Building Bridges Seminar

Asma Afsaruddin is a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. She specializes in the religious and political thought of Islam, Qur’an and hadith, Islamic intellectual history, and gender. In addition to numerous articles, her books include Contemporary Issues in Islam (2015); Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought and Praxis (2013); Islam, the State and Political Authority: Medieval Issues and Modern Concerns (2011); and The First Muslims: History and Memory (2008). Afsaruddin is a member of the academic council of Georgetown's Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and of the American Academy of Liberal Education's board of trustees. She has received research funding from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York, which named her a Carnegie Scholar in 2005. Afsaruddin earned her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University and previously taught at the University of Notre Dame and Harvard University.

Seyed Amir Akrami is an Iranian scholar with research interests that include​Islamic philosophy and interreligious relations. Currently based at the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies (Tehran), he was a visiting professor at the Eastern Mennonite University Center for Interfaith Engagement from 2012 to 2015. He has also been a lecturer at the Al-Mahdi Institute in Birmingham, United Kingdom, and a member of the Iranian Institute of Philosophy. Akrami holds a B.A. in Islamic studies, M.A. in religion and mysticism, and Ph.D. in the philosophy of religion.

Afifi al-Akiti is KFAS Fellow in Islamic Studies and Islamic Centre lecturer in Islamic studies at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford, as well as college lecturer in world religions at Oxford's Worcester College. His areas of expertise are Islamic theology, philosophy, and science, while his research interests include the works of al-Ghazali, medieval Arabic manuscripts and Moroccan religious lithographs (Hajariyyat), medieval Islamic astronomy (‘ilm al-falak), and Islamic law, primarily the Shafi‘i school. The assistant editor of the Journal of Islamic Studies, he has also been a visiting professor of Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. In 2010 he was made a board member of the Perak Islamic Religious Council in Malaysia, and in 2012, he was elected into the Royal and Privy Council of the Malaysian state, the Dewan Negara, constitutionally as a life peer. Since 2010, he has been listed in The Muslim 500: The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims.

Ahmet Alibašić is assistant professor in the Faculty of Islamic Studies at the University of Sarejevo, where he teaches Islamic culture and civilization courses. His doctorate, completed at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Sarajevo, focused on Islamic opposition in the Arab world. He is the director of the Center for Advanced Studies, Sarajevo, a senior associate of the Democratization Policy Council, and chairman of Gazi Husrev-bey Library. He is one of the editors of Yearbook of Muslims in Europe (2009–2013) and Journal of Muslims in Europe. From 2003 to 2007 he served as deputy president of the Association of Islamic Scholars in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Zainab Alwani is the founding director of the Islamic Studies program at Howard University School of Divinity, where she is associate professor of Islamic studies and chair of the Religious Studies Master of Arts program. Her research focuses on Qur'anic studies, Islamic jurisprudence, the relationship between civil and religious law in the area of family, women and gender, and interreligious relations. A prolific author in both Arabic and English, her publications include Implementation of Maqasid al Shariah: Marriage and Divorce in American Muslim Family (2013, in Arabic) and “Religion, Gender, And Family Law: Critical Perspectives On Integration For Western-Muslims” in Applying Sharia in the West (2013). She is the first female jurist to serve on the board of the Fiqh Council of North America and currently serves as the council’s vice-chair. She received her Ph.D. in Islamic sciences from the International Islamic University in Malaysia.

Naumana Amjad is associate professor at the Institute of Applied Psychology, University of Punjab, where she has taught since 1991. Amjad is published in English and Urdu, including “Psyche in Islamic Gnostic and Philosophical Tradition” in Qurʼanic Concepts of Human Psyche (1992). Her research has addressed the concept of God among Christians and Muslims in Pakistan; forgiveness, gratitude, and well-being; and changing hostile attitudes against other religious groups. Her early work focused on religious and spiritual wisdom about human self in world religions, and she won the Templeton Foundation-funded Science and Religion Course Program award in 2000 for her course Self and Personality: Traditional and Modern Perspectives. She is a member of the Pakistan Psychological Association and the International Society for Research on Aggression, as well as vice president of the Society for Advancement of Muslim Psychology (Pakistan). She completed her master’s degree at the University of Punjab and obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Warwick.

Najib George Awad, a theologian and poet originally from Syria, is professor of Christian theology and Eastern Christian thought at Hartford Seminary; he is also director of its Ph.D. program in Islamic studies and Christian-Muslim relations. His research interests include systematic theology, the doctrine of the Trinity, theology of religions, contextual theology, Arabic Christianity and Christian-Muslim relations, and Oriental/Arab Christianity, particularly the early Christian-Muslim kalam of the early Muslim (Umayyad and Abbasid) era. He publishes in both Arabic and English. His works in English include God without Face? On the Personal Individuation of the Holy Spirit (2011); And Freedom Became a Public-Square: Political, Sociological and Religious Overviews on the Arab Christians and the Arabic Spring (2012); Orthodoxy in Arabic Terms: A Study of Theodore Abū Qurrah’s Trinitarian and Christological Doctrines in an Islamic Context (2015); and Umayyad Christianity: John of Damascus as a Contextual Example of Identity Formation in Early Islam (2018). He earned his M.A. and D.Phil. in systematic theology from King’s College, University of London, and D.Th. (habilitation) in historical/Oriental theology from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany.

Jonathan A.C. Brown is the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he is also the director of the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding. His current research focuses on Islamic legal reform and a translation of Sahih al-Bukhari. He previously taught a class supported through the Berkley Center's Doyle Seminars project. His book publications include Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy (2014), Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction (2011), Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (2009), and The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon (2007). Brown has published articles in the fields of hadith, Islamic law, Sufism, Arabic lexical theory, and pre-Islamic poetry and is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islamic Law. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Brown received his B.A. from Georgetown University and his doctorate from the University of Chicago.