Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington DC and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is a Visiting Professor and was First Distinguished Chair of Middle East & Islamic Studies at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. He has taught at Princeton, Harvard and Cambridge Universities and has been called “the world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam” by the BBC. Ahmed was the Pakistan High Commissioner (Ambassador) to the United Kingdom and Ireland. He is the author of over a dozen award-winning books, including “Discovering Islam” and “The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam.”