Reza Aslan Quotes

“[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 memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history. That is a shame. Because the one thing any comprehensive study of the historical Jesus should hopefully reveal is that Jesus of Nazareth-Jesus the man-is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. He is, in short, someone worth believing in.”

— Reza Aslan

“The first-century Jews who wrote about Jesus had already made up their minds about who he was. They were constructing a theological argument about the nature and function of Jesus as Christ, not composing a historical biography about a human being.”

— Reza Aslan

“The overwhelming consensus is that the traditions contained within the epistle can confidently be traced to James the Just. That would make James's epistle arguably one of the most important books in the New Testament. Because one sure way of uncovering what Jesus may have believed is to determine what his brother James believed. The first thing to note about James's epistle is its passionate concern with the plight of the poor. This, in itself, is not surprising. The traditions all paint James as the champion of the destitute and dispossessed; it is how he earned his nickname, "the Just." The Jerusalem assembly was founded by James upon the principle of service to the poor. There is even evidence to suggest that the first followers of Jesus who gathered under James's leadership referred to themselves collectively as "the poor.”

— Reza Aslan

“Over the last few years, the Islamic world has produced more female presidents and prime ministers than both Europe and North America combined.”

— Reza Aslan

“Thus, a story concocted by Mark strictly for evangelistic purposes to shift the blame for Jesus's death away from Rome is stretched with the passage of time to the point of absurdity, becoming in the process the basis for two thousand years of Christian anti-Semitism.”

— Reza Aslan

“It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.”

— Reza Aslan

“I believe in God, which means I am open to some absurd possibilities. But I understand the power of that faith, and I understand the metaphor of that belief.”

— Reza Aslan

“There's only one reason to be crucified under the Roman Empire, and that is for treason or sedition. Crucifixion, we have to understand, was not actually a form of capital punishment for Rome. In fact, it was often the case that the criminal would be killed first and then crucified.”

— Reza Aslan

“Nobody, absolutely nobody, straps a bomb on their body because they were recruited from the Internet. It takes an enormous amount of personal face-to-face contact and time in order to recruit a young person into the cause of jihad.”

— Reza Aslan

“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.”

— Reza Aslan

“Literature offers not just a window into the culture of diverse regions, but also the society, the politics; it's the only place where we can keep track of ideas.”

— Reza Aslan

“A cosmic war is like a ritual drama in which participants act out on Earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in the heavens.”

— Reza Aslan

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.

— Reza Aslan

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

— Reza Aslan

“The Revolutionary Guard controls almost everything in Iran, and this is hurting the people.”

— Reza Aslan

“Is it possible that Jesus, unlike 98 percent of his fellow Jews, was literate and educated? Yes, it's possible.”

— Reza Aslan

“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.”

— Reza Aslan

“The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is What do these stories mean?”

— Reza Aslan

All religions are inextricably bound to the social, spiritual, and cultural milieux from which they arose and in which they developed. It is not prophets who create religions. Prophets are, above all, reformers who redefine and reinterpret the existing beliefs and practices of their communities, providing fresh sets of symbols and metaphors with which succeeding generations can describe the nature of reality.

— Reza Aslan

In fact, the term "holy war" originates not with Islam but with the Christian Crusaders who first used it to give theological legitimacy to what was in reality a battle for land and trade routes. "Holy war" was not a term used by Muslim conquerors, and it is in no way a proper definition of the word jihad. There are a host of words in Arabic that can be definitively translated as "war"; jihad is not one of them. The word jihad literally means "a struggle," "a striving," or "a great effort." In its primary religious connotation (sometimes referred to as "the greater jihad"), it means the struggle of the soul to overcome the sinful obstacles that keep a person from God. This is why the word jihad is nearly always followed in the Quran by the phrase "in the way of God.

— Reza Aslan

“One would think that Jesus's admonishment not to teach others to break the Law of Moses would have had some impact on Paul. But Paul seems totally unconcerned with anything "Jesus-in-the-flesh" may or may not have said.”

— 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

“Judea is, for all intents and purposes, a temple-state.”

— 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 whatsoever, but could be accessed by anyone.”

— Reza Aslan

“The relationship between the Jews and pagan Arabs was symbiotic in that not only were the Jews heavily Arabized, but the Arabs were also significantly influenced by Jewish beliefs and practices.”

— Reza Aslan

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

— 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 the movement Jesus left behing.”

— Reza Aslan

“Yet the Kingdom of God in Jesus's teachings is not a celestial kingdom existing on a cosmic plane. Those who claim otherwise often point to a single unreliable passage in the gospel of John in which Jesus allegedly tells Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36). Not only is this the sole passage in the gospels where Jesus makes such a claim, it is an imprecise translation of the original Greek. The phrase ouk estin ek tou kosmou is perhaps better translated as "not part of this order/system [of government]." Even if one accepts the historicity of the passage (and very few scholars do), Jesus was not claiming that the Kingdom of God is unearthly; he was saying it is unlike any kingdom or government on earth.”

— 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 Jesus, and to adapt Jesus's words and actions to the new political situation in which they found themselves.”

— Reza Aslan

By the time these stories were written, six decades had passed since the crucifixion. In that time, the evangelists had heard just about every conceivable objection to the resurrection, and they were able to create narratives to counter each and every one of them.

— Reza Aslan

“Those who treat the muslim woman not as an individual but as a symbol either of Islamic chastity or secular liberalism are guilty of the same sin : the objectification of women”

— Reza Aslan

“The two men's roles had to be reversed: Jesus had to be made superior, John inferior. Hence the steady regression of John's character from the first gospel, Mark-wherein he is presented as a prophet and mentor to Jesus-to the last gospel, John, in which the Baptist seems to serve no purpose at all except to acknowledge Jesus's divinity.”

— Reza Aslan

“The first century was an era of apocalyptic expectation among the Jews of Palestine, the unofficial Roman designation for the vast tract of land encompassing modern day Israel/Palestine as well as large parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon (the land would not be officially called Palestine until after 135 C.E.)”

— 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

“Matthew needs Jesus to come out of Egypt for the same reason he needs him to be born in Bethlehem: to fulfill the scattered prophecies left behind by his ancestors for him and his fellow Jews to decipher, to place Jesus in the footsteps of the kings and prophets who came before him, and, most of all, to answer the challenge made by Jesus's detractors that this simple peasant who died without fulfilling the single most important of the messianic prophecies-the restoration of Israel-was in fact the anointed one.”

— Reza Aslan

“Three centuries of early Christian and Jewish documentation, not to mention the nearly unanimous opinion of contemporary scholars, recognize James the brother of Jesus as the head of the first Christian community ... Why then has James been almost wholly excised from the New Testament and his role in the early church displaced by Peter and Paul in the imaginations of most modern Christians?”

— Reza Aslan

“In recognition of his service, Rome named Herod "King of the Jews", granting him a kingdom that would ultimately grow larger than that of King Solomon”

— Reza Aslan

“The reformation of Christianity was a terrifying process, but it was not, as it has so often been presented, a collision between Protestant reform and Catholic intransigence. Rather, the Christian Reformation was an argument over the future of the faith-a violent, bloody argument that engulfed Europe in devastation and war for more than a century.”

— Reza Aslan

“Herod was convert,after all. His mother was Arab. His people, the Idumeans, had come to Judaism only a generation or two earlier.”

— 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 abounded with charismatic fantasts claiming to channel the divine for a nominal fee. Yet from the perspective of the Galileans, what set Jesus apart from his fellow exorcists and healers is that he seemed to be providing his services free of charge.”

— Reza Aslan

But, as in the rest of Galilee, the profits firm this increase in the means of production disproportionately benefited the large landowners and moneylenders who resided outside Capernaum: the wealthy priests in Judea and new urban elite in Sepphoris and Tiberias. The majority of Capernaum's residents had been left behind by the new Galilean economy. It would be these people whom Jesus would specifically target - those who found themselves cast to the fingers of society, whose lives had been disrupted by the rapid social and economic shifts taking place throughout Galilee.

— Reza Aslan

Islam doesn't promote violence or peace. Islam is just a religion, and like every religion in the world, it depends on what you bring to it. If you're a violent person, your Islam, your Judaism, your Christianity, your Hinduism, is going to be violent.

— Reza Aslan

“Bill Maher is right to condemn religious practices that violate fundamental human rights. Religious communities must do more to counter extremist interpretations of their faith. But failing to recognize that religion is embedded in culture - and making a blanket judgment about the world's second largest religion - is simply bigotry.”

— Reza Aslan

“I really believe that to have a full impression of Jesus, both as Christ as a man, you must know about the world that gave shape to him - the world out of which he arose.”

— Reza Aslan

“Should I act violently in defense of my religion, absolutely.”

— Reza Aslan

“The religiously observant is lumped in with the nominal Muslim, the nominal Muslim is lumped in with the non-Muslim and the radical. If we want to make sense of this mess and stop pushing Muslims into the arms of the extremist, we need to make meaningful distinctions between the religion of Islam that a billion Muslims follow and see as a guidance as a peaceful righteous moral life and the puritanical Islam of a minority which so captures the media's attention.”

— Reza Aslan

“What's happened in the United States is something that has already happened in Europe and that is that Islam is become 'otherised', it has become a kind of receptacle into which fears and anxieties about the political or economic situation, about the changing racial landscape of this country are being thrown.”

— Reza Aslan

“I think by all accounts in the same way we look back on the anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish sentiments of our history with shame and derision and with a healthy dose of mockery, that's how we will very likely look back on this sort of anti-Muslim sentiment as well in the next generation.”

— Reza Aslan

“But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason you were brought into Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you might know me better there.”

— Reza Aslan