Dr. Abul-Hassan Navvab was born in 1958 in Shahreza, Isfahan. Having passed elementary educations, he entered Hawzah Ilmmiyyah. Up to the victory of Islamic revolution in Iran, Navvab continued his seminary education in classical Islamic scholarship, teaching at the schools affiliated with Hawzah. In the past twenty years he has always been active in several administrative, mostly culcural, positions. Having made several long and short international trips, Dr. Navvab has achieved an invaluable experience of visiting more than 70 foreign countries. In order to preach the peaceful message of Islam and resolve cultural and social crises. He has also published a number of books and articles the most important of which are: Purity of Human (Arabic) and Geography of the Shiite (Persian).

I'm an intellectual historian who is interested in the course of philosophy in the Islamic world both past and present. Increasingly I am interested in how that study and category of philosophy coincides with the emergent category of global philosophy. In terms of method, my research is informed by the need for a decolonial and reparative study of Islam.

I supervise graduate students broadly in Islamic intellectual history, especially in philosophy, theology and Quranic exegesis. I am the director of the Centre for the Study of Islam.  

I work on Islamic intellectual history in the wider Persianate world. My particular interests which grew from my PhD at Cambridge on the philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. c. 1636) lie in post-Avicennan philosophical, theological and mystical traditions. My second main area of interest is Qurʾanic exegesis and textual hermeneutics.

Professor, Institute On Globalization and the Human Condition
Professor Liyakat Takim is the Sharjah Chair in Global Islam at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. A native of Zanzibar, Tanzania, he has spoken at more than eighty academic conferences and authored one hundred scholarly works on diverse topics like reformation in the Islamic world, the treatment of women in Islamic law, Islam in America, the indigenization of the Muslim community in America, dialogue in post-911 America, war and peace in the Islamic tradition, Islamic law, Islamic biographical literature, the charisma of the holy man and shrine culture, and Islamic mystical traditions. He teaches a wide range of courses on Islam and offers a course on comparative religions.

Professor Takim’s second book titled Shi'ism in America was published by New York University Press in summer 2009. His first book, The Heirs of the Prophet: Charisma and Religious Authority in Shi‘ite Islam was published by SUNY press in 2006. He is currently working on his third book, Ijtihad and Reformation in Islam. Professor Takim has taught at several American and Canadian universities and is actively engaged in dialogue with different faith communities.