Andrew March is an assistant professor of political science at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. He is at work on a book about Islam and citizenship in liberal democracies and is an expert on Islam and democracy.

Stephen Schwartz is executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, which says it promotes moderate Muslim views. Schwartz has taken credit for coining or popularizing the term.

The Rev. Patrick Howell is vice president for mission and ministry at the School of Theology and Ministry at Seattle University. He co-edited the book Empowering Authority: The Charisms of Episcopacy and Primacy in the Church Today. He has frequently written about Pope Benedict XVI for the Seattle Times.

Hussein Rashid is a visiting professor of Islam at the religion department at Hofstra University and a prolific blogger and commentator on Islam in America. He has written about Islamophobia, for example in this June 3, 2009, column for the website Religion Dispatches.

Frederick W. Kagan is a widely read military historian and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., who is associated with the neoconservative movement. Kagan has said he prefers the term Islamist to Islamofascist.

Sandra Yocum is chair of religious studies at the University of Dayton who specializes in the history of theology, which is Benedict’s forte.

David Horowitz is a self-described conservative and founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the Terrorism Awareness Project. The project sponsors an annual “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” on campuses.

Mark D. Chapman teaches church history, Catholicism, ecclesiology and Anglicanism at the University of Oxford. Chapman researches Anglican theology and church history.

James Carroll is an author and Boston Globe columnist who dissected problems with the association of Islam and fascism in a Jan. 21, 2008, op-ed in The New York Times, “Islamofascism’s ill political wind.”