Reza Aslan

Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American writer and scholar of religion, born in Tehran in 1972. ¹ He is the author of No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam and of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, and the host of the CNN series Believer. ¹

Aslan was born in Tehran on 3 May 1972, and his family fled Iran to the United States in 1979, around the Iranian Revolution; he grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. ¹ Born into a Twelver Shia Muslim family, he converted to evangelical Christianity at the age of fifteen and converted back to Islam the summer before attending Harvard. ¹ He took a bachelor's degree in religious studies at Santa Clara University, a master's degree at Harvard Divinity School, an MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a doctorate in sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. ¹ He married the entrepreneur Jessica Jackley in 2011, and they have four children. ¹

Aslan has named his own tradition in his own words. In a 2013 interview he said: "I'm definitely a Muslim and Sufism is the tradition within Islam that I most closely adhere to." ² In 2019 he answered a question about his religion: "Muslim. The tradition in Islam I follow is Sufism." ³ On those two statements the museum records his faith as Sufi, self-identified; The Guardian's 2005 description of him as "a Shia by persuasion" is a journalistic characterization, and his family's Twelver background is not the basis of the record. ¹

Aslan's first book, No God but God (2005), describes the history of Islam and argues for a liberal interpretation of the faith; it has been widely translated. ¹ His Zealot (2013), a historical account of the life of Jesus, was a bestseller, and he has also written Beyond Fundamentalism, God: A Human History and An American Martyr in Persia. ¹ He co-founded the media company BoomGen Studios, hosted the CNN spiritual travel series Believer, and served as an executive producer on the HBO series The Leftovers. ¹ He is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. ⁴

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