Seeking to defend his Islamic faith from forces of “ignorance and hate,” Aslan’s book denounces the “rising anti-Muslim vehemence that has become so much a part of the mainstream media’s discourse about the Middle East.” Purporting to demonstrate that Islam and its predecessor monotheisms, Christianity and Judaism, are entirely compatible and need not clash with one another, Aslan argues that the message of Islam, as intended by its founder, the Prophet Mohammed, is a “revolutionary message of moral accountability and social egalitarianism.” As Middle East Forum Fellow Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi wrote in 2013, Aslan’s book constitutes “not scholarship, but apologetics replete with misinformation.” For example, Al-Tamimi writes: In 2005 Aslan published his first book, No god but God, an international bestseller that was updated and re-released in 2011 and was translated into at least seventeen languages. government ought to conduct diplomacy he has similarly exhorted the United States to negotiate with the jihad terror group Hamas he has praised Hezbollah as “the most dynamic political and social organization in Lebanon” and in 2011 he called it “a good thing” that the Muslim Brotherhood “will have a significant role to play in post-Mubarak Egypt.” For instance, Aslan has described Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who explicitly called for the destruction of Israel, as a liberal reformer with whom the U.S. Over the years, he has openly supported a number of extremist Muslim figures and organizations. In addition to his academic duties, Aslan serves on the advisory board of the National Iranian American Council, a lobbying group for the theocratic, anti-Semitic government in Tehran. He was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Iowa (2000-2003), and a Professor of Religion at Drew University (2012-13).

Today Aslan is a tenured Professor of Creative Writing at UC-Riverside. in Sociology from UC-Santa Barbara in 2009. Aslan subsequently obtained a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University in 1999, a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from the University of Iowa in 2002, and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Santa Clara University in 1995, he decided to convert back to Islam. Raised as a Muslim, Aslan converted to evangelical Christianity at the age of 15. His family fled to the United States in 1979, to escape Ayatollah Khomeini‘s Iranian Revolution, and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. Reza Aslan was born in Iran on May 3, 1972.

* Characterized conservative broadcaster Rush Limbaugh as “a curse upon this nation, a purveyor of hatred and racism who’s at the very least indirectly responsible for the mass suffering of countless people” * Referred to President Donald Trump as a “piece of sh**,” “an embarrassment to America,” “a stain on the presidency,” and “an embarrassment to humankind” * Board member of the National Iranian American Council

* Professor of creative writing at University of California, Riverside * Iranian-American writer, scholar of religious studies, and television host

Start date rough draft with reza aslan