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.

Herbert Berg is professor of philosophy and religion at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His area of expertise is Islam.

Carl W. Ernst is a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He wrote Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World and edited Islamophobia in America: The Anatomy of Intolerance. He is affiliated with the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security.

Brannon Wheeler is director at the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. He co-edited the Historical Dictionary of Prophets in Islam and Judaism. He has said that the Quran does not take a moral view of good and evil, but rather views the terms in relationship to […]

Gordon Darnell Newby is a professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian studies at Emory University in Atlanta. He wrote The Making of the Last Prophet: A Reconstruction of the Earliest Biography of Muhammad (University of South Carolina Press, 1989).

Omid Safi is a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies at Duke University, where he also directs the Duke Islamic Studies Center. He edited Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism and is a sought after source on religion, culture and interfaith issues.

Michael Cook is a professor of near Eastern studies at Princeton University in New Jersey. He is the author of Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and numerous other publications.  

Francis E. Peters is a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at New York University. He wrote Muhammad and the Origins of Islam (SUNY Press, 1994).