Alam Payind is director of the Middle East Studies Center at Ohio State University in Columbus.

Fred M. Donner is a professor of near Eastern history at the University of Chicago. He wrote Seeing the Origins of Islam in Historical Perspective.

Nelly van Doorn-Harder is a professor of Islamic studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Geneive Abdo is author of several books on the Middle East and the Islamic world. She was previously a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a nonresident fellow in the Brookings Institution at Brookings Institution and a fellow in the Middle East program at the Stimson Center think tank. She researches contemporary Iran and political […]

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.

Bee Moorhead is executive director of the interfaith group Texas Impact, which is based in Austin, Texas, and promotes environmental conservation and opposes voter suppression measures.

The National Religious Partnership for the Environment is an alliance of major faith groups and denominations across the spectrum of Jewish and Christian communities and organizations in the United States. Its four founding partners are the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Evangelical Environmental Network, Creation Justice Ministries and the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life.

Todd Collins is director of the Public Policy Institute at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C. The institute aims to empower Western North Carolina to effectively deal with real policy problems by mobilizing community leaders, faculty, residents and students.