Azyumardi Azra is a history professor and rector of Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta, Indonesia. He is the author of numerous books, including Indonesia, Islam and Democracy: Dynamics in a Global Context.

Tamara Cofman Wittes is a senior foreign policy fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. She is director of the institution’s Middle East Democracy and Development Project.

Shibley Telhami is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and an expert on politics in the Persian Gulf and in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. He is also the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland in College Park.

Jean-Francois Seznec is a visiting associate professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He is an expert on democratization in the Persian Gulf region..

Itamar Rabinovich is a visiting fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He is a former president of Tel Aviv University and an expert on politics in the Arab world.

Vali R. Nasr is director of the Roundtable Series on Global Islamic Politics at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is also an adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies. He is dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Relations at Johns Hopkins University and is an expert on Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, political Islam and […]

Suzanne Maloney is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. She is an expert on Iran and the Gulf States and has written about religion and human rights in the region.

Steven Cook is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is knowledgeable about politics in the Arab world, U.S.-Middle East policy, civil-military relations in the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Mohamad Bazzi is a fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is working on a project about Hezbollah and the Shiite community in Lebanon. He is the former Middle East bureau head for (New York) Newsday and is based in New York City.