Tom Lansford, academic dean at the University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast in Long Beach, has written about religion in West Africa.

Rosalind I.J. Hackett is a religious studies professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She has written about gender and religion in Africa, radical Christian revivalism in Nigeria and Ghana and the gospel of prosperity in West Africa.

Frank Salamone, emeritus professor at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y., has written about African religions and the Krishna Consciousness Movement in Nigeria.

• Dana Robert is professor of world Christianity and history of mission and director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University School of Theology. She is the editor of African Christian Outreach, Vol. 2: Mission Churches (Southern African Missiological Society, 2003) and co-editor of Frontiers of African Christianity (Unisa Press, 2003).

The Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Mich., claims to be the largest mosque in the U.S. It is a Shiite mosque, and its congregation is predominantly Arab. Contact Imam Sayed Hassan Al-Qazwini.

Marcia Hermansen is director of the Islamic World Studies Program and a professor in the theology department at Loyola University Chicago. She is an expert on Islamic spirituality and Sufism.

The center is an interdisciplinary program in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, dedicated to the study of the modern Middle East and the geo-cultural area in which Islamic civilization prospered, and continues to shape world history.  The center at the University of Arkansas includes professors in a variety of disciplines.

The Islamic Center of Mississippi is located in Starkville and serves a diverse groups of residents.

Karim was an assistant professor in the department of philosophy and religious studies at Spelman College in Atlanta. She was reared in an African-American Muslim community. Her expertise is on race, gender and Islam; younger Muslims in the U.S.; and connections and tensions among African-American Muslims and immigrant Muslims in the U.S.