Akbar Ahmed

Nonresident Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, U.S. Relations with the Islamic World

Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun chair of Islamic Studies at American University, the first distinguished chair of Middle East and Islamic Studies at the U.S. Naval Academy, and a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings. He has taught at Princeton, Harvard, and Cambridge Universities and has been called “the world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam” by the BBC. Ambassador Ahmed, who was also the high commissioner of Pakistan to the United Kingdom, has advised General David Petraeus, the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and various U.S. agencies on Islam and foreign policy. He is regularly interviewed by CNN, NPR, BBC, and Fox and has appeared several times on The Oprah Winfrey Show. He is the author of over a dozen award-winning books, including Discovering Islam, which was the basis of the BBC six-part TV series Living Islam. Following his critically acclaimed Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization, he conducted fieldwork that resulted in the full-length documentary Journey into America and the book Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam (Brookings Institution Press, 2010).