An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville
by Reza Aslan
Buy on AmazonIn this erudite and piercing biography, best-selling author Reza Aslan proves that one person’s actions can have revolutionary consequences that reverberate the world over. Little known in America but venerated as a martyr in Iran, Howard Baskerville was a twenty-two-year-old Christian missionary from South Dakota who traveled to Persia (modern-day Iran) in 1907 for a two-year stint teaching English and preaching the gospel. He arrived in the midst of a democratic revolution—the first of its kind in the Middle East—led by a group of brilliant young firebrands committed to transforming their country into a fully self-determining, constitutional monarchy, one with free elections and an independent parliament.…
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"I picked up An American Martyr in Persia not knowing or, frankly, caring much about early 20th-century Iran or the American missionaries who spread the Gospel there, but Reza Aslan does a remarkable job proving the importance of that time and place. Howard Baskerville was an evangelist of both American religious virtue and democracy when his own Jim Crow America was little more than an apartheid state. Still, the people of Persia – now Iran – believed in his ideals and risked their lives to win their own freedom. What then happened to them – and to Baskerville himself – was a tragedy that echoes down to the present day, as Iranians of a new generation attempt to claim for themselves some measure of the freedoms Americans take for granted."
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