Dr. Akbar S. Ahmed

Ambassador Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington, D.C. and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is a Visiting Professor and was First Distinguished Chair of Middle East & Islamic Studies at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD. He has taught at Princeton, Harvard, and Cambridge Universities and has been called “the world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam” by the BBC. Regularly interviewed by CNN, NPR, BBC, and Al-Jazeera, he has appeared several times on "Oprah," and has also been a guest of "The Daily Show" and Nickelodeon. For the fall term 2012, Ambassador Ahmed was the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professor at Cambridge University and Visiting Fellow of Jesus College.

Ahmed was the Pakistan High Commissioner (Ambassador) to the UK and Ireland. He is the author of over a dozen award-winning books, including "Discovering Islam," which was the basis of a six-part BBC TV series called "Living Islam"; the critically acclaimed "Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization"; "Suspended Somewhere Between, a book of verse"; and "Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam," which culminated in the full-length documentary "Journey into America" and won the American Book Award for 2011. Two of his books were re-published in 2011 as part of the Routledge Revivals — “restoring to print books by some of the most influential academic scholars of the last 120 years.” Ahmed completed "The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror became a Global War on Tribal Islam," published by Brookings Institution Press in February 2013.