University, a Master of Theological Studies (MTS) from Harvard Divinity School, a Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) in fiction writing from the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His 2009 dissertation, "Global Jihadism as a Transnational Social Movement: A Theoretical Framework", discusses contemporary Muslim political activism.
In August 2000, while serving as the Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Aslan was a visiting faculty member in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Iowa.
Aslan was the 2012–13 Wallerstein Distinguished Visiting professor at the Drew University Center on Religion, Culture & Conflict.
An Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from 2012 to 2013, he is also a member of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and the Pacific Council on International Policy. He has served as Legislative Assistant for the Friends Committee on National Legislation in Washington D.C., and was elected President of Harvard's Chapter of the World Conference of Religions for Peace. Aslan also serves on the board of directors of the Ploughshares Fund, which gives grants for peace and security issues, PEN Center USA, a writer's advocacy group, and he serves on the national advisory board of The Markaz (formerly the Levantine Cultural Center), a program to promote peace between Americans and the Arab/Muslim world. He also serves on the board of trustees for the Chicago Theological Seminary and is on the advisory board of the Yale Humanist Community.
Religious views Aslan was born into a Twelver Shia Muslim family. He converted to evangelical Christianity at the age of 15, and converted back to Islam the summer before attending Harvard. Aslan completed his Harvard degree in 1999. In 2005, The Guardian called him "a Shia by persuasion". In a 2013 interview with WNYC host Brian Lehrer, Aslan said: "I'm definitely a Muslim and Sufism is the tradition within Islam that I most closely adhere to." In a 2013 article in The Washington Post, Aslan stated: "It's not [that] I think Islam is correct and Christianity is incorrect. It's that all religions are nothing more than a language made up of symbols and metaphors to help an individual explain faith." In 2014, in an interview with Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, Aslan described Islam as:
a man-made institution. It's a set of symbols and metaphors that provides a language for which to express what is inexpressible, and that is faith. It's symbols and metaphors that I prefer, but it's not more right or more wrong than any other symbols and metaphors. It's a language; that's all it is.
Career
Writing Aslan has published four books, edited two anthologies, and frequently writes for different media outlets.
Books No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam is a non-fiction book published in 2005. The book describes the history of Islam and argues for a liberal interpretation of the Islamic religion. It blames Western imperialism and self-serving misinterpretations of Islamic law by past scholars for the current controversies within Islam, challenging the "Clash of Civilizations" thesis.
How to Win a Cosmic War (a.k.a. Beyond Fundamentalism) In 2009, Aslan published his second book, How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of Terror. The next year, it was re-released in paperback as Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization. The book is both a study of the ideology fueling Al Qaeda, the Taliban and like-minded militants throughout the Muslim world, and an exploration of religious violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Aslan argues that the United States is fighting a similar war by infusing the war on terror with its religiously polarizing rhetoric. This war, he asserts, cannot be won.
Aslan refers to Al Qaeda's jihad against the West as "a cosmic war", distinct from holy war, in which rival religious groups are engaged in an earthly battle for material goals. "A cosmic war is like a ritual drama in which participants act out on earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in the heavens." American rhetoric of "war on terrorism", Aslan says, is in precise "cosmic dualism" to Al Qaeda's jihad. Aslan distinguishes Islamism and Jihadism. Islamists have legitimate goals and can be negotiated with, unlike Jihadists, who dream of an idealized past of a pan-Islamic, borderless "religious communalism". Aslan's prescription for winning the cosmic war is not to fight but to engage moderate Islamic political forces in the democratic process. "Throughout the Middle East, whenever moderate Islamist parties have been allowed to participate in the political process, popular support for more extremist groups has diminished."
The New Yorker called Beyond Fundamentalism a "thoughtful analysis of America's War on Terror". The Washington Post added that it "offers a very persuasive argument for the best way to counter jihadism."
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Aslan's book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013) is an historical account of the life of Jesus, which analyzes the various religious perspectives on Jesus, as well as the creation of Christianity. In the book, Aslan argues that Jesus was a political, rebellious, and eschatological Jew whose proclamation of the coming kingdom of God was a call for regime change to end Roman hegemony over Roman Judea and end a corrupt and oppressive aristocratic priesthood.
God: A Human History In this book, published by Random House in 2017, Aslan explains in an accessible scholarly style the history of religion and a theory of why and how humans started thinking about supernatural beings and eventually God.
An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville On October 11, 2022, W. W. Norton & Company published Aslan's book about Howard Baskerville. Kirkus Reviews called it "an intriguing read that breathes life into a pivotal moment of Persian/Iranian history".
Other writing Aslan has written articles for The Daily Beast as a contributing editor. He has also written for various newspapers and periodicals, including the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post, Slate, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The Nation, and The Christian Science Monitor.
Work as editor Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East, an anthology he edited and published, appeared in 2011. In collaboration with Words Without Borders, Aslan worked with a team of three regional editors and seventy-seven translators, amassing a collection of nearly 200 pieces originally written in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkish, many presented in English for the first time.
Muslims and Jews in America: Commonalities, Contentions, and Complexities (2011) co-edited with Abraham's Vision founder Aaron J. Hahn Tapper, is a collection of essays exploring contemporary Jewish–Muslim relations in the United States and the distinct ways in which these two communities interact with one another in that context.
Business ventures Aslan Media Aslan founded Aslan Media, a media platform offering alternative coverage of the Middle East and its global diaspora communities.
BoomGen Studios In 2006, Aslan partnered with Iranian American cinematographer and producer Mahyad Tousi to create BoomGen Studios, a studio and production company focused on bringing stories from and about the Middle East to American audiences. Projects that they consulted on include National Geographic's Amreeka; Disney's Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and the Broadway adaptation of Aladdin; the Weinstein Company's Miral; Relativity Media's Desert Dancer; Fork Films' The Trials of Spring; Jon Stewart's directorial debut Rosewater; and 2014 Oscar-nominated documentary The Square.
Of Kings and Prophets In January 2015, BoomGen announced that ABC picked up its biblical epic, Of Kings and Prophets, a dramatic retelling of the central story in the Hebrew Bible: the story of King David from shepherd to king. The series followed an ensemble of characters, including Saul and David, the successive Kings of Israel, their families, and their political rivals. Of Kings and Prophets was set in the Kingdom of Israel but filmed in Cape Town, South Africa. Aslan, Tousi, and Jason Reed served as executive producers on the show.
TV projects The Leftovers In 2015, Aslan joined the HBO series The Leftovers as a consulting producer for both its second and third seasons. Aslan was integral to shaping protagonist Kevin Garvey's season two character arc.
Rough Draft In March 2016, cable network Ovation premiered Rough Draft with Reza Aslan, a fast-paced talk show featuring Aslan conversing with critically acclaimed authors and writers in film, TV, and journalism.
Believer In 2015, Aslan began production on the "spiritual travel series" Believer, a documentary series that follows Aslan as he immerses himself and experiences various religious traditions internationally, focusing on sects considered fringe and disreputable by larger religions. The program, which Aslan compared to Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown was part of CNN's original programming lineup and premiered in March 2017.
The first episode focused on the Aghori sect of Hinduism. Aslan was accused of sensationalism and anti-Hinduism when Aslan ate part of a human brain while meeting Aghori sadhus. The United States India Political Action Committee said in a statement that "[w]ith multiple reports of hate-fueled attacks against people of Indian origin from across the U.S., the show characterizes Hinduism as cannibalistic, which is a bizarre way of looking at the third largest religion in the world." Vamsee Juluri, professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco, described the episode as "reckless, racist, and anti-immigrant", while Aseem Shukla of the Hindu American Foundation accused Aslan of being "poorly informed", circulating "common stereotypical misconceptions" about Hinduism and indulging in "religion porn" "to grab ratings", with the "most clichéd, spurious conflations of the Hindu religion with the caste system".