Yusuf al-Abdallah, Professor

Dr al-Abdallah is professor of Archaeology and Epigraphy at the University of San'a, Yemen, dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of San'a (1982) and dean of the Faculty of Research and Higher Studies, University of San'a (1986). His publications include, among others, Die Personennamen in al-Hamdani's al-Iklil und ihre Parallelen in den südarabischen Inschriften. His research interests are: Arabian ancient history, epigraphy and archaeology with a focus on the Yemen.

Touhami Abdouli, Professor

Dr Touhami Abdouli is Associate Professor (maitre de conf) at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Sousse, Tunisia. He completed his Academic Habilitation at the University of Sousse in 2005 and received his PhD from the University of Manouba, Tunisia I on Islamic Civilization: Abraham in the Arab-Islamic Culture. He is currently based at the Link Campus University in Rome, where he served as the Director of Academic Promotion until 2007. He was previously the President of Kadmous University, Syria. He has served as visiting professor at a range of institutions including the Faculty of Arts at Damascus University, the Institute of Asian Cultures at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan, the Faculty of Arts at Sousse University, Tunisia and the Institute of Applied languages in Moknine, Tunisia. His most recent publications are Islam of Kurds, Attaliaa House, Beirut, 2007 (in Arabic) and Monarchy and Society in Morocco, A reading into the dialectics of Domination and Continuity, AACA, DAM-Tokyo, 2006 (in English).

K. Humayun Ansari, Professor

Dr Humayun Ansari is Professor of the History of Islam and Cultural Diversity, Department of History, and Director of the Centre for Minority Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has conducted research and provided consultancy and training in the field of ethnic minority issues and equal opportunities for a range of organisations in the public, private and voluntary sectors, including government departments and agencies, the health sector, the police, the probation service, further and higher education, and within industry and commerce. His academic research includes ethnicity, identity, migration, multiculturalism and Islamophobia. He has written extensively on the subject of Muslims in Western society, cultural diversity and cross-cultural issues. He is author of The Infidel Within, Muslims in Britain Since 1800, The Emergence of Socialist Thought Among North Indian Muslims (1917-1947) and co-author of Managing Cultural Diversity At Work.

Aziz al-Azmeh, Professor

Dr al-Azmeh has taught extensively in Europe, the Middle East and North America. He obtained his PhD in Philosophy in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford. In 1993 he was conferred with the Republican Order of Merit for his services to Arab culture by the President of Tunisia. His publications include Islams and Modernities. Since 2002, Dr al-Azmeh has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Humanities Center, Central European University, Budapest.

Karim Javan, Lecturer

Mr Javan received his MPhil in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from the University of Cambridge. He has taught English and Persian in Iran and England and has published a biographical article in Persian entitled Shah Karim al Huseini - The Fourth Aga Khan.

Nels Johnson, Lecturer

Dr Johnson received his PhD from McGill University, Montreal. He has taught at universities in America, Canada, Egypt and Britain and held the position of Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Richmond University between 1985-1994. His field of research is wide and his publications include: 'Ahmad: A Kuwaiti Pearl-Diver' in Struggle and Survival in the Middle East; and 'Mass Culture and Islamic Populism' in Mass Culture, Popular Culture and Social Life in the Middle East. His current research is on Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, tribal structures, cultural amnesia (especially genealogical amnesia) and Islamic social movements.

Wadad Kadi, Professor

Dr Kadi has been a professor of Islamic Thought at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilisations at the Unviersity of Chicago, USA since 1988. Her publications include: The Impact of the Qur’an on the Epistolography of Abd al-Hamid; and The Imitations of Qur'anic Usage in Early Arabic Poetry: The Example of a Kharijite Poem. Her research interests include: Arabic literature and Islamic Studies; the Qur’an’s influence on Arabic prose; Islamic political thought; early Islamic theology and sectarianism; early Islamic administrative history; and Islamic papyrology.

David Mitchell, Visiting Fellow Birkbeck College

Dr Mitchell obtained his PhD in philosophy from Merton College Oxford and has held lectureships at the Universities of Cambridge and Leicester. He is currently an honorary fellow of the School of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. He has taught and published in the areas of history of philosophy and moral and political philosophy. His recent research is concerned with human rights and human development.

Azim Nanji, Professor

Professor Azim Nanji was Director of the Institute of Ismaili Studies from 1998 to 2008. In 2008, he became a faculty member in religious studies as part of the Abbasi Programme in Islamic Studies at Stanford University. Previously, he was Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion at the University of Florida and has held academic and administrative appointments at various American and Canadian universities. Professor Nanji has authored, co-authored and edited several books including: The Nizari Ismaili Tradition (1976), The Muslim Almanac (1996), Mapping Islamic Studies (1997) and The Historical Atlas of Islam (with M. Ruthven) (2004) and The Dictionary of Islam (with Razia Nanji), Penguin 2008. In addition, he has contributed numerous shorter studies and articles on religion, Islam and Ismailism in journals and collective volumes including The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Encyclopaedia Iranica, Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Modern Islamic World, and A Companion to Ethics.

Wen-chin Ouyang, Senior Lecturer

Dr Wen-chin Ouyang is Senior Lecturer in Arabic Literature within the Department of the Languages and Cultures of Near and Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. She specialises in classical and modern Arabic literature, narrative and story-telling and critical theory and thoughts. Ouyang received her MA, MPhil and PhD from Columbia University, USA. She is the author of Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture: The Making of a Tradition (1997) and editor of Ideological Variations and Narrative Horizons: New Perspectives on the Arabian Nights (2004) and Companion to Magical Realism (2005). She has written numerous articles for a range of journals including Middle Eastern Literatures, Modern Arabic Literature: The Comparative Perspective and Modern Languages Quarterly.

Hassan Rachik, Professor

Hassan Rachik is a Professor at the Faculté des Sciences Juridiques Economiques et Sociales de Casablanca, Morocco.

Robert Rollinger, Professor

Dr Rollinger has been Professor at the Institute for Ancient History, Languages and Cultures of the Ancient Orient at Leopold Franzens University in Innsbruck since 1990. From 2003 to 2004 he was also visiting professor at the University of Graz, Institute for Ancient History. His publications include Herodot’s Babylonian logos; Early forms of historical thought in Ur III and Isin-Larsa and Ancient Greece and the ancient Near East. His expertise and research interests include: ancient languages and cultures of the ancient Near East; the interaction between the cultural spaces with a focus on the period from the 8th to the 5th centuries B.C.E.; gender roles in Late Hellenism and the early Imperial period; the ethnography of the reception of gender in antiquity; cultural exchange between the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean World; the history of the ancient Orient (1st Millennium B.C.E.); the culture of the Greek Archaic period; the Achaemenid dynasty; and ancient historiography.

Iqbal Singh Sevea, Lecturer

Dr Sevea was awarded his PhD in Modern History from the University of Oxford. He has taught in Singapore and worked as a research assistant in both Singapore and England. His publications include: Islam, State and Modernity: Muslim Political Discourse in Late 19th and early 20th Century India. Dr Iqbal is an active member of the Punjab Research Group.

Malak Shuqair, Visiting Lecturer

Malak Shuqair is a part-time visiting lecturer at the School of Languages at the University of Westminster. She has taught non-specialised English/Arabic translation and editing skills on the MA translation course, as well as supervised students. Since 1999 she has taught modern Arabic literature and culture. Prior to this, Shuqair has worked as both an educational officer and translator at a variety of institutions including the Saudi Arabian Cultural Office and the Libyan Embassy in London. She has worked as a cataloguer at the Islamic Cultural Centre Library and the University of Jordan library in Amman.

Amine Cakir Surmeli, Instructor

Dr Amine Çakir Sürmeli is a Turkish language instructor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, where she teaches elementary written, intensive and advanced Turkish. From 1993 to 2008 she was an English language instructor at Çukurova University, YADIM (Foreign Languages Research and Application Centre). She was also a member of the YADIM project unit, where she worked on various EU projects. She was, between 2004 and 2007, a German and Turkish Instructor in Turkey, having taught Turkish both as a private language course, and at YADIM for Erasmus students coming from all over Europe. She is an adjunct professor at Maryland University- Europe, Incirlik/Adana.

David Taylor, Professor

Dr Taylor was Vice Provost (Academic Development and Special Projects) at Aga Khan University, Pakistan from May 2002 until 2008. Before joining AKU he was on the faculty of the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) for 32 years, where he had most recently held the position of Pro-Director for Taught Courses. He had previously also been Head of the Department of Political Studies and Chair of the Centre for South Asian Studies. Dr Taylor's disciplinary background is in history and political science; he completed his undergraduate study at the University of Cambridge and his Masters and PhD degrees are from the University of London. His main areas of research have been the twentieth-century history of India and Pakistan.

Farouk Topan, Lecturer

Dr Topan received his PhD from SOAS, University of London, where he held the position of Senior Lecturer until 2006. He held the position of Research Scholar & Head, Teacher Training Programme at the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London from 1977-1993. His publications include: Uchambuzi wa Maandishi ya Kiswahili (edited); Contemporary issues in Swahili literature; Song, dance and the continuity of Swahili identity in continuity and Autonomy in Swahili Communities; Langue et culture Swahili a Zanzibar in Zanzibar aujourd’hui; Being Muslim in East Africa: a Swahili perspective in Africa, Islam and Development; Swahili and Isma’ili perceptions of Salat in Islamic Prayer across the Indian Ocean; Swahili aesthetics: someobservations in Art in Eastern Africa (forthcoming); Islam in East African Literature in Encyclopaedia of African Literature.