Sarah Husain is a poet, activist and editor of Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality (2006). She is based in New York City.

Mona Eltahawy is a speaker, writer and commentator who focuses on issues concerning Islam. She is based in New York City.

Katherine Bullock is vice president of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists of North America and editor of Muslim Women Activists in North America: Speaking for Ourselves (2005). She is also the author of Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical & Modern Stereotypes. She lives in Mississauga, Canada.

Read a 2013 report from the office’s advisory council about human trafficking, one of the target initiatives for the group.

Kecia Ali is a professor of religion at Boston University. She wrote Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Qur’an, Hadith and Jurisprudence. Her areas of expertise include progressive Islam and women, gender and Islamic law and Muslim societies. She taught a class in 2003 on marriage and divorce in Islamic law at Harvard University Divinity School.

Dr. Laila Al-Marayati is a physician and past president of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Muslim Women’s League, which represents Muslim women and supports the status of women as equal members of society. The league has a speakers bureau and position papers on topic issues such as divorce, honor killing, female genital mutilation, gender equality, inheritance and […]

Leila Ahmed is a professor of divinity at Harvard University Divinity School. She has a background in women’s studies and is a pre-eminent scholar of Islam as it pertains to women. She has written about the resurgence of the veil and about Islam and women’s bodies, among other things. Contact her through faculty assistant Kristin Gunst.

The Rev. Robert E. Shore-Goss is a former Jesuit priest who now is senior pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church in the Valley in North Hollywood, Calif. He has been an activist in gay rights organizations, and among the books he has co-edited are Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible and Gay Catholic Priests and […]

The Rev. Richard J. Hauser is professor of systemic and spiritual theology at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb. He says that the commitment and ability to live celibately is the essential condition for ordination to priesthood, for gays and for straights.