Akbar Ahmed

President Donald Trump recently made headlines when he claimed that the Soviets were justified in invading Afghanistan. It appears that Trump does not want America to be involved in the Great Game, and the implications of this have not been thought out, especially with thousands of American troops still in Afghanistan. The Great Game, the […]

As a scholar of religion and someone promoting understanding between faiths, I am an admirer of Guru Nanak Devji, the great founder of the Sikh faith, and see members of his community through his wise and profound teachings. Helaid down these three core principles of Sikhism: Naam Japo, remember the Supreme being; Kirat Karo, work […]

One of the great ironies of Ziauddin Yousafzai’s life is that while he was mocked for his stammer by his relatives and could therefore not speak in public, he now speaks on international platforms and his voice is heard by presidents and prime ministers. The teacher who struggled to promote education in his village in […]

At a recent top level conference in Washington, D.C, after I gave my key note address two sweet old ladies came up to where Zeenat my wife and I were standing and said, “that was good, but you must meet and learn from this young Muslim female scholar at Cambridge” who writes about and practices […]

In my work in the West, both teaching and conducting research, I have found that some of the greatest names of Muslim history are rarely taught in universities and not known. They include people such as Nizam-ul-Mulk, Ibn Battuta, and Al Beruni, who is highly relevant for my discipline of anthropology. I first wrote about […]

As we know, these fundamental assumptions of Weberian modernity are being challenged today as events unfold on the world stage. Take China and India, both once dominated by Europeans. Both have surged ahead in economic terms, outpacing European societies and even posing a threat to the preeminent position of the United States. Confucian and Hindu […]

The ideas of Weber, a German sociologist living in the university towns of Bismarckian Germany, and Ibn Khaldun, a sociologist of tribal societies born almost half a millennium earlier on the edge of the Sahara desert in North Africa but with experience of working in Europe, have interesting similarities and differences that are reflected in […]

As so often happens on the frontier, I was thrown into a risky situation not of my choosing in which failure or success would determine my reputation. The question was how to proceed when the effectiveness of a political officer was defined by factors outside his control. I decided to send messages to Safar Khan […]

In my 2013 book The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam, I examined Muslim tribal societies living on the periphery of modern states such as the Pukhtun, Yeminis, Somalis, and Kurds and the ways in which they have been drawn into the war on terror […]

Farhana Qazi, an American Pakistani, a senior counter-terrorism professional is the nearest equivalent to a female Muslim James Bond or Felix Leiter, forever battling the bad guys in a penumbral world. But as her writing sillustrate, it is sometimes difficult to differentiate the good guys from the bad guys and pin-point where the truth ends […]