Berkley Center

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.

Ambassador Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies in American University's School of International Service and a trustee for the World Faiths Development Dialogue. Ahmed belonged to Pakistan's senior civil service and was Pakistan's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and Ireland. Ahmed is a member of the Washington Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council and is a member of the International Advisory Board for The Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at The Queen’s University of Belfast. Ahmed consistently writes for a number of popular news publications around the globe, including a weekly column in the Daily Times, a leading English-language Pakistani newspaper.

Eric Patterson serves as president of the Religious Freedom Institute and is a research fellow with the Georgetown University Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. He previously served as dean of the School of Government at Regent University, and before that, as associate director at the Berkley Center. He is an expert in two overlapping areas: the ethics of war and peace, and global religious trends and religious freedom policy. These two areas routinely intersect, such as in building post-conflict systems that represent diverse ethnoreligious factions, understanding the religious factors in conflict, and measuring U.S. democracy promotion efforts. His government experience includes time at the U.S. State Department, service as a White House Fellow, and over 20 years as an Air National Guard commander. He is the author or editor of 20 books, including Politics in a Religious World: Toward a Religious Informed U.S. Foreign Policy (2011).