Reza Aslan Quotes

#1. Whether for good or for bad, the Iran that ultimately rises out of the ashes of last summer's uprising will be unlike the Iran we know today, and for that we can thank the Green Movement, not another round of useless sanctions.

Reza Aslan

#2. A king with no place to lay his head. A king who came to serve, not to be served.

Reza Aslan

#3. Every single interview I have ever done on TV or in print says I'm a Muslim.

Reza Aslan

#4. The intention of the United States government in supporting Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war was to curb the spread of Iran's revolution, but it had the more disastrous effect of curbing its evolution.

Reza Aslan

#5. 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.

Reza Aslan

#6. In the 5,000-year history of Jewish thought, the notion of a God-man is completely anathema to everything Judaism stands for.

Reza Aslan

#7. '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.

Reza Aslan

#8. I wouldn't call myself a Christian because I do not believe that Jesus is God, nor do I believe that he ever thought that he was God, or that he ever said that he was God.

Reza Aslan

#9. This creator god was called Allah, which is not a proper name but a contraction of the word al-ilah, meaning simply the god.

Reza Aslan

#10. My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.

Reza Aslan

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith.

Reza Aslan

#14. God doesn't make you a bigot. You're just a bigot.

Reza Aslan

#15. Egyptians believed that the Pharaoh would be resurrected, but they did not accept the resurrection of the mases

Reza Aslan

#16. The New Testament is not a historical document.

Reza Aslan

#17. So then, give back to Caesar what is his, and give back to God what belongs to God. That is the zealot argument in its simplest, most concise form. And it seems to be enough for the authorities in Jerusalem to immediately label Jesus as lestes. A bandit. A zealot.

Reza Aslan

#18. [ ... ] pluralism implies religious tolerance, not unchecked religious freedom.

Reza Aslan

#19. Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.

Reza Aslan

#20. Both gospels employ the term "Son of God" exactly as it is used throughout the Hebrew Scriptures: as a royal title, not a description.

Reza Aslan

#21. the famed French theorist Ernest Renan, who years ago defined the nation as "a group of people united in a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.

Reza Aslan

#22. The idea that education will lead to a lessening of bigotry is just factually incorrect.

Reza Aslan

#23. The reason crucifixion was so common is because it was so cheap. It could be carried out almost anywhere; all one needed was a tree. The torture could last for days without the need for an actual torturer.

Reza Aslan

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

Reza Aslan

#25. 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

#26. The principal task of the messiah, who was popularly believed to be the descendant of King David, was to rebuild David's kingdom and reestablish the nation of Israel. Thus, to call oneself the messiah at the time of the Roman occupation was tantamount to declaring war on Rome.

Reza Aslan

#27. American Muslims - young American Muslims in particular - are starting to understand that unless they are willing to stand up for all the other oppressed communities in this country, including those discriminated against for their gender or sexuality, then no one will stand up for them.

Reza Aslan

#28. 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

#29. In other words, according to Jesus, Caesar is entitled to be "given back" the denarius coin, not because he deserves tribute, but because it is his coin: his name and picture are stamped on it.

Reza Aslan

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

Reza Aslan

#31. 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

#32. Whereas a religion of many gods posits many myths to describe the human condition, a religion of one god tends to be monomythic; it not only rejects all other gods, it rejects all other explanations for God.

Reza Aslan

#33. Unlike their brethren in the Holy Land, Diaspora Jews spoke Greek, not Aramaic: Greek was the language of their thought process, the language of their worship.

Reza Aslan

#34. 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.

Reza Aslan

#35. The choice for the early church was clear: either Jesus was just another failed messiah, or what the Jews of Jesus's time expected of the messiah was wrong and had to be adjusted

Reza Aslan

#36. I'm a person of faith, and the language that I use to define my faith, the symbols and metaphors that I rely upon to express my faith, are those provided by Islam because they make the most sense to me.

Reza Aslan

#37. How could the Law of Retribution function properly when one party in a dispute was so wealthy and so powerful as to be virtually untouchable?

Reza Aslan

#38. There are striking similarities between the Christian and Quranic descriptions of the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment, and the paradise awaiting those who have been saved.

Reza Aslan

#39. 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

#40. Muhammad's example must have had a lasting effect on his early followers: as Nabia Abbott has shown, throughout the first two centuries of Islam, Muslims regularly read the Torah alongside the Quran. Certainly,

Reza Aslan

#41. As the Quran suggests over and over again, and as the Constitution of Medina explicitly affirms, Muhammad may have understood the concept of the Umm al-Kitab to mean not only that the Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared a single divine scripture but also that they constituted a single divine Ummah.

Reza Aslan

#42. Religion doesn't make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.

Reza Aslan

#43. 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

#44. Indeed, if we commit to placing Jesus firmly within the social, religious, and political context of the era in which he lived - an era marked by the slow burn of a revolt against Rome that would forever transform the faith and practice of Judaism - then, in some ways, his biography writes itself.

Reza Aslan

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

Reza Aslan

#46. 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

#47. What the printing press is to Christianity in the 16th century, that's what the Internet is doing to Islam now. It has opened up the monopoly over the interpretation of Islam that used to solely belong to the religious class.

Reza Aslan

#48. That actually is true of most of the books in the New Testament. Such so-called pseudepigraphical works, or works attributed to but not written by a specific author, were extremely common in the ancient world and should by no means be thought of as forgeries.

Reza Aslan

#49. Naming a book after a person was a standard way of reflecting that person's beliefs or representing his or her school of thought.

Reza Aslan

#50. 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

#51. The readers of Luke's gospel, like most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality; the two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in what actually happened than in what it meant.

Reza Aslan

#52. Montanist Christians like Tertullian believed that Jesus possessed the same divine quality as God, but not in the same quantity as God.

Reza Aslan

#53. No- one is ever told any story but their own.

Reza Aslan

#54. Rhodes, founder of the De Beers diamond company and at one time the virtual dictator of modern-day South Africa, famously declared, "We Britons are the first race in the world, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race." Among

Reza Aslan

#55. The only way to survive in a community where movement was the norm and material accumulation impractical was to maintain a strong sense on tribal solidarity by evenly sharing all available resources.

Reza Aslan

#56. 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

#57. All these schools of though gradually transformed into legal institutions, the diversity of ideas and freedom of opinion that characterized their early development gave way to rigid formalism, strict adherence to precedent, and an almost complete stultification of independent though

Reza Aslan

#58. 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

#59. Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but the sword. MATTHEW 10:34

Reza Aslan

#60. Thus, the Quran promises that all those who believe - the Jews, the Sabians, the Christians - anyone who believes in God and the Last Days, and who does good deeds, will have nothing to fear

Reza Aslan

#61. Muhammad may have been, there is one detail that should not be lost in the tumult and confusion

Reza Aslan

#62. Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism.

Reza Aslan

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

Reza Aslan

#64. He had been summoned to appear before a meeting of the Apostolic Council to defend his self-designated role as missionary to the gentiles (Paul insists he was not summoned to Jerusalem but went of his own accord because Jesus told him to).

Reza Aslan

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. The separation of "church and state" of which America is so proud was established in Islam fourteen centuries ago, when it was decided that no Caliph would have religious authority over the community.

Reza Aslan

#68. 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.

Reza Aslan

#69. In the Ummah, there was no tradition of veiling until around 627 C.E., when the so-called "verse of hijab" suddenly descended upon the community. That verse, however, was addressed not to women in general, but exclusively to Muhammad's wives:

Reza Aslan

#70. To begin with, with the possible exception of the gospel of Luke, none of the gospels we have were written by the person after whom they are named.

Reza Aslan

#71. Ezekiel declared, in the center of all nations

Reza Aslan

#72. Even the Quran, which Sufis respect as the direct speech of God, lacks the capacity to shed light upon God's essence. As one Sufi master has argued, why spend time reading a love letter (by which he means the Quran) in the presence of the Beloved who wrote it?

Reza Aslan

#73. 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.

Reza Aslan

#74. There is absolutely no difference between religion and politics at all in Jesus' time. In other words, every seemingly religious word that came out of Jesus' mouth had very clear and unmistakable political connotations to it.

Reza Aslan

#75. 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

#76. The great Christian theologian Rudolf Bultmann liked to say that the quest for the historical Jesus is ultimately an internal quest. Scholars tend to see the Jesus they want to see. Too often they see themselves - their own reflection - in the image of Jesus they have constructed.

Reza Aslan

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. Considering how effortlessly religious dogma has become intertwined with political ideology, how can we overcome the clash-of-monotheisms mentality that has so deeply entrenched itself in the modern world? Clearly, education and tolerance are essential.

Reza Aslan

#80. 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

#81. Sacred history is like a hallowed tree whose roots dig deep into primordial time and whose branches weave in and out of genuine history with little concern for the boundaries of space and time. Indeed, it is precisely at those moments when sacred and genuine history collide that religions are born.

Reza Aslan

#82. The bad news is that Iran wants to talk about everything except their nuclear program. They want to talk about regional cooperation, they want to talk about the sanctions issues, and it seems like the western powers want to talk about nothing more than the nuclear issue.

Reza Aslan

#83. 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.

Reza Aslan

#84. Should I act violently in defense of my religion, absolutely.

Reza Aslan

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. When you forcefully suppress religious nationalism, you radicalize it.

Reza Aslan

#88. Whether you're talking about MSNBC or Fox or CNN, it's all about getting enough interest out there, sensationalizing the story in such a way that people are compelled to tune in.

Reza Aslan

#89. Paul's lack of concern with the historical Jesus is not due, as some have argued, to his emphasis on Christological rather than historical concerns. It is due to the simple fact that Paul had no idea who the living Jesus was, nor did he care.

Reza Aslan

#90. One-fifth of Americans, 20% believe that Barak Obama is, himself, a Muslim and in fact - amongst Republicans that number is almost 40%. Polls show in this country, that the more you disagree with Barak Obama's domestic policies, the more likely you are to think that he is a Muslim.

Reza Aslan

#91. No one speaks for God - not even the prophets (who speak about God).

Reza Aslan

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

Reza Aslan

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

Reza Aslan

#94. 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

#95. There is no evidence that Jesus himself openly advocated violent actions. But he was certainly no pacifist. "Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but the sword" (Matthew 10:34 | Luke 12:51).

Reza Aslan

#96. Jesus was crucified by Rome because his messianic aspirations threatened the occupation of Palestine, and his zealotry endangered the Temple authorities.

Reza Aslan

#97. [ ... ] there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy [ ... ]

Reza Aslan

#98. 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.

Reza Aslan

#99. 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

#100. Islam is more than a religion, it's much more than a religion, it's a way of life, it is a one party political system that has a very elaborate legal system that can put you to death if you leave it.

Reza Aslan