Search for a topic and join the conversation!
Bernard Haykel is Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University where he also is Director of The Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Haykel’s primary research interests center on Islamic political movements and legal thought as well as the politics and history of Saudi Arabia and Yemen. His first book (Revival and Reform in Islam) is a study of a major Islamic reformist scholar, Muhammad Shawkani. Haykel is presently completing a second book on the global Salafi movement as well as an edited volume on contemporary Saudi Arabian politics and culture. He will soon turn his attention to writing a monograph on the modern history of Saudi Arabia for which he received the Guggenheim Fellowship. Haykel obtained his doctorate in 1998 from the University of Oxford and is the recipient of various awards including the Prize Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, the Ryskamp Fellowship of the American Council of Learned Societies, and a Carnegie Corporation Fellowship.
Will McCants is a fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at The Brookings Institution and director of its Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World. He is also adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University and has held various government and think tank positions related to Islam, the Middle East, and terrorism. From 2009-2011, McCants served as a U.S. State Department senior adviser for countering violent extremism.
He is the founder of Jihadica.com, an academic group blog focused on the global jihadi movement. The blog has been featured on the cover of the New York Times, and described byWired magazine’s Danger Room as “the gold standard in militant studies.” In 2011 and 2012, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine as one of its FP’s Top 100 “Twitterati.”
McCants is the author of numerous articles on Islamist politics and terrorism, including the headlining article of Foreign Affairs’ 9/11 Tenth Anniversary Edition. He also edited the Militant Ideology Atlas, which identified the key ideologues in the global jihadi movement, and also translated, from Arabic into English, a book written by an al Qaeda strategist.
His book, Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam, traces the history of cultural debate in the Middle East after the Greeks, Romans and Arabs conquered the region. He is working on a second book about the scriptural history of the Koran. McCants has a Ph.D. from Princeton University and has lived in Israel, Egypt and Lebanon.