... In actuality, Reza Aslan is not a “professor of religion,” and what he claims he does “for a living” is an outrageous inaccuracy. Reza Aslan is an associate professor in the Creative Writing program at the University of California, Riverside. He teaches there based on his Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction from Iowa, his relevant academic credential.
In addition, Reza Aslan received his PhD in sociology – not “History of Religions” – from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2009.
I used to teach at the University of California at Santa Barbara and I am familiar with the prominent theologians, professors and academic scholars at the school. None of these individuals that I met considered Reza Aslan even remotely close to being a scholar in religion. After all, he received his PhD in sociology. At first, I did not know of Reza Aslan. But when his name was brought up, I asked a director of one the departments at the university – who prefers to remain anonymous – for more information. He stated simply that Reza Aslan is a hungry self-promoter who begs for media attention and appearances, and who repeatedly misrepresents his credentials. He added that it goes without saying that Reza Aslan is laughed at within scholarly circles, and that academics do not consider Reza Aslan even a minor religious scholar.
Secondly, the expertise – which Reza Aslan claims is based on his PhD – should be determined by the topic of the dissertation. Reza Aslan’s dissertation, titled “Global Jihadism as a Transnational Social Movement: A Theoretical Framework” reveals that if he is an expert based on his PhD, he should be an expert on social movements in early twentieth-century Islam, not on Christianity or even modern Islam.
Third, although Reza Aslan calls himself a “historian,” he has never attainted a degree or had professional training in history, and has never even taken an elementary course in historiography for that matter. His dissertation focuses on the events and movements of the twentieth century and does not apply any historical methods or archival research. In addition, his dissertation is also an abnormally short one – approximately 130 pages double-spaced – which seems to have been written for publicity purposes for his book, Beyond Fundamentalism. Reza Aslan has been exploiting the situation in the United States after 9/11 to self-promote and make profits through these exaggerations and fabrications.
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