This week’s episode of The Archive Project features Reza Aslan discussing his new book, An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville. Aslan was interviewed by Literary Arts executive director Andrew Proctor at the 2022 Portland Book Festival, presented by Bank of America, which took place on Saturday, November 5 in downtown Portland.

Iran has been in the news this fall for a new wave of protests in reaction to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the morality police for not wearing her hijab “properly” and died while in police custody. The protests have been remarkably widespread, and the government response severe. Aslan asserts this current movement is a fourth Iranian revolution, after 1979, 1953, and the 1906 constitutional revolution his book focuses on.

In An American Martyr in Persia, Aslan describes the events of that 1906 revolution through the story of Howard Baskerville, the son of a preacher and a student of Woodrow Wilson, who found himself in Tabriz, Iran in 1907, working as a Presbyterian minister and teacher. What happened next is well-known to Iranians but almost totally unknown to Americans.

“People ask me, ‘What can we do to help the people of Iran?’ Well, when you ask the people of Iran, ‘What do you need?’ they say, ‘Pay attention, that’s what we need.’ We have the ability to say, ‘We hear you. We’re paying attention. We’re going to shine a light on this for as long as it takes.’ That is far, far more powerful and valuable than you think it is.”

Reza Aslan is an acclaimed writer and scholar of religions. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Zealot, No God but God, and editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Andrew Proctor has been the director of Literary Arts since 2009. Born and raised in Canada, Proctor, earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Music at Concordia University in Montreal, and later worked in London for the Cultural Attaché to the Canadian High Commission. In the UK, he also earned an MA in English Literature at the University of East Anglia under the supervision of England’s then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. From 2000-2004 Proctor worked as an editor for HarperCollins in New York City and then as the Membership and Operations Director of the PEN American Center, a global literary and human rights organization focused on the welfare of writers and editors. In total, Proctor has worked in the literary world for over twenty years in the governmental, for profit and nonprofit sectors.