Dr. Bulliet received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at Harvard and Berkeley. He served for 12 years as the Director of the Middle East Institute. His research interests include history of Middle East and North Africa, the history of technology, world history, and social history, and the history of human-animal relations. He is the author of books Islam: The View from the Edge, The Camel and the Wheel, The ...Patricians of Nishapur, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period, co-author of The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History, editor of The Columbia University History of the Twentieth Century and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East.

His most recent book, Islam: The View from the Edge (Columbia University Press 1994), deals with the ways in which localized Muslim communities have constructed their own versions of Islam from the seventh century until today, taking Iran as a case study....

Fawaz A. Gerges, an adjunct professor at Columbia University, holds the Christian A. Johnson Chair in International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. A consultant and regular commentator for ABC, he has appeared on many television and radio programs throughout the world, including CNN, CBS, NPR, BBC, The Charlie Rose Show, LBC, and others. Dr. Gerges received his M.Sci. at London School of Economics and was awarded a DPhil. from Oxford University. His special interests are Islam and the political process, fringe Islamist movements, Arab politics, American foreign policy in the Middle East, the modern history of the Middle East, history of conflict, diplomacy and foreign policy, historical sociology, and international relations. He has won several academic awards, one of which is a two-year MacArthur Fellowship; he spent these two years conducting field research on relations between the Islamist and the West in six Arab countries.

He is the author of America and Political Islam: Clash of Interests Or Clash of Cultures? (Cambridge University Press, 1999), The Islamists and the West: Ideology vs Pragmatism (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2002), The Superpowers and the Middle East: Regional and International Politics, 1955-1967 (Oxford and Westview Press, 1994); and The Clinton Administration Approach toward Islamist Movements (The Council on Foreign Relations: New York, 1999).

John Voll graduated from Dartmouth College and received his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University. He taught at University of New Hampshire before becoming a professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University with a joint appointment in the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and in the university's history department. He is a past president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and also of the New England Historical Association. His research interests include Islamic movements of revival and reform in the modern era and the broader issues of the history of renewal and reform movements in Islamic history.

His latest book, Makers of Contemporary Islam, co-authored with John L. Esposito, was published this year. He also co-authored Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World and Islam and Democracy with John L. Esposito. In addition, he has published numerous articles and book chapters on modern Islamic and Sudanese history. In 1991 he received a Presidential Medal in recognition of scholarship on Islam from President Husni Mubarak of Egypt.

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