Top 100 Reza Aslan Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Why? Why not? Why not you? Why not now?”

— Reza Aslan

2. “Things never happen the same way twice, dear one.”

— Reza Aslan

3. “Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith.”

— Reza Aslan

4. “But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”

— Reza Aslan

5. “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

6. “Faith is a choice; anyone who says otherwise is trying to convert you.”

— Reza Aslan

7. “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

8. “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

9. “Religion is, by definition, interpretation; and by definition, all interpretations are valid. However, some interpretations are more reasonable than others.”

— Reza Aslan

10. “The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it.”

— Reza Aslan

11. “Religion doesn’t make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.”

— Reza Aslan

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

— Reza Aslan

13. “No- one is ever told any story but their own.”

— Reza Aslan

14. “The New Testament is not a historical document.”

— Reza Aslan

15. “Im 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

16. “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

17. “It is a shame that this word, myth, which originally signified nothing more than stories of the supernatural, has come to be regarded as synonymous with falsehood, when in fact myths are always true. By their very nature, myths inhere both legitimacy and credibility. Whatever truths they convey have little to do with historical fact.”

— Reza Aslan

18. “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

19. “Indonesia, women are absolutely 100 percent equal to men.”

— Reza Aslan

20. “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

21. “More than a thousand years before Christ, Zarathustra preached the existence of a heaven and a hell, the idea of a bodily resurrection, the promise of a universal savior who would one day be miraculously born to a young maiden, and the expectation of a final cosmic battle that would take place at the end of time between the angelic forces of good and the demonic forces of evil.”

— Reza Aslan

22. “God doesn’t make you a bigot. You’re just a bigot.”

— Reza Aslan

23. “Religion is concerned not with genuine history, but with sacred history, which does not course through time like a river. Rather, 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.”

— Reza Aslan

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

— Reza Aslan

25. “Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition.”

— Reza Aslan

26. “Luke means that Jesus is the new David, the King of the Jews, placed on God’s throne to rule over the Promised Land. Simply put, the infancy narratives in the gospels are not historical accounts, nor were they meant to be read as such. They are theological affirmations of Jesus’s status as the anointed of God. The descendant of King David. The promised messiah.”

— Reza Aslan

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

— Reza Aslan

28. “Herod was not just the emperor’s client-king. He was a close and personal friend, a loyal citizen of the Republic who wanted more than to emulate Rome; he wanted to remake it in the sands of Judea. He instituted a forced Hellenization program upon the Jews, bringing gymnasia, Greek amphitheaters, and Roman baths to Jerusalem. He made Greek the language of his court and minted coins bearing Greek letters and paga.”

— Reza Aslan

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

— Reza Aslan

30. “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

31. “The gospels claim that on either side of Jesus hung men who in Greek are called lestai, a word often rendered into English as “thieves” but which actually means “bandits” and was the most common Roman designation for an insurrectionist or rebel.”

— Reza Aslan

32. “As with everything else in the gospels, the story of Jesus’s arrest, trial, and execution was written for one reason and one reason only: to prove that he was the promised messiah. Factual accuracy was irrelevant. What mattered was Christology, not history.”

— Reza Aslan

33. “There is a term for this phenomenon – politicomorphism, or “the divinization of earthly politics” – and it is, to this day, one of the central features of nearly every religious system in the world.”

— Reza Aslan

34. “Six days a week, from sunup to sundown, Jesus would have toiled in the royal city, building palatial houses for the Jewish aristocracy during the day, returning to his crumbling mud-brick home at night. He would have witnessed for himself the rapidly expanding divide between the absurdly rich and the indebted poor. He.”

— Reza Aslan

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “The idea that education will lead to a lessening of bigotry is just factually incorrect.”

— Reza Aslan

39. “It was standard Roman policy to forge alliances with the landed aristocracy in every captured city, making them dependent on the Roman overlords for their power and wealth. By aligning their interests with those of the ruling class, Rome ensured that local leaders remained wholly vested in maintaining the imperial system.”

— Reza Aslan

40. “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

41. “Mark’s focus is kept squarely on Jesus’s ministry; he is uninterested either in Jesus’s birth or, perhaps surprisingly, in Jesus’s resurrection, as he writes nothing at all about either event.”

— Reza Aslan

42. “Cognitive theorists have a term for what Eve just experienced. They call it her Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device, or HADD. This is a biological process that arose deep in our evolutionary past, all the way back in the days when hominids were still stooped and hairy. In its simplest terms, HADD leads us to detect human agency, and hence a human cause, behind any unexplained event: a distant sound in the woods, a flash of light in the sky, a tendril of fog slithering along the ground.”

— Reza Aslan

43. “When you’re a brown Muslim from Iran talking about Jesus on TV, you need to keep your cool at all times, OK? That’s not rocket science.”

— Reza Aslan

44. “When you forcefully suppress religious nationalism, you radicalize it.”

— Reza Aslan

45. “Matthew implies that the kingdom belonging to the Son of Man is one and the same as the Kingdom of God. And since the Kingdom of God is built upon a complete reversal of the present order, wherein the poor become powerful and the meek are made mighty, what better king to rule over it on God’s behalf than one who himself embodies the new social order flipped on its head? A peasant king. A king with no place to lay his head. A king who came to serve, not to be served. A king riding on a donkey.”

— Reza Aslan

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

— Reza Aslan

47. “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

48. “Islamophobia has become so mainstream in this country that Americans have been trained to expect violence against Muslims – not excuse it, but expect it. And that’s happened because you have an Islamophobia industry in this country devoted to making Americans think there’s an enemy within.”

— Reza Aslan

49. “The Roman Senate determined that the most effective way to retake Jerusalem from Parthian control was to make Herod its client-king and let him accomplish the task on Rome’s behalf. The naming of client-kings was standard practice during the early years of the Roman Empire, allowing Rome to expand its borders without expending valuable resources administering conquered provinces directly.”

— Reza Aslan

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

— Reza Aslan