Mohammed Ayoob is University Distinguished Professor of International Relations at James Madison College at Michigan State University in East Lansing. He researches the intersection of religion and politics in the Muslim world. He is the author of The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim World (2007).

David Bryan Cook is an associate professor of religious studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He specializes in the origins and historical development of Islam. He has written several books on historical and contemporary Islamic writings about the apocalypse and has taught a course titled “Jihad and the End of the World.”

Norman Stillman is professor and Schusterman/Josey Chair in Jewish History at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. He is an expert in medieval and modern Jewish and Islamic History.

Claudia Liebeskind is an associate professor of Middle Eastern History at Florida State University. She teaches on South Asian history, Islam, and world history.

Vincent Cornell is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Middle East and Islamic Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, and he has taught in numerous academic centers of Islam in the U.S. His expertise ranges widely, including Islamic thought, Sufism, philosophy and Islamic law.

Bruce Lawrence is professor emeritus of  religion at Duke University in Durham, N.C. He is author of Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden (Verso, 2005). He is an expert on comparative fundamentalism and Muslim networks.

Timothy Furnish is an expert in Islamic and Middle Eastern history and Islamic fundamentalism as well as Mahdism (Islamic messianism. He is the author of Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, their Jihads and Osama bin Laden (Praeger Publishers, 2005).  He is a former military Christian army chaplain.

Herbert Berg is professor of philosophy and religion at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His area of expertise is Islam.

Carl W. Ernst is a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He wrote Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World and edited Islamophobia in America: The Anatomy of Intolerance. He is affiliated with the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security.