Berkley Center

Prince Moulay Hicham Ben Abdallah El Alaoui is a member of the Moroccan royal family and an established voice calling for political reform and greater democracy in the Arab world. Through the Hicham Alaoui (Moulay Hicham) Foundation, he has endowed the Institute for the Trans-Regional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia at Princeton University. He holds a Ph.D. in Oriental Studies from Oxford University and is currently a Research Associate at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center.

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.

Giancarlo Bosetti is the editor-in-chief and one of the founders of Reset Dialogue on Civilizations and Reset, a cultural magazine he founded in 1993. He was vice-editor-in-chief of the Italian daily L’Unità. He is also currently a columnist for the Italian daily La Repubblica and a professor at University La Sapienza and University Roma Tre.

José Casanova is one of the world's leading scholars in the sociology of religion and a senior fellow at the Berkley Center, where his work focuses on globalization, religions, and secularization. He is also professor emeritus at Georgetown University, where he previously taught in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. During 2017 he was the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North at the U.S. Library of Congress' John W. Kluge Center, where he worked on a book manuscript on Early Modern Globalization through a Jesuit Prism. He has published works on a broad range of subjects, including religion and globalization, migration and religious pluralism, transnational religions, and sociological theory. His best-known work, Public Religions in the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 1994), has become a modern classic in the field and has been translated into several languages, including Japanese, Arabic, and Turkish. In 2012, Casanova was awarded the Theology Prize from the Salzburger Hochschulwochen in recognition of his life-long achievement in the field of theology. Casanova is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Jocelyne Cesari holds the Chair of Religion and Politics and is director of research at the Edward Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom; at Georgetown University she is a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and an associate professor of the practice of religion, peace, and conflict resolution in the Department of Government. She is the T. J. Dermot Dunphy Visiting Professor of Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding at Harvard Divinity School. Former president of the European Academy of Religion, her work on religion, political violence, and conflict resolution has garnered recognition and awards from numerous international organizations such as the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs and the Royal Society for Arts in the United Kingdom. She is a Professorial Fellow at Australian Catholic University's Institute for Religion, Politics and Society. She teaches on contemporary Islam and politics at Harvard Divinity School and directs the Islam in the West program. Cesari is a member of the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, part of the Culture of Encounter Project.

Dr. Nedžad Grabus holds the position of Mufti of the Islamic Community in Slovenia. He is a Professor of theology at the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was the editor of the first interreligious program in Sarajevo that covered both Islamic and Christian issues.

Mohsen Kadivar is a research professor of Islamic studies at Duke University's Department of Religious Studies. His main intellectual interests are human rights and democracy in Islam, classical and modern Shia theology and legal theories, Shia political thought, classical Islamic philosophy, and modern Quranic studies. An author of thirty books, Kadivar has been at Duke since 2009.

Maayan Raveh is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Haifa in Israel. She holds a B.A. in Comparative Religion and Arabic Language and Literature studies and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Religion from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.