Margot Badran is a historian and gender studies specialist focusing on the Muslim world. She is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Senior Fellow at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding at Georgetown University.
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British Lawyer Ahmad Thomson converted to Islam in 1973. He is a noted speaker on Islamic matters and an author of several books on the subject. Thomson is a member of the Murabitun movement, founded by Ian Dallas, and a member and co-founder of the Association of Muslim Lawyers. In 1994, he founded Wynne Chambers: one of the first chambers to specialise in Islamic law as well as English law. He has actively campaigned for elements of Muslim personal law to be accommodated by English civil law. He says a whole zone of knowledge about Islamic truth and its wisdom has been kept at bay, if you like, by established educational institutions in what’s called the West. He tries to redress the balance here.
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1969. She sought political asylum in the Netherlands in 1992 in order to escape an arranged marriage. She became a member of the Dutch parliament and made a film with Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh that led to his assassination by a Muslim extremist in 2004. She is currently a fellow at the right –wing think tank American Enterprise Institute and head of the AHA Foundation (www.theahafoundation.org), a charity that helps protect and defend the rights of women in the West against militant Islam.
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Turi Munthe is CEO and founder of Demotix – www.demotix.com – the multiple-awardwinning open newswire, with over 3,000 reporters in 190 countries around the world. Turi is English-French-Swedish and was brought up in London. He has been a publisher, editor, think-tank analyst (Middle East policy), lecturer, journalist and talking head. He has written for many of the world’s leading English-language newspapers, appeared on CNN, BBC, NBC, al-Jazeera, Asahi. He edited The Saddam Hussein Reader: Selections from Leading Writers on Iraq.
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Shazia Khan is a radio and TV reporter. She reports for the BBC World Service and Radio 4. Her background and training is in news but now she specialises in reporting on faith and culture. She has presented numerous documentaries on subjects such as women and beauty, sacred music and gay Muslims.
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Ali Ansari is the Professor of Iranian History and Director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews, as well as Associate Fellow of the Middle East Programme, Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House). He has just finished a study of the recent presidential elections, to be published this month. He is currently working on a book for Cambridge University Press entitled The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran, and has recently been appointed Editor of the Cambridge History of Iran Vol 8 (The Islamic Republic). It is difficult for Iranian people within the country to freely express their views, although the internet makes it easier, he says. But what has been published in the last decade before the current crackdown reflects the fact there is a literate readership that hungers for history.
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Rated by the British Library as among the top ten foreign poets currently based in London, Hasan-Zadeh is one of the most exciting voices in contemporary poetry. Her collection On Wings Over the Horizon, translated into English in 2002 by Richard McKane, drew comparisons with Anna Akhmatova and Maria Tsvetayeva.
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Syed Ashfaqul Haque is Chief News Editor at The Daily Star, the largest circulating English language daily newspaper in Bangladesh. Ashfaqul began his career as an apprentice subeditor at The Daily Star nearly 20 years ago, when the newspaper was a year old. In 2009 his investigative report on corruption in imports won the Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) Investigative Journalism Award, the Unesco-Bangladesh Journalism Award and the Dhaka Reporters Unity Award for best economic investigative report. Ashfaqul talks to FiveBooks about his nation’s struggle for independence, the repression of journalists and his five favourite books about Bangladesh.
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Deputy-Chair of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge, and Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Dr Bennison has published widely on the medieval and early-modern Maghreb. She says that the scientific tradition in the Islamic world underpinned much of the European Renaissance, and that Muslim doctors were appalled by the brutal and primitive medical techniques of the early crusaders. Most Muslim towns had a hospital by the 10th century.
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Eugene Rogan is Director of the Middle East Centre and a faculty fellow and lecturer in the Modern History of the Middle East at Oxford University. His research focuses on the social and economic history of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and the Arab states in the 20th century. His most recent book, The Arabs: A History, came out in 2009 to widespread media attention, not least because it offered historical insight into why US efforts to promote democracy in the region have been met with such suspicion.
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