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 […]

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.