Author Profile: David Nasser: Escaping from Iran

-- Publishers Weekly, 7/21/2009 2:58:00 PM

By Valerie Weaver-Zercher

Iranian-born Christian evangelist and author David Nasser cannot return to his homeland, which has seized world attention with the violent response following recent elections. Nasser’s Jumping Through Fires: The Gripping Story of One Man’s Escape from Revolution to Redemption (Baker Books, Oct.) tells the story of his family’s escape from Iran during its 1979 revolution, when he was nine years old. During a recent trip to Israel, Nasser’s mother pleaded with him to make sure that his return flight was not routed over Iran; in the event of an emergency landing, he could have been detained, or worse.

Nasser’s memoir, which covers his attempts to assimilate to American culture and his conversion to Christianity, follows three books that he jokingly calls “devotionals on crack.” He self-published his first book, A Call to Die (2000), because publishers had told him that it wouldn’t sell: the title was off-putting, and at 300 pages, it was too long for the tweet-length attention spans of modern readers. It has now sold more than 125,000 copies.

Nasser attributes the success of his first three books to the fact that he tries to listen to his audiences as much as he speaks. “I talk to so many young people during the year that I get a sense of what they want to read next,” he said during a recent phone conversation with PW from a conference in Orange Beach, Ala., where he was speaking to 2,000 youth. Nasser says he wrote this memoir because he wanted to write a book that “waged war with religion with the sword called ‘grace.’ ” He is quick to clarify that he doesn’t only mean Islam, the former faith of his parents (who have also since converted to Christianity), but any human attempt, Christian ones included, to “earn favor with God” through good works. While scholars may quibble with Nasser’s definition of religion and his suggestion that having a personal relationship with Jesus doesn’t count as “religion,” he seems to tap into a widespread discontent, especially among youth, with what he calls “religion gone wrong. People are fed up with religion, and I’m fed up with it, too,” he says. “The hero in this story is the grace of God.”

Baker is hoping to garner wide media attention for Nasser’s book because of recent interest in Iran, and plans to sponsor dialogues on college campuses between Nasser and Muslim speakers about their respective faiths.