Nurcholish Madjid is a prominent Muslim intellectual, known for his innovative opinions on social and political matters in Indonesia and other developing Islamic nations. Dr. Madjid has served as Rector of the Paramadina Mulya University (Jakarta) since 1998. In addition, he is a lecturer on the post-graduate faculty at Syarif Hidayatullah University (Jakarta) and a senior researcher at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. He was previously a leader of various student organizations.

Ahmed al-Rahim is a founding member of the American Islamic Congress, an organization formed after September 11 in the belief that American Muslims should play a leading role in rejecting Islamic extremism and promoting a democratic future in the Muslim world. Mr. al-Rahim is also preceptor in Classical Arabic Language and Literature at Harvard University, and a doctoral candidate at Yale University, where he is completing a dissertation on Islamic intellectual history during the Mongol period. During 2002, he served as an advisor to USAID on educational reform in Iraq. A frequent contributor to television and radio programs on Islam and politics, Mr. al-Rahims publications include an edited book, Before and After Avicenna, and a number of articles in the Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal.

Mohammad Fadel is an attorney in New York. A frequent lecturer on Islamic law, he was a founding member of Muslims Against Terrorism, now Muslim Voices for Peace. Dr. Fadel has also been an instructor of Arabic at the University of Virginia, Middlebury College, and Notre Dame University and has published several papers on Islamic law.

Mohammed Ayoob is University Distinguished Professor of International Relations at James Madison College, Michigan State University. Before joining Michigan State University, he taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University in India and the Australian National University. He has also held visiting appointments at Princeton, Columbia, Oxford, Sydney, and Brown Universities and at Bilkent University in Turkey. He is the author of The Third World Security Predicament: State Making, Regional Conflict, and the International System, and has published numerous scholarly articles in professional journals such as World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Global Governance, Asian Survey, Orbis, Foreign Policy, International Affairs, International Journal, Washington Quarterly, Middle East Policy.

Hillel Fradkin is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and director of its Islamic Studies and Jewish Studies programs. Before joining the Ethics and Public Policy Center, he was the W.H. Brady, Jr. Fellow in Politics, Religion and Culture at the American Enterprise Institute. Prior to his work at AEI, Dr. Fradkin was a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he taught the history of political and religious thought (Muslim, Christian and Jewish) as well as other courses in political science. For the same period, he was vice president of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

Husain Haqqani is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. He is a syndicated columnist for The Indian Express and The Nation (of Pakistan) and serves as chairman of Communications Research Strategies, a Pakistani consulting company. Mr. Haqqani's journalism career includes work as East Asian correspondent for Arabia - The Islamic World Review and Pakistan and Afghanistan correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review. He is a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Arab News. He regularly comments on Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Islamic politics and extremism on BBC, CNN, NBC, and ABC. Mr. Haqqani has also served as an advisor to Pakistani prime ministers Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, Nawaz Sharif, and Benazir Bhutto. From 1992 to 1993, he served as Pakistan's ambassador to Sri Lanka.

Abdou Filali-Ansary is director of the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, Aga Khan University in London. He served from 1984 to 2001 as the founding director of the King Abdul-Aziz Foundation for Islamic Studies and Human Sciences in Casablanca, Morocco, having previously taught modern philosophy in the Faculty of Letters in Rabat. Professor Filali-Ansary has contributed widely to academic discourses on democratization and civil society in the Middle East and in 1993, co-founded the bilingual Arabic and French journal Prologues: revue maghrébine du livre . His work includes a translation into French of Ali Abderraziq's landmark book, Islam and the Foundations of Political Power, and an essay titled "Is Islam Hostile to Secularism?". He serves on the advisory boards of numerous academic and cultural institutions, and on the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy.

Asma Afsaruddin is associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her fields of specialization are the religious and political thought of Islam, Qur'an and hadith studies, and the intellectual history of Islam. Professor Afsaruddin is the author of Excellence and Precedence: Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership and editor of Hermeneutics and Honor: Negotiating Female "Public" Space in Islamic/ate Societies. She was recently a visiting scholar at the Centre of Islamic Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and is currently serving on the board of directors of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (Washington, DC) and on the advisory board of Karamah, a women's and human rights organization (Washington DC).

Francis Fukuyama is dean of faculty and the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. He has previously taught at George Mason University, was a scholar at the RAND Corporation, and served on the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. Professor Fukuyama has written widely on democratization and international political economy. He is the author of many books and articles including The End of History and the Last Man and Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.

Peter Skerry is professor of political science at Boston College and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His research focuses on social policy, racial and ethnic politics, and immigration. He was formerly a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He has also served as legislative director for the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. His writings on politics, racial and ethnic issues, immigration and social policy have appeared in a variety of scholarly and general interest publications, including Society, Publius, The Journal of Policy History, The New Republic, Slate, The Public Interest, The Wilson Quarterly, and The National Review. He is the author of Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority. His current project is a study of the social, cultural, and political integration of Muslims and Arabs in the United States.

Shaykh Kabbani is a Sufi scholar and chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, a Muslim civic organization that hosts conferences, engages in inter-religious dialogue, and promotes traditional, moderate Islamic views within US and foreign policymaking channels. In his effort to unite, educate and serve Muslims, Shaykh Kabbani has also founded several national organizations, including the Kamilat Muslim Women's Association. He holds a degree in Shari'ah, and has also studied medicine in Louvain, Belgium, and Islamic spirituality under two internationally renowned spiritual guides of the worldwide Naqshbandi Sufi Order.

Asma Afsaruddin is associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her fields of specialization are the religious and political thought of Islam, Qur'an and hadith studies, and the intellectual history of Islam. Professor Afsaruddin is the author of Excellence and Precedence: Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership and editor of Hermeneutics and Honor: Negotiating Female "Public" Space in Islamic/ate Societies. She was recently a visiting scholar at the Centre of Islamic Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and is currently serving on the board of directors of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (Washington, DC) and on the advisory board of Karamah, a women's and human rights organization (Washington DC).

Hillel Fradkin. (See biography above.)

Abdulwahab Alkebsi is program officer for the Middle East and North Africa at the National Endowment for Democracy. In 2002, he served as Executive Director of  the Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy, a non-profit think tank, based in Washington DC, dedicated to studying Islamic and democratic political thought and merging them into a modern Islamic democratic discourse.