Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish columnist for Hürriyet Daily News, the website Al-Monitor: The Pulse of the Middle East and The International New York Times. He is also the author of Islam Without Extremes. In 2011, he delivered a TED Talk on the subject of faith versus tradition in Islam.

Karima Bennoune is a professor of international law at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here.

Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun, is an authority on the Abrahamic religions and author of many books on the subject. Her most recent book is Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence.

Bernard Haykel is a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and director of the Institute for Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. He is an expert on ISIS, or the Islamic State, jihadism, and Islamic apocalypiticism.

John Keane is a professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and the director of the Sydney Democracy Network. He holds a doctorate and a master’s degree from the University of Toronto and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Adelaide. In addition to other research interests, Keane focuses on secularism, Islam, and Europe.

Abed Awad is an attorney and public speaker based in New Jersey and New York. He focuses on general civil litigation, including complex matrimonial law, commercial law, Islamic law and international law. Awad has an academic knowledge of shari’a and the laws of Arab countries. He holds a J.D. and a master’s degree in Near and Middle East Studies from the University of […]

Asifa Quraishi-Landes is a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Law and specializes in comparative Islamic and American constitutional law. She is currently focusing on modern Islamic constitutional theory. Quraishi is a 2009 Carnegie Scholar and 2012 Guggenheim Fellow.

Gender Spectrum is a national organization that advocates for and supports transgender youth, their families, educators and health providers. It maintains a “topics” page on its website about transgender and faith traditions and faith leaders and publishes a resource guide for faith communities. Lisa Kenney is executive director. Gender Spectrum is based in the San Francisco […]