Explore Quotes by Reza Aslan

It is no exaggeration to say that Syria holds the key for nearly all of America's foreign policy goals in the Middle East. As Syria goes, so goes the region.

In the history of the prophetic biblical canon that starts with Genesis, the Koran is by far the most tolerant of the views of other religions.

Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways.

Anyone who says that Iran will commit suicide with its nuclear power is a moron and has no business in discussion.

You can be a follower of Jesus and not necessarily be a Christian.

The truth of the matter is that when you write about religion like I do, you're writing about something that people take very seriously.

The idea of literalism in the Bible is a very new phenomenon. In many ways, it's a product of the scientific revolution.

The key to recognizing who Jesus was is to recognize this fundamental truth: He was a Jew.

I have watched Muslims chant 'Death to America!' on the streets of Tehran, then privately beg me to help them get a visa to the United States.

I am a scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament and fluency in Biblical Greek, who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades, who also happens to be Muslim.

I think if you place Jesus firmly in the historical context... you can make very educated hypotheses and guesses about how he lived.

The Jews integrated themselves into American life to the point that the argument that the Jews aren't American sounded so stupid, that people stopped thinking it.

Few Iranians these days go through the fiction of calling themselves 'Persian.' Calling yourself Persian is a way of distancing themselves from Iran.

The Muslim community is completely fractured - it doesn't really exist anymore; the only place it does exist is online.

There's no question that homophobia is rampant among the world's 1.5 billion Muslims - but that doesn't negate the fact that there are huge groups of Muslims who have easily reconciled their faith and sexual orientation, like LGBT people in other faith communities.

Mike Huckabee and indeed many of the Christian conservatives in the U.S. have far more in common with the Muslim Brotherhood than they'd like to admit, in that all of them very much want to see a role of religion in society.

'Zeal' is essentially a compromising devotion to God, a commitment to cleansing the Holy Land of all foreign and pagan presences and to re-establish the kingdom of David as God had intended.

Whether or not you believe that after three days of being dead and entombed, Jesus got up and walked out of his own accord, what you cannot argue about is the fervent belief of the followers that this happened.

There's nothing more distasteful than an academic having to, like, trot out his credentials. You really come off as a jerk when you do that.

The more I started studying the historical Jesus, the man who lived 2,000 years ago... the more I started to realize that there was this chasm between the historical Jesus and the Jesus that I had been taught about in church.

When you forcefully suppress religious nationalism, you radicalize it.