DR. ABDULLAHI AHMED AN-NAʿIM is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law, and Associated Professor in Emory College of Arts and Sciences of Emory University, and Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion. An-Naʿim is the author of What Is an American Muslim? (2014); Muslims and Global Justice (2011); Islam and the Secular State (2008); African Constitutionalism and the Role of Islam (2006); and Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights and International Law (1990). His edited books include Human Rights Under African Constitutions (2003); Islamic Family Law in a Changing World: A Global Resource Book (2002); Cultural Transformation and Human Rights in Africa (2002); and Human Rights in Cross-Cultural Perspectives: Quest for Consensus (1992). He has also published more than 70 articles and book chapters on human rights, constitutionalism and Islam, and politics in African and Islamic countries. An-Naʿim’s research projects include women’s access to, and control over, land in seven African countries; a global study of Islamic Family Law; and a fellowship program in Islam and Human Rights. The archives of the website of each of the three projects remains accessible (though no longer updated or revised) at: https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/aannaim/project-archive/
RAJEEV BHARGAVA is the director of the Institute of Indian Thought at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi, where he served as the Director from 2007 to 2014. He has also been a professor at the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (1980–2005), Bhargava’s publications include Individualism in Social Science (1992), What Is Political Theory and Why Do We Need It? (2010), and The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy (2010). His edited books include Secularism and Its Critics (1998).
AKEEL BILGRAMI is the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he is also a professor on the Committee on Global Thought and the Director of the South Asian Institute. His publications include the books Belief and Meaning (1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (2006), Democratic Culture (2012), and Secularism, Identity and Enchantment (2014). He is due to publish two short books in the near future: What Is a Muslim? and Gandhi’s Integrity. His long-term future work is on the relations between agency, value, and practical reason.
SOULEYMANE BACHIR DIAGNE is a professor of French and Philosophy at Columbia University. He also taught for many years at Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar (Senegal) and Northwestern University. His book Bergson postcolonial. L’élan vital dans la pensée de Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal was awarded the Dagnan-Bouveret prize by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for 2011. He also received the Edouard Glissant Prize for his work in 2011.
SUDIPTA KAVIRAJ is a professor of Indian politics and intellectual history at Columbia University. He also taught for many years at SOAS, London University, and Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He has been a fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and Sciences Po in Paris. He is the author of The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Indian Nationalist Discourse (1995), The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas (2010), Trajectories of the Indian State (2010), Enchantment of Democracy and India (2011), The Invention of Private Life (2015), and co-editor with Sunil Khilnani, Civil Society: History and Possibilities (2001).
CLAUDIO LOMNITZ is the Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books); Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism; and Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican Space. His most recent book, The Return of Comrade Ricardo Flores Magón (Zone Books, 2014), is about exile, ideology, and revolution.
ALFRED STEPAN is the Wallace Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia University, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR), and the co-director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL). He has authored and edited a large number of books, including Arguing Comparative Politics (Oxford University Press, 2001), and, co-authored with Juan Linz and Yogendra Yadav, Democracy in Multinational Societies: India and Other Polities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). In 2012 he was the recipient of the Karl Deutsch Award of the International Political Science Association.
CHARLES TAYLOR is professor emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University. His recent publications include Modern Social Imaginaries (2004), A Secular Age (2007), and (with Jocelyn Maclure) Secularism and Freedom of Conscience (2012).
PETER VAN DER VEER is director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University. He works on the comparative study of religion and nationalism in India and China. He is the author and editor of many books, most recently The Modern Spirit of Asia (Princeton, 2014), Handbook of Religion in Asian Cities (California, 2015), and The Value of Comparison (Duke, 2016).