Ambassador Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun chair of Islamic Studies at American University, and a nonresident senior fellow with the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at Brookings.

He is a visiting professor and was first distinguished chair of Middle East and 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 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 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. Ahmed has recently 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 March 2013.

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