Gordon Darnell Newby is a professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian studies at Emory University in Atlanta. He wrote The Making of the Last Prophet: A Reconstruction of the Earliest Biography of Muhammad (University of South Carolina Press, 1989).

Omid Safi is a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies at Duke University, where he also directs the Duke Islamic Studies Center. He edited Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism and is a sought after source on religion, culture and interfaith issues.

Michael Cook is a professor of near Eastern studies at Princeton University in New Jersey. He is the author of Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and numerous other publications.  

Francis E. Peters is a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University. He wrote Muhammad and the Origins of Islam (SUNY Press, 1994).

Patricia Crone is a professor of Islamic history at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in New Jersey. She is an expert in Islamic history and religion.

Ervand Abrahamian is a professor of history at Baruch College in New York City. He is an expert on Islamic history.

Yvonne Y. Haddad is professor of the history of Islam and Muslim-Christian relations at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She co-authored Muslim Women in America: The Challenge of Islamic Identity Today and Educating the Muslims of America. Her scholarly interests include Muslims in the West, Islamic revolutionary movements, 20th-century Islam and the intellectual, social and political history of the […]

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and Literature at Columbia University in New York.

Abbas Amanat is director of the Iranian Studies Initiative at Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and former chairman of the Council on Middle East Studies at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. He is author of Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi’ism (2009).