Khalil Akbar is the resident imam at Masjid Ash-Shaheed, a predominantly African-American mosque in Charlotte, N.C.

Craig Keener is a professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. He co-authored an article on the Nation of Islam for A Guide to New Religious Movements. He is an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

James Jones is an associate professor of world religions at Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y. He wrote a paper titled “Islam, Incarceration and the African American Male.”

Eddie Glaude Jr. is a professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. He specializes in African-American religious history and is the editor of Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism.

Aisha al-Adawiya is the founder and director of Women in Islam, a human rights organization based in New York, N.Y. She is an expert on African-American Islamic women.

Jeffrey Ogbonna Green Ogbar is former director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. He is currently the Vice Provost for Diversity.

Sofian Zakkout is director of the American Muslim Association of North America. It is based in Miami.

Siraj Wahhaj is an African-American convert to Islam who is the imam of Masjid Taqwa in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 1991 he became the first Muslim to offer the invocation for the U.S. House of Representatives. He is also a member of the board of directors of the Islamic Society of North America.

Carolyn Moxley Rouse is a professor of anthropology at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J., and the author of Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam. She has written about women and Islam and how their religion is expressed in food and other forms of consumption.