Mahnaz Afkhami
Dr. Afkhami is Founder and President of Women’s Learning Partnership (WLP), Executive Director of the Foundation for Iranian Studies, and former Minister of State for Women’s Affairs in Iran. Born in Kerman, Iran, she founded the Association of Iranian University Women and served as secretary general of the Women’s Organization of Iran prior to the Islamic revolution. Ms. Afkhami has lectured and published extensively on the international women’s movement, women’s human rights, women in leadership, women and technology, and women, civil society, and democracy.
Email: wlp [at] learningpartnership [dot] org
Leila Ahmed
Dr. Ahmed is Professor of Women’s Studies in Religion at Harvard Divinity School. Her areas of expertise include women in Islam, Muslims in America, and Islam’s internal pluralism.
She can be contacted via email at leila_ahmed [at] harvard [dot] edu
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.
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
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
John L. Esposito
Dr. John L. Esposito is University Professor and Professor of Religion and International Affairs and Professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. He is the Founding Director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding: History and International Affairs at Georgetown University. Professor Esposito’s more than 25 books focus on Islam and politics, society, democracy, and human rights. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World and The Oxford History of Islam.
For more information, visit, http://www.islam-democracy.org/esposito_bio.asp
Email Dr Esposito at esposito [at] islam-democracy [dot] org
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.
Jibrin Ibrahim
Dr. Ibrahim is the Nigeria Program Director at the International Human Rights Law Group in Washington, DC. His research interests are democratization and the politics of transition, comparative federalism, religious and ethnic identities, and the crisis in social provisioning in Africa.
Contact him at jibo72 [at] yahoo [dot] com
Azza Karam
Dr. Azza Karam is the Program Director of the Women’s Department at the World Conference on Religion and Peace (WCRP). She has worked since the 1980s in the fields of gender, development, human rights, democratization, conflict, and political Islam.
To learn more about the World Conference, visit the website at http://www.wcrp.org/RforP/RFP_1_MAIN.html
Email Dr. Karam at akaram [at] wcrp [dot] org.
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
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.
Azar Nafisi
Dr. Nafisi is a Visiting Fellow and Professional Lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Washington D.C. She researches subjects such as the Middle East, Iran, culture and politics, democracy, human rights in Muslim societies, and women’s rights.
Email her at anafisi [at] jhu [dot] edu
Abdulaziz A. Sachedina
Dr. Sachedina�s work covers a broad range of topics that deal with contemporary Islam. His areas of expertise are political Islam, religious conflict resolution through analysis of Islamic legal tradition, Islamic roots of religious and political pluralism, and human rights in the Middle East, Pakistan, and East Africa. He has written articles on issues of Muslim youth, Islamic jurisprudence, Islamic perspectives on human cloning, and issues of riba in Islamic faith and law.
For more information, visit http://www.people.virginia.edu/~aas/home.htm
Yoginder Sikand
Dr. Yoginder Sikand is currently a post-doctoral research scholar at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, Leiden, The Netherlands. His research project is ‘Islamic Perspectives on Inter-Faith Relations in Contemporary India’. He also edits a web-magazine, Qalandar, that is devoted to a discussion of issues related to Islam and Inter-Faith Relations in South Asia (www.islaminterfaith.org). He has taught Islamic history at the Henry Martyn Institute of Islamic Studies, Hyderabad, India, and has also worked with voluntary agencies in the areas of education and communal harmony. His extensive list of publications includes 4 books, over 30 journal articles and chapters in edited volumes, and over 250 articles in numerous South Asian periodicals and newspapers.
Email Dr. Sikand at ysikand [at] yahoo [dot] com
Download Dr. Sikand’s CV
Visit the Qalandar website at www.islaminterfaith.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.
M. Hakan Yavuz
M. Hakan Yavuz is the Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame University. He is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah, and a frequent commentator in the Turkish media. His work focuses on Islamic conceptions of human rights, the politics of identity, and the impact of globalization on developing countries. Dr. Yavuz is particularly interested in its implications for the evolution of modernist thinking in the Islamic world as a whole and for future relations between Islam and the West.
Email him at hakan [dot] yavuz [at] poli-sci [dot] utah [dot] edu