Experts
Reza Aslan
Professor of Islamic Studies, UC Riverside
Recent Activity
Obama is cutting off money for groups that promote democracy in Iran, but Reza Aslan says he and most other young Iranians struggling for change there are glad the U.S. is keeping its measly $85 million. When I heard President Obama had decided to...
October 27, 2009, 1:31 AM
This Friday at 5PM, PBS is airing the series premiere of WHO SPEAKS FOR ISLAM hosted by Ray Suarez, which explores Islam in an age when Muslim extremists are laying claim to the religion. As Suarez interviews an elite panel of researchers, scholars,...
October 21, 2009, 10:58 PM
Not such a bad idea, talking to rogue nations: In one day of negotiations, Iran has relented on nuclear inspections and shipping enriched uranium. Reza Aslan says it's not a bad start, though the most intractable issues lie ahead. Maybe President...
October 2, 2009, 6:46 AM
Washington and Tehran may be playing down the significance of Thursday's talks, but without a real military option and with no guarantee sanctions will work, these negotiations are all we have left. Forget about the secret nuclear sites, the missile...
September 30, 2009, 11:29 PM
Ignore the Iranian president's vile rhetoric about the Holocaust. It's his clever way of distracting us from what a lousy president he is. Iran's presumptive president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, heads to New York today to once again address the United...
September 22, 2009, 10:46 PM
Dr. Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is a columnist at the Daily Beast. Reza Aslan has degrees in Religions from Santa Clara University, Harvard University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, where he was named the Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, and the Pacific Council on International Policy. He serves on the board of directors for both the Ploughshares Fund, which gives grants for peace and security issues, Abraham's Vision, an interfaith peace organization, and PEN USA.
Aslan's first book is the New York Times Bestseller, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, which has been translated into thirteen languages, short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award in the UK, and nominated for a PEN USA award for research Non-Fiction. His most recent book is How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror, followed by an edited anthology, Words Without Borders: Writings from the Middle East, which we will be published by Norton in 2010. Aslan is Cofounder and Chief Creative Officer of BoomGen Studios, a hub for creative content from and about the Middle East, as well as Editorial Executive of Mecca.com. Born in Iran, he now lives in Los Angeles where he is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.
