Khalil Akbar is the resident imam at Masjid Ash-Shaheed, a predominantly African-American mosque in Charlotte, N.C.

Craig Keener is a professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. He co-authored an article on the Nation of Islam for A Guide to New Religious Movements. He is an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

James Jones is an associate professor of world religions at Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y. He wrote a paper titled “Islam, Incarceration and the African American Male.”

Eddie Glaude Jr. is a professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. He specializes in African-American religious history and is the editor of Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism.

Aisha al-Adawiya is the founder and director of Women in Islam, a human rights organization based in New York, N.Y. She is an expert on African-American Islamic women.

Jeffrey Ogbonna Green Ogbar is former director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. He is currently the Vice Provost for Diversity.

Ernest Allen Jr. is a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He has written about the evolution of the Nation of Islam from its roots as the Moorish Science Temple to the stepping down of Farrakhan.

The Muslim Journal is the publication of the American Muslim Society.

The Moorish Science Temple was founded by Noble Drew Ali in the early 1900s 1913 and is based on the teachings of Islam, although it also incorporates Eastern and Gnostic beliefs. It is based in Hyattsville, Md.