Reza Aslan

Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American author, religion scholar, and public intellectual. He was born in Tehran in 1972 and emigrated with his family to the United States after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. He holds a doctorate in the sociology of religion from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.

His bestselling books include No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (2005), which became one of the most widely read popular accounts of Islamic history and theology; and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013), which was a major commercial success. He is also the author of Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization (2010) and God: A Human History (2017).

Aslan is primarily a religion scholar and public communicator rather than a specialist on contemporary Iranian politics. His commentary on Iran is typically framed from a moderate-to-dovish perspective, opposing military intervention and sanctions escalation and contextualizing IRI behavior within broader patterns of religious nationalism. He produced the CNN docuseries Believer (2017) exploring religious traditions around the world.

He was a board member of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) for several years, which is relevant context for understanding his Iran policy positioning.