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).

Jamal J. Elias is a professor of religious studies and South Asia studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written on visual religious art in Islam.

Roy Mottahedeh is the Gurney Professor of Islamic History at Harvard University. His major work is on the premodern social and intellectual history of the Islamic Middle East. He is also the faculty adviser of  The Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review.

Natana Delong-Bas is an associate professor of theology at Boston College. She teaches courses on Islam, environmentalism and Muslim women.

Dr. Sayyid M. Syeed is National Director for Interfaith and Community Alliances at the Islamic Society of North America.

Safa Rifka is the chair of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. This group condemned the Muhammad cartoons, calling them hateful and racist. ADC lists state chapters.

Salam Al-Marayati is president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. The group condemned both the Danish cartoons and the violence they spawned.

Nihad Awad is executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Reza Aslan worked as a research associate at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy. He is the author many books, including Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization and No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam. He is the founder of AslanMedia.com, an online journal for news and […]