Maria Chin Abdullah
Dr. Abdullah is the Executive Director of the Women’s Development Collective (WDC), a non-governmental organization in Malaysia focused on research, education, and training. Established in the early 1980’s, WDC’s programs focus on gender analysis, worker health and safety, awareness and understanding of Malaysian laws, and leadership and grassroots organizing.
Contact her through wlp [at] learningpartnership [dot] org
Aziza Abemba
Dr. Abemba is the Executive Director of the Women’s Self-Promotion Movement (WSPM) in Zimbabwe. WSPM provides training and education for Zimbabwean women and girls and for refugee women from African countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi. Their programs promote women’s leadership, micro-enterprise, and political participation, as well as provide training in conflict resolution skills and domestic violence prevention.
Contact her through wlp [at] learningpartnership [dot] org
Mohammed Abu-Nimer
Dr. Abu-Nimer is Assistant Professor in the School of International Service at American University, Washington, DC. He conducts research on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the application of conflict resolution in non-western contexts, and holds dialogues for peace among Palestinians and Jews in Israel. As a practitioner, he has been conducting conflict resolution training workshops in Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Turkey, and the US.
Email him at abunimer [at] american [dot] edu
Asma Afsaruddin
Dr. Afsaruddin is Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Classics at the University of Notre Dame. She is a member of the advisory boards of the Crescent University Foundation and Karamah, a women’s and human rights organization based in Washington DC, and is a fellow of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy. Her fields of specialization are the religious and political thought of Islam, Qur’an and hadith studies, and Islamic intellectual history.
Access selected publications via: http://www.nd.edu/~col/faculty/index.html
Email: asma [dot] afsaruddin [dot] 1 [at] nd [dot] edu
Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad
Dr. Ahmad is the President of the Minaret of Freedom institute, a Maryland-based institution founded to counter misconceptions about Islamic beliefs and practice and to expose both American and Islamic-world Muslims to free market thought. Dr. Ahmad�s research interests include Islam and human rights, inter-faith issues, Palestine, and the Islamist movement.
To learn more, send him an email to Dean [dot] Ahmad [at] iad [dot] blkcat [dot] com.
Payam Akhavan
Dr. Akhavan is a Research Associate at the Danish Center for Human Rights and works for the UN Centre for Human Rights in Geneva. He has contributed to fact-finding missions and expert seminars on issues of minority protection in Central and Eastern Europe.
Contact him via the Danish Center web site at http://www.humanrights.dk
Azizah al-Hibri
Dr. Al-Hibri is Professor of Islamic Jurisprudence at the T.C. Williams School of Law, University of Virginia. She is also the founding editor and current president of Karamah�Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights, Washington, DC. Her research is in the area of Muslim women’s rights, especially the Islamic worldview on gender, and the marriage contract. Since September 11, she has become more involved in the area of American Muslim civil rights.
Read her articles and learn more about Karamah at: http://www.karamah.org
Contact Dr. Hibri at aalhibri [at] richmond [dot] edu
S. James Anaya
S. James Anaya is Samuel M. Fegtly Professor of Law at the University of Arizona College of Law. He teaches and writes in the areas of international law and organizations, human rights, and issues concerning indigenous peoples. He has been a consultant for numerous organizations and government agencies in several countries on matters of human rights and indigenous peoples, and he has represented indigenous groups from many parts of North and Central America before courts and international organizations.
Email him at anaya [at] nt [dot] law [dot] arizona [dot] edu
Abdullahi A. An-Na’im
Abdullahi An-Naim (from Sudan), the Director of the Fellowship Program in Islam and Human Rights, is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory Law School. An internationally recognized scholar of Islam and human rights, and human rights in cross-cultural perspectives, Professor An-Na’im teaches courses in human rights, religion and human rights, Islamic law, and criminal law. His research interests also include constitutionalism in Islamic and African countries, and Islam and politics. He is the Director of the Religion and Human Rights Program of the Law and Religion Program at Emory University School of Law. He directs several research projects which focus on advocacy strategies for reform through internal cultural transformation.
For more information, visit http://www.law.emory.edu/aannaim
Mucha-Shim Q. Arquiza
Ms. Arquiza is the Secretary General of the Asian Muslim Action Network (AMAN), an Asia-wide network of Muslims working for human rights, peace and social justice through inter-cultural and inter-faith dialogue. She is also the Executive Director and senior researcher for an all-women, mostly-Moroland (an indigenous community in the Philipines) research collective. The aim of the organization (HAGS, Inc.) is to work towards indigenous women�s empowerment.
Contact her at: mucha-shim [at] eudoramail [dot] com
Donna E. Arzt
Dr. Arzt is Professor of Law at the College of Law at Syracuse University, New York. She serves as the Director of the Center for Global Law and Practice, as well as Director of the Lockerbie Trial Families Project, established under a grant from the US Department of Justice Office for Victims of Crime. She has published numerous articles on human rights in the Soviet Union and the Middle East and served as a consultant to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Human Rights Watch, and the UN special rapporteur on population transfer. She received the Michael J. Tryson Memorial Award for Excellence and Leadership in the field of human rights law. Her current research pertains to the Middle East peace process, refugees, religious freedom in secular states, humanitarian intervention, and Islamic law.
Send her an email to dearzt [at] syr [dot] edu.
Nihad Awad
Nihad Awad is co-founder and the Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington DC-based grassroots membership organization which seeks to empower the North American Muslim community through political and social activism. Mr. Awad helped found CAIR in June 1994, which has grown rapidly in the United States and Canada. In 1997 he joined the Civil Rights Advisory Panel to the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. Mr. Awad conducts training in public relations, lectures about American Muslims, and is frequently interviewed on national and international media such as CNN, BBC World Service, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Mr. Awad also frequently serves as a consultant for various Islamic organizations.
View the Council’s website on http://www.cair-net.org/
Jamal Badawi
Dr. Badawi is a professor in the department of Religious Studies at Saint Mary�s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He is the Founder-Chairman of the Islamic Information Foundation, a non-profit foundation seeking to promote better understanding of Islam by Muslims and non-Muslims. Presently, he is the Vice-Chairman of the Islamic American University in Missouri. He has written on topics such as the status of women in Islam and gender equity.
Email him at jamal [dot] badawi [at] stmarys [dot] ca.
Nimat Hafez Barazangi
Dr. Barazangi holds a Research Fellow position for Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University, New York. There she specializes in curriculum and instruction, Islamic and Arabic Studies, and adult and community education. She is a board member of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID). Her areas of expertise include Muslim women�s education and human rights and her current research work focuses on (1) Islamic education in North America (2) self-identity and Educating the Muslim Women, (3) literacy and women development, and (4) research-based computerized curriculum of Arabic as a first and a foreign language.
Email her at nimat [at] islam-democracy [dot] org.
M. Cherif Bassiouni
M. Cherif Bassiouni is College of Law Professor at Depaul University in Chicago, and the President of DePaul’s International Human Rights Law Institute. In 1992, he was appointed a member, and later Chairman, of the UN Commission to Investigate Violations of International Humanitarian Law in the former Yugoslavia. He was nominated for a 1999 Nobel Peace Prize for his lifelong work to establish an International Criminal Court.
Contact Prof. Bassiouni at: cbassiou [at] depaul [dot] edu
Lucie Coulibaly
Dr. Coulibaly is a Program Coordinator at the Ivorian League for Human Rights (la Ligue Ivoirienne des Droits de l’Homme – LIDHO). From 1990 to 1999, Coulibaly acted as Secretary of External Relations for LIDHO. In this capacity, she initiated a number of training projects, seminars, conferences, and roundtable discussions on such topics as human rights, women’s rights, religious tolerance, and planning and managing nongovernmental organizations. She also coordinated and participated in a number of conferences that instructed on methods for investigating, researching, and reporting human rights violations.
Email her at: luciecool [at] caramail [dot] com
Francis M. Deng
Professor Deng is the Co-Director of the Brookings-SAIS (School of Advanced International Studies) Project on Internal Displacement, Washington, DC. He has been the Sudanese Ambassador to the United States Scandinavia and Canada and a Human Rights Officer for the United Nations. His areas of expertise include internal displacement, Sudan, human rights, and US-Africa relations.
Visit the Brookings Institution website at http://www.brook.edu/default.htm to learn more.
Yuri Dzhibladze
Dr. Dzhibladze is a the President of the Centre for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights, Russia. His areas of expertise include political science, human rights, international law, and development of civil society. He created several Russian and international NGOs concerned with civil society development, non-violent social change, intercultural dialogue and conflict resolution. He acts as a consultant to a number of Russian and international NGOs as an expert in democratic institution building, development of civil society and rule of law, human rights and conflict resolution.
Email him at: dzhib [at] demokratia [dot] ru
Mona Makram Ebeid
Dr. Ebeid is Professor of Political Science and American Political Sociology at the American University in Cairo. She is the President-Founder of the Association for the Advancement of Education, an NGO with observer status in the United Nations, and also a founding member of the Arab Organization for Human Rights.
,br> Contact her at mmakbeid [at] aucegypt [dot] edu.
Abdelwahab El-Affendi
Dr. El-Affendi is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Westminster Centre for the Study of Democracy and Co-ordinator of the Centre’s Project on Democracy in the Muslim World. Dr. El-Affendi is also a member of the Consultative Council of the Arab Human Rights Organization in the UK. One of his latest research initiatives is to examine the crisis of democratization in the Middle East in particular, and Muslim majority countries in general.
Visit the Centre�s website at http://www.wmin.ac.uk/csd
Email Dr El-Affendi at: A [dot] El-Affendi [at] westminster [dot] ac [dot] uk
Nader Fergany
Dr. Fergany is the editor and lead author of the first-ever Arab Human Development Report (AHDR). He is the Director of Almishkat, an independent, non-commercial institution devoted to advancing knowledge on contemporary Egypt, and Arab countries, through research in the social sciences, with emphasis on human development.
For more information, visit the website: http://www.almishkat.org
Riffat Hassan
Dr. Hassan is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. She is the founder of The International Network for the Rights of Female Victims of Violence in Pakistan (INRFVVP), a non-profit organization with a worldwide membership and reputation for playing a noteworthy role in highlighting the issue of violence against girls and women, particularly with reference to “crimes of honor.”
Visit her website at http://www.inrfvvp.org
Send an email to inrfvvpe [at] athena [dot] louisville [dot] edu to contact her.
Maher Hathout
Dr. Hathout is the Senior Advisor and one of the founders of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), a public service, non-profit, non-partisan agency that disseminates accurate information about Islam and Muslims to the media and to our elected officials. He is also the spokesperson for the Islamic Center of Southern California. Dr. Hathout�s areas of expertise include Islamic jurisprudence and international human rights issues.
Visit http://islamctr.org/ to learn more.
Saad Eddin Ibrahim
Dr. Ibrahim is Professor of Political Sociology at the American University in Cairo and the Director of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies (ICDS), Cairo. ICDS is a non-governmental research organization seeking to promote the use of available research in the social sciences in the policy-making process in Egypt and the Arab world, and to advocate this objective among influential pressure groups in policy-making circles. An internationally renowned sociologist and advocate of democracy and human rights, he is known as one of Egypt’s most prominent human rights activists.
Contact Dr. Ibrahim at saadedin [at] aucegypt [dot] edu to learn more.
Ayesha Imam
Ayesha Imam has been a woman’s rights activist for over two decades.� She is founding director of BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights in Nigeria.� BAOBAB was formally established in 1996 as an organization focusing on women’s legal rights issues under customary, statutory and religious laws.� Dr. Imam is a core group member of the international solidarity network, Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) in Africa and the Middle East.� She has also worked on gender training, evaluation and research for activists in NGOs, for mid-level planners and functionaries in government, and for researchers.� She is currently Chief of the Culture, Gender and Human Rights Branch of UNFPA.
Dr. Imam has lectured and carried out research in women’s studies and gender analysis at universities and research institutes in Nigeria, the U.K., Canada and Senegal.� She has published widely for both academic and activist uses.�� Her work on women�s rights in Muslim laws and practices include the widely reprinted articles “The Muslim Religious Right (�Fundamentalists�) and Sexuality,” and� “Women�s Rights in Muslim Laws (Sharia),” as well as contributing to the introduction and chapter on “Legal Systems and Change” and conceptual editing of Knowing Our Rights: Women, Family, Laws and Customs in the Muslim World (WLUML 2003).� Her formal publications include editing and writing chapters for Engendering African Social Sciences (CODESRIA 1994, also published in French 2002) and two special issues of Africa Development, Re-Visiting Gender I and II, as well as numerous journal articles, training modules and research reports.
Contact her at AyeshaImam [at] earthlink [dot] net
Sayyed Nadeem Kazmi
Mr. Kazmi is the Head of International Development at Al-Khoei Foundation, London and New York, and Senior Advisor to HRH Prince El-Hassan bin Talal of Jordan. He has worked in human rights advocacy and humanitarian development since 1991. He is also an Advisor to the Amnesty International UK Ethnic Minorities Working Group and a member of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House, London).
Visit http://www.communitytransitions.org to learn more about his work.
Contact him at kazmico [at] idt [dot] net.
Amina Lemrini
Amina Lemrini is a Founder of the Moroccan Human Rights Organization, and an Executive Committee member of the Association D�mocratique des Femmes du Maroc (ADFM), a non-governmental organization working on the promotion and defense of women’s rights in Morocco. She is also on the Board of Directors of Collectif 95 Maghreb-Egalite, a women’s regional NGO working in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Ms. Lemrini has lectured and published on a variety of issues dealing with human rights, particularly on the rights of the child and women’s rights.
Email her at: adfm [at] mtds [dot] com or at Lemrini [at] iam [dot] net [dot] ma
J. Paul Martin
Dr. Martin is the Director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University, New York. His current research focuses on Africa and includes human rights education, religious proselytization, cooperative training programs in human rights with and for African NGOs. He has been working with human rights NGO coalitions in Africa to develop their own research and training programs.
E-mail him at jpm2 [at] columbia [dot] edu.
Radwan Masmoudi
Radwan Masmoudi is the founder and President of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID), a Washington-based non-profit think tank. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Center’s quarterly publication, Muslim Democrat. Dr. Masmoudi is very active with local Muslim organizations and was elected as Director of the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. He was also a Founding Member and President of the Tunisian Scientific Society (TSS). Dr. Masmoudi has published several papers on the topics of democracy, diversity, human rights, and tolerance in Islam. Dr. Masmoudi has a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and has been active in interfaith dialogue and in promoting a greater understanding of democracy and democratic values within Islam and within the Muslim World.
Find out more about the Center at http://www.islam-democracy.org
Contact him at masmoudi [at] islam-democracy [dot] org
Ali A. Mazrui
Dr. Mazrui is Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is also the Albert Luthuli Professor-at-Large in the Humanities and Development Studies at the University of Jos in Nigeria. The Chair of the Board of Directors for the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID), Dr. Mazrui has been involved in a number of UN projects on matters which have ranged from human rights to nuclear proliferation. He is also internationally consulted on Islamic culture and Muslim history. His research interests include African politics, international political culture, political Islam, and North-South Relations.
Contact him at amazrui [at] binghamton [dot] edu.
Sindi Medar-Gould
Sindi Medar-Gould is Executive Director of the Nigeria-based organization BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights, a non-profit organization working for women’s human rights and legal rights under customary and religious law in Africa. BAOBAB also coordinates programs for Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) in Africa and the Middle East. Ms. Medar-Gould has been a women’s human rights activist for over 20 years, and is an experienced teacher, trainer, and researcher.
Contact her at sindi [at] baobab [dot] com [dot] ng.
Mahmood Monshipouri
Dr. Monshipouri is the Executive Director of the Center for Iranian Research and Analysis (CIRA), an independent and non-profit educational organization designed to generate and publicize scholarly research on developments in Iran and the Middle East. He is also the Chair of the Political Science Department at Quinnipiac University, Connecticut. He has studied the abrupt democratization of Third World countries and the effect this process has on Human Rights. Dr. Monshipouri’s publications include Islamism, Secularism, and Human Rights in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998), and, more recently, the volume Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization (eds. Mahmood Monshipouri, Neil Englehart, Andrew J. Nathan, and Kavita Philip, Armonk, NY: M.E.Sharpe, 2003).
To learn more about CIRA, visit their website at http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libarts/monshipouri/cira/.
Contact Dr. Monshipouri via email at Mahmood [dot] monshipour [at] quinnipiac [dot] edu.
Chandra Muzaffar
Dr. Muzaffar is a professor at the Centre for Civilisational Dialogue at the Universiti Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. He is the President of the Malaysian based international NGO, International Movement for a Just World (JUST), which seeks to raise public consciousness on the moral and intellectual basis of global justice. Dr. Muzaffar�s research interests include religion and human rights, Malaysian politics, and Malaysian politics.
Visit the JUST website for more information at http://www.just-international.org.
Farish A. Noor
Dr. Noor is a Malaysian political scientist and human rights activist. He has taught at the Centre for Civilisational Dialogue, University of Malaya and the Institute for Islamic Studies, Frie University of Berlin. Dr. Noor is also an associate fellow at the Institute for Strategic and International Studies (ISIS), Malaysia and the Secretary General of the International Movement for a Just World.
Email: muza [at] po [dot] jaring [dot] my
Ayo Obe
Ayo Obe is the second President of Nigeria’s Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO). In October 1998, Obe was one of eight African human rights activists at a roundtable discussion in Dakar, Senegal, with President and Mrs. Clinton. Obe is a member of the Nigerian Bar Association and the International Bar Association.
Email her at Amoo [at] alpha [dot] linkserve [dot] com or clo [at] gacom [dot] net.
Xiao Qiang
Xiao Qiang is the Executive Director of Human Rights in China (HRIC). He is a full-time human rights activist and acted as deputy director of the Washington-based Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars (IFCSS) before he assumed his current position at HRIC in April, 1991. He has spoken on behalf of the Chinese human rights movement at each meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights since 1993 and testified in front of the European Parliament and the United States Congress on numerous occasions. Xiao is a founding member and North American representative of the Asia-Pacific Human Rights NGO Facilitating Team
Find out more at http://www.hrchina.org
Email him at Hric2 [at] igc [dot] org
Loretta Ross
Loretta Ross is the founder and Executive Director of the Atlanta-based Center for Human Rights Education, a training and resource center for grassroots activists which uses human rights criteria to address social injustice in the United States. She is an expert on human rights, women’s issues, diversity, hate groups, and bias crimes.
Visit the Center’s website for more information at http://www.nchre.org/.
Azzam Tamimi
Dr. Tamimi is Senior Lecturer at Markfield Institute of Higher Education in London and the Director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought, London. He has researched issues of human rights, liberty, and democratization in the Islamic world and has extensive knowledge on the trends and activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan. In 1992, he helped to found the London-based organization Liberty for the Muslim World, and in the 1998 Parliamentary Elections in Jordan, he served as Chairman of the Islamic Movement’s Parliamentary Office.
Contact him via email at info [at] ii-pt [dot] com.