Quotes by Reza Aslan

About Reza Aslan:

Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American writer, scholar of religions, and professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. His educational background is in religious studies and the history of religion, and includes a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has written two books on religion: No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Aslan is a member of the American Academy of Religion.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

[...] there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy [...]

Reza Aslan

[...] pluralism implies religious tolerance, not unchecked religious freedom.

Reza Aslan

[Islam] is the dynamic conviction that a person's spiritual and worldly responsibilities are one and the same, that an individuals duty to the community is indistinguishable from his or her duty to God.

Reza Aslan

The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it.

Reza Aslan

All these schools of though gradually transformed into legal institutions, the diversity of ideas and freedom of opinion that characterized their early development gave way to rigid formalism, strict adherence to precedent, and an almost complete stu...

Reza Aslan

Muhammad was not yet establishing a new religion; he was calling for sweeping social reforms. He was not yet preaching monotheism; he was demanding economic justice.

Reza Aslan

Certainly the shahadah contained an important theological innovation, but that innovation was not monotheism. With this simple profession of faith, Muhammad was declaring to Mecca that the God of the heavens and the earth required no intermediate wha...

Reza Aslan

Paul may be an excellent source for those interested in the early formation of Christianity, but he is a poor guide for uncovering the historical Jesus.

Reza Aslan

This is an extremely difficult matter for modern readers of the gospels to grasp, but Luke never meant for his story about Jesus's birth at Bethlehem to be understood as historical fact. Luke would have had no idea what we in the modern world even me...

Reza Aslan

Scattered across the Roman Empire, it was only natural for the gospel writers to distance themselves from the Jewish independence movement by erasing, as much as possible, any hint of radicalism or violence, revolution or zealotry, from the story of ...

Reza Aslan

...most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality. The two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in what , than in what it . It would have b...

Reza Aslan

Those who did know Jesus - those who followed him into Jerusalem as its king and helped him cleanse the Temple in God's name, who were there when he was arrested and who watched him die a lonely death - played a surprisingly small role in defining th...

Reza Aslan

Paul's portrayal of Jesus as Christ may sound familiar to contemporary Christians—it has since become the standard doctrine of the church—but it would have been downright bizarre to Jesus's Jewish followers. The transformation of the Nazarean int...

Reza Aslan

Like most people born into a religious tradition, my faith was as familiar to me as my skin, and just as disregardable.

Reza Aslan

The choice between James’s vision of a Jewish religion anchored in the Law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome, and Paul’s vision of a Roman religion that divorced itself from Jewish provincialism and required n...

Reza Aslan

Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single passage of scripture or prophecy about the promised messi...

Reza Aslan

Thus it is written that the messiah would suffer and rise again on the third day," Jesus instructs his disciples (Luke 24:44–46). Except that nowhere is any such thing written: not in the Law of Moses, not in the prophets, not in the Psalms. In the...

Reza Aslan

How one in the modern world views Jesus's miraculous actions is irrelevant. All that can be known is how the people of his time viewed them. And therein lies the historical evidence. For while debates raged within the early church over who Jesus was�...

Reza Aslan

The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus's head as he writhed in pain—"King of the Jews"—was called a titulus and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who hung on a cross received a plaque declaring the specif...

Reza Aslan

Jesus was surely not the first exorcist to walk the shores of the Sea of Galilee. In first-century Palestine, professional wonder worker was a vocation as well established as that of woodworker or mason, and far better paid. Galilee especially abound...

Reza Aslan

Author Bio

  • NameReza Aslan
  • DescriptionWriter, scholar
  • AliasesRaza Aslan; Riza Aslan
  • BornMay 3, 1972
  • CountryIran
  • ProfessionWriter