1 Week Political Islam Programme Speakers
Dr Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
A Lecturer in Comparative and International Politics at SOAS, he was the first Jarvis Doctorow Fellow in International Relations and Peace Studies at Oxford University. His writings have been translated into many languages and he is the author of Iran in World Politics: The question of the Islamic Republic (2008) and the forthcoming A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations: Us and Them Beyond Orientalism.
Sheikh Abdualla Anas
Sheikh Anas fought the Soviets in Afghanistan with the ‘Mujhideen’. Founder of the ‘Office of Services’, the ‘forerunner of Al-Qaeda’, he knew Bin Laden well. After the fall of Kabul he returned to Algeria and joined the Islamic Salvation Front. He published his memoirs in 2002 in London where he is now based.
Dr Abdullah Baabood
Director of the Gulf Research Centre, University of Cambridge, Dr Baabood’s research interest focuses on the GCC states economic, social and political development and the GCC external relations.
Dr Sophie Gilliat-Ray
Reader in Religious Studies at Cardiff University, and founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK, established in 2005.
Noman Hanif
Lectures on Political Islam at Birkbeck, and Middle East Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. His current research focuses on the Islamic movement, Hizb ut Tahrir (Liberation Party), and specifically to the challenge it poses to Western security in the Islamic world.
Dr Kamal Helbawy
Chairman of the London-based Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Advisor at the Global Civilizations Study Centre. Former spokesman of the International Organisation of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, Helbawy is a veteran activist involved in Islamist politics worldwide.
Dr Khaled Hroub (programme convenor)
A leading expert on Hamas and Islamic movements, Dr Hroub teaches Modern Middle Eastern history at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Cambridge University, where he is the Director of Cambridge Arab Media Project (CAMP).
Professor George Joffé
George Joffé teaches in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and specialises in the international relations of the Middle East and North Africa. His particular research interests focus on issues of radicalisation and extremism in North Africa and on the mobilisation of Islamic paradigms as social and political challenges.
Dr Laleh Khalili
Senior Lecturer in the Politics of the Middle East at SOAS. Her research interests include nationalism, gender, social and political movements, and everyday life in the Middle East. Her recent book is entitled ‘Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration’.
Professor Maleiha Malik
Reader in Law at King’s College London, a barrister and a member and fellow of the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn. She has written extensively on discrimination law, minority protection and feminist theory and is co-author of Discrimination Law: Theory and Practice (2008).
Dr Matthew J Nelson
Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS. His focus is the politics of Islam in South Asia. He has spent several years conducting archival, ethnographic, and survey-based field research in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, focusing primarily on the politics of Islamic law and the politics of Islamic education in Pakistan.
Professor Tariq Ramadan
Professor of Islamic Studies. He is currently Senior Research Fellow St Antony’s College (Oxford), Doshisha University (Kyoto, Japan) and at the Lokahi Foundation (London). He is a Visiting Professor (holding the chair: Identity and Citizenship) at Erasmus University (Netherlands) (www.eur.nl/fsw/ramadan). Professor Tariq Ramadan is currently President of the European think tank: European Muslim Network (EMN) in Brussels.
Camille Tawil
Leading Lebanese journalist covering armed Islamic groups for the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat for many years.
Laura Hammond
Laura Hammond is senior lecturer in development studies at Soas-University of London. She has been conducting research on conflict, food security, migration and diasporas in and from the Horn of Africa since the early 1990s.
Dr Stéphane Lacroix
Assistant Professor of Political Science at Sciences Po. In 2008-2009, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University. His work focuses on Islam and politics in the contemporary Middle East, with a particular interest in the Gulf region. He has published articles in some of the major academic journals in the field of Middle East studies, including the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and the Middle East Journal. His PhD dissertation was on Islamism in Saudi Arabia, and was transformed into a book, "Les islamistes saoudiens. Une insurrection manquée", which came out at the Presses Universitaires de France in February 2010 for a review in Le Monde.
Dr Jeroen Gunning
His research focuses on the interplay between social movements, democratisation, religion and violence in the Middle East, with particular emphasis on Hamas and Hizballah, and more recently, the activist movements behind the Egyptian '25 January revolution'. His publications include Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence, 2007, and Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda, 2009 (co-edited with Richard Jackson and Marie Breen Smyth). He is currently writing a book with Dr Ilan Baron on the recent uprising in Egypt, to be published by Hurst.
