Seminar Leader:
Abdullah Saeed is a leading scholar of Islam and religious freedom. He is currently the Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where he is also Director, National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies, and Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Law. He holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and an MA in Applied Linguistics, University of Melbourne, Australia. He earned his BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the Islamic University in Medina, Saudi Arabia. He has also studied in Pakistan. Prof. Saeed's research includes approaches to the interpretation of the Quran today, reform of classical Islamic law, and Islam and human rights, including religious freedom. He is involved in both Muslim-Christian and Muslim-Jewish interfaith dialogue. His publications include Freedom of Religion, Apostasy, and Islam, co-authored with his brother Hassan Saeed (2004), and Interpreting the Qur'an: Towards a Contemporary Approach (2006). For further information and a bibliography of Abdullah Saeed's extensive list of publications see www.abdullahsaeed.org.

Guest Speakers:
Thomas F. Farr is the Director of the Task Force on Religious Liberty of the Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute. A former U.S. diplomat, he is Visiting Associate Professor of Religion and World Affairs, and Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University. During his career in the Foreign Service, Dr. Farr specialized in strategic military policy, political affairs, and religious freedom. During the Cold War he helped develop U.S. strategic nuclear policy, and was part of the U.S. negotiating team in the U.S.-Soviet arms control talks in Geneva. In the 1990s he served in Bonn, negotiated the value of U.S. military bases being returned to Germany, and focused on Greek-Turkish-Cypriot relations. During the last four years of his career, Farr served as the first director of the State Department's office of international religious freedom. In that capacity he traveled worldwide to engage governments and religious communities on the subject of religious freedom. Dr. Farr has taught history at the U.S. Military Academy and international relations at the U.S. Air Force Academy. He has written widely on America's international religious freedom policy and U.S. national security, as well as on the development of the Catholic doctrine of religious liberty.

Ed Husain is senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His work focuses on international threats from radicalization, extremism, and terrorism. Previously, Mr. Husain was cofounder and codirector of Quilliam Foundation, the world's first counter-radicalization think tank. He also served as a language instructor at the British Council in Syria and Saudia Arabia. Formerly an activist of Hizb ut-Tahrir and Jamat-e-Islam front organizations in the United Kingdom, Mr. Husain has now become a strong critic of extremism and Islamism. He is an advocate of Muslim engagement in mainstream politics as citizens, and not as separatist, anti-western polemical ideologues with Islamist agendas.

Asma T. Uddin is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of www.altmuslimah.com. She is also an attorney, with several years of experience practicing commercial litigation at prestigious national law firms. Currently she works on international religious freedom matters with The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in Washington, D.C. As an editor, Asma has worked with Dr. Umar F. Abd-Allah on a number of articles for scholarly journals on Islamic Law. She also helped edit the manuscript of Dr. Abd-Allah's A Muslim in Victorian America, published in 2007 by Oxford University Press. As Associate Editor and legal columnist for Islamica Magazine, Asma focused her writings on how American Muslims can rethink their social position within the American legal framework. Asma's writing has also appeared in Muslim Girl Magazine, altmuslim, Beliefnet, and in the Guardian's "Comment is Free." She is an expert panelist for the Washington Post/Newsweek blog "On Faith." Her more scholarly work has been published in the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion and The Review of Faith & International Affairs. Asma, selected in 2009 as a "Muslim Leader of Tomorrow," has traveled throughout Europe and to various Muslim-majority countries to meet with Muslim and other minority groups as well as politicians, journalists, and anti-discrimination organizations. Asma is a 2005 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, where she was a member of The University of Chicago Law Review.

Seminar Director:
Dr. Jennifer Bryson is the Director of the project on Islam and Civil Society of the Witherspoon Institute. She studied Political Science as an undergraduate at Stanford, medieval European intellectual history for an MA in History at Yale, and Greco-Arabic and Islamic studies for a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale. She has worked in journalism and for the Department of Defense. For the Department of Defense she has provided outreach to and analysis of Egyptian Islamic newspapers, as well as outreach in Yemen to media, madrasas, and civil society institutions. She managed a counter-terrorism research team for two years for the Department of Defense and for this work twice received the Defense Civilian Meritorious Service Award. She most recently worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense where she was the lead Action Officer for countering ideological support to terrorism in the Office of Support to Public Diplomacy. Dr. Bryson has near-native fluency in German, professional-fluency in Arabic, and has reading knowledge of Latin, Greek, Syriac, French, and Persian.