Robert W. Hefner is an anthropology professor and director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University. Since 1991 he has also directed the institute’s program on Islam and society. His many books include (as editor) Shari’a Politics: Islamic Law and Society in the Modern World and (as co-editor) Schooling Islam: The […]

Clark McCauley Jr. is Rachel C. Hale Professor of Mathematics and the Sciences and co-director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College. His research focuses on the psychological foundations of ethnic conflict and genocide. At the April 2011 conference at Fordham, McCauley argued that “ideology and religion are more rationalization […]

Charles Kurzman is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-director of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations. He is the author of The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists, in which he argues that there are far fewer Islamic terrorists […]

Mohammed M. Hafez is a visiting professor of political science at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He wrote the book Why Muslims Rebel: Repression and Resistance in the Islamic World, and is currently working on a book to be titled,”Suicide Bombers: Politics, Reason, and Faith in Extreme Violence.”

Read an essay in the September/October 2011 edition of Foreign Policy magazine by Charles Kurzman titled “Why Is It So Hard to Find a Suicide Bomber These Days?” Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-director of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations, is […]

A Gallup Poll published in August 2011 showed the views of members of different religious communities to the question of whether terrorist violence is ever justified. Nearly nine in 10 Muslim Americans said violent attacks on civilians are never justified, the highest level of disapproval among the groups surveyed.

Read an October 5, 2011 NPR story about a controversial book by Ken Ballen, Terrorists in Love: The Real Lives of Islamic Radicals. Ballen spent five years interviewing more than 100 Islamic extremists to learn what motivated them to carry out violent attacks against the United States and others they considered enemies of Islam.

Read an article about the massacre in Norway in July 2011 by anti-Islamic extremist Anders Behring Breivik, who claimed to be a Christian crusader even as he rejected central Christian beliefs, which highlighted the phenomenon of right-wing violence.

Faheem Shuaibe is the resident imam of Masjidul Waritheen, an affiliate of W. Deen Mohammed’s group, in Oakland, Calif. His website contains his teachings.