Reza Aslan

Reza Aslan was born in Tehran in 1972, moved to the United States as a child after the Iranian Revolution, and has spent his career as a scholar of religion and a public intellectual.

No god but God (2005) and Zealot (2013) are works of religious history, but his television series Believer (CNN, 2016) placed him squarely in the travel writing tradition — visiting sacred and extreme religious communities around the world and documenting them from the inside.

His approach combined the scholar's knowledge of religious history with the journalist's willingness to participate — he swam with the Voodoo practitioners of Haiti, spent time with the cannibal ascetics of the Aghori tradition in India, and visited evangelical megachurches in the American Bible Belt with the same quality of respectful curiosity.

The work raises questions about objectivity and participation that travel writers have always faced: how much does the visitor's presence change the thing visited? Aslan's willingness to absorb himself in the communities he documented produced television and writing of unusual depth.