Said Bensaid Alaoui is a Professor of Philosophy and Islamic Studies, and the Dean of the Faculty of Literature and Humanities at Mohammed V University in Morocco. Alaoui has written an extensive open letter on the Moroccan reform movement, Muslim-Western relations, and Sunni theological thought. His books include Jurisprudence and Politics, Ideology and Modernity, Ijtihad and Modernization, and Islam and Contemporary Questions,you have the opportunity to order an essay on any of these topics. All you need to do for this is to be an active user of this site. We are also waiting for new proposals for discussions on philosophical and political topics.

David Blankenhorn is the Founder and President of the Institute for American Values and a leading proponent for the application of these values in the public sphere. In 2002, Blankenhorn and his colleagues released What We’re Fighting For: A Letter from America, an open letter underlining the applicability of Just War theory to the conflict in Afghanistan. The letter has served as the basis for the vigorous, ongoing dialogue with interlocutors from the Arab world.

Raina Sacks Blankenhorn is the Executive Vice President of the Institute for American Values and Editor of IjtihadReason. Recent projects include serving as the Executive Director of Through American Eyes: Religion and Society in Oman, published by The Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs of the Sultanate of Oman.

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago. She is the author of many books, including: Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World and Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy. Her most recent book, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self, was originally delivered as the Gifford lectures of 2005-2006. She was one of the main authors of the statement, What We’re Fighting For: A Letter from America.

Abdou Filali-Ansary is the Director of the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations at the Aga Khan University in London. He has taught modern philosophy in the Faculty of Letters in Rabat and served as the founding director of the King Abdul-Aziz Foundation for Islamic Studies and Human Sciences in Casablanca, Morocco. He 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 maghrebine du livre.

Hillel Fradkin is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Islam, Democracy, and the Future of the Muslim World at the Hudson Institute. He is Founder and Co-Editor of the journal Current Trends in Islamist Ideology. He received his degree in Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago for work directed by Muhsin Mahdi and the late Fazlur Rahman.

William A. Galston is the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. Dr. Galston is a political theorist who both studies and participates in American politics and domestic policy. He was Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy during the first Clinton Administration and Executive Director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal. Galston’s teaching and research interests include political theory, American politics, and public policy.

Abdulaziz al-Gasim is a leading expert on Shari‘a and Saudi law. An attorney and former judge, he has brought reform petitions before Crown Prince Abdullah and was jailed in the early 1990s for his outspoken demands. Al-Gasim remains an advocate for reform and currently works on an array of religious, legal, and political issues.

John Kelsay is the Distinguished Research Professor and Richard L. Rubenstein Professor of Religion at Florida State University. He is a Co-Editor of the Journal of Religious Ethics and his most recent book is Arguing the Just War in Islam, published by Harvard University Press in 2007.

Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University. His published scholarship has contributed to the fields of welfare economics, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of income distribution. Professor Loury is also a social critic and public intellectual whose essays on racial inequality and social policy have appeared in dozens of influential journals of public affairs in the U.S. and abroad.

Hassan I. Mneimneh is the Director of the Center for Global Engagement at the Institute for American Values. A dedicated observer, critic, and participant in the Arab cultural scene; Mneimneh has focused on the development of practical measures for the preservation of the pluralism in Islamic societies. Until 2007, he served as the Director of the Iraq Memory Foundation.

Michael Novak is a philosopher, theologian, and author, and the 1994 recipient of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. He has been an emissary to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. He has written twenty-seven books on the philosophy and theology of culture, especially the essential elements of a free society. His latest book is No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers.

Daniel C. Peterson is a Professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic at Brigham Young University. He is the Editor-in-Chief of BYU’s four-part Middle Eastern Texts Initiative or “METI,” which publishes dual-language editions of classical works of medieval Arabic and Persian philosophy; Arabic science, medicine, and mathematics; and texts from the Arabic, Coptic, and Syrian Christian traditions. He is also Director of Outreach for BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Professor Peterson is the author of a number of books and articles on Islam and other topics.

Alex Roberts is a doctoral student at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, Ohio State University. He was an Affiliate Scholar with the Institute for American Values from 2003-2009. Roberts is Co-Editor of The Islam/West Debate, published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. in 2005.

Ridwan al-Sayyid is a Professor of Islamic Studies at the Lebanese University and a principal voice in defense of the pluralistic tradition of Islam. A prolific writer and translator, al-Sayyid was the Co-Editor of al-Ijtihad, an Arabic language periodical of importance in the evolution of ideas in the Arab world for over two decades. He is also Co-Chair of the Malta Forum.

Ajume H. Wingo is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Center for Values and Social Policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is also Associate of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard. A citizen of Cameroon, he is the author of Veil Politics in Liberal Democratic States, published by Cambridge University Press in 2003.