Akbar Ahmed

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

Ambassador 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 in the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World 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. | View Full Bio

  • Cover: The Thistle and the Drone

    Featured Book

    The Thistle and the Drone

    How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam

    2013, Akbar Ahmed

    “In the end, I was close to tears. Lagrimas caudales or “flowing tears,” to use the apposite phrase of Blas de Otero, seems to be what the book’s conclusions lead to. Thus lagrimas for the tribes, for the soldiers, and for the United States. Professor Ahmed gives us the only way out of this dangerous dilemma, a way to coexist with the thistle without the drone.”—Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell and Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary

Recent Activity

Refine by: Islamic World | Middle East and North Africa | Islamist Movements | Terrorism

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Expert Information

Contact

Email Akbar Ahmed

202.797.6105 — Brookings Office of Communications

Resources

Expertise

  • Islam
  • Middle East
  • South Asia
  • Afghanistan and Pakistan
  • anthropology
  • Muslims in America
  • homeland security

Experience

Current Positions

  • Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies and Professor of International Relations at American University in Washington, DC
  • First Distinguished Chair of Middle East and Islamic Studies at the U.S. Naval Academy

Past Positions

  • Visiting professor at Harvard University (1981), Cambridge University (1988-1999), and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (1980)
  • Founder-Director General of the National Center for Rural Development (1982-1985)
  • Former High Commissioner of Pakistan to Great Britain (2000)
  • Pakistan Civil Service
  • Political Agent, South Waziristan Agency

Education

  • Honorary LLD, University of Liverpool
    Ph.D., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
    M.A. and Diploma in Education, Cambridge University
    BSocSc (Honors), Birmingham University

Language Fluency

  • French
  • Urdu

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Topics

Geography