Reza Aslan

International Best-Selling Author and Scholar of Religions

Network 20/20 Charter Member Dr. Reza Aslan is an internationally acclaimed writer, scholar of religions, and contributing editor for The Daily Beast.  A best-selling author, Aslan’s first book, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, was named one of the hundred most important books of the last decade.  He has made regular appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, CBS News, and Tavis Smiley among many others.  He is also the author of How to Win a Cosmic War (published in paperback as: Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in a Globalized Age), as well as editor of two volumes: Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East, and Muslims and Jews in America: Commonalities, Contentions, and Complexities.

Dr. Aslan is CEO of Aslan Media Inc., whose holdings include BoomGen Studios, the first motion picture studio entirely focused on entertainment content about the greater Middle East and its globally dispersed communities.  His non-profit organization, Aslan Media Initiatives, uses social media technology to provide news and information about the Middle East to young people all over the world.

Dr. Aslan has degrees in Religion from Santa Clara University, Harvard University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, where he was named the Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction.  An Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, he is also a member of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities and the Pacific Council on International Policy.  He serves on the board of directors of the Ploughshares Fund, which gives grants for peace and security issues; Abraham’s Vision, an educational, conflict transformation organization for Israeli and Palestinian youths; PEN USA, which champions the rights of writers under siege around the world; and the Levantine Cultural Center, which builds bridges between Americans and the Arab/Muslim world through the arts.

He lives in Los Angeles, California where he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside and a Research Associate at the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy.

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