Zealot, by Reza Aslan
In Review
Zealot
Reza Aslan’s Zealot arrived with an enormous splash. An engaging and personal interview on NPR’s Fresh Air attracted widespread interest. Then a Fox News interview commandeered Internet coverage. The network’s religion correspondent, Lauren Green, began by asking why Aslan, a Muslim, would write a book about Jesus. In his reply Aslan perhaps overstated his scholarly qualifications to write about the New Testament. The contentious interview was pure gold for Aslan and Random House: Zealot rocketed to Amazon’s no. one best-seller spot. Several accomplished biblical scholars quickly posted reviews of the book—something that rarely happens. At this point, any review must reckon with Zealot’s remarkable marketing journey.
Aslan has established himself as an influential scholar and commentator on religion. His controversial No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam is perhaps the most influential introduction to Islam for Western audiences. Aslan completed a master’s degree in theological studies at Harvard, then a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California–Santa Barbara. His dissertation investigated global jihadism, a subject he took on in How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror. In short, Aslan is a public commentator on religion whose academic credentials are stronger in some areas than in others. New Testament studies represents one of his interests but not an area of formal expertise.
Aslan’s biography also invites interest: born a Muslim in Iran, he experienced an evangelical Christian conversion as an adolescent living in the United States. After an undergraduate encounter with critical biblical scholarship undermined his biblicist naïveté, Aslan abandoned Christianity and returned to embrace Islam—but with a difference. He identifies primarily with Sufism, Islam’s best-known expression of mysticism. Holding a critical distance from conventional dogma, Aslan welcomes truth from many religious traditions but chooses to identify primarily with Islam.
