Islamic Foundations of a Free Society (PDF)

populations.

Azhar Aslam is a founder member of the Istanbul Network for Liberty and chief executive of EO Vision 21 Foundation, a Pakistani-based NGO. He is the Program Director of its Speed Literacy Program, with a mission to eradicate illiteracy in Pakistan. He also writes on Islamic issues, including previously for the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Hasan Yücel Başdemir is Associate Professor of Islamic Philosophy at the Yildirim Beyazit University in Ankara, Turkey. He is a Board Member of the Association for Liberal Thinking (ALT) in Turkey, editor of Liberte Publications of ALT and coordinates ALT’s Center for the Studies on Religion and Liberty. He has authored Ethical Foundations of Liberalism (Liberte, 2009) and The Problem of Definition of Knowledge in Contemporary Epistemology (Hitit Kitap, 2010), and edited Religious Freedom and Laicism in Turkey (Liberte, 2011). His research interests focus on Islamic political thought, freedom of religion, the links between ethics and politics, and comparative epistemology.

Kathya Berrada is a research associate at the Arab Center for Scientific Research and Humane Studies, a Moroccan-based think tank. Before joining the Center, Kathya worked for rating agencies and consultancy firms in France, Belgium and Morocco. Kathya holds a Masters degree in business from Grenoble Graduate business School and is currently pursuing her PhD in economics.

Maszlee Malik graduated from the Al al-Bayt University in Jordan in 1994 with a degree in the field of fiqh and usul al-fiqh. His master’s degree in the same field is from the University of Malaya and he obtained his PhD in political science at Durham University. He is currently assistant professor in the Faculty of Islamic Revealed Knowledge and Human Sciences at the International Islamic University Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur.

Youcef Maouchi is the director of the Institute for Economic Studies, Europe. He holds a PhD in economics from Aix-Marseille Université, France. He was a teaching and a research fellow at Aix-Marseille Université and a regular lecturer on Islamic Finance at the Legal and Commercial Cooperation with the Arab World programme at the Aix-Marseille Law School and in economics at the Kedge Business School. He also worked as a research assistant for Atlas Network’s francophone project ­UnMondeLibre.org.

Hicham El Moussaoui obtained his PhD in economics in 2008 at the Université Paul Cézanne (Aix-Marseille III). Since 2009, he has been Assistant Professor in Economics at Sultan Moulay Slimane University, Morocco. He joined the Atlas Foundation for Economic Research in 2008, where he is the editor of www.libreAfrique.org, a French-speaking project to defend ideas of freedom in Africa.

M. A. Muqtedar Khan is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware. He earned his PhD in International Relations, Political Philosophy and Islamic Political Thought, from Georgetown University in May 2000. He founded the Islamic Studies programme at the University of Delaware and was its first director from 2007 to 2010. Dr Muqtedar Khan is a fellow of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. He was a senior non-resident fellow of the Brookings Institution (2003–8) and a fellow of the Alwaleed Center at Georgetown University (2006–7). He has been the president, vice president and general secretary of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists.

Bican Şahin is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Hacettepe University, Ankara. He earned his PhD at the University of Maryland, College Park, US, in 2003. He is the President of the Freedom Research Association, a classical liberal think tank based in Ankara.

Atilla Yayla is Professor of Social and Political Theory at Halic University, Istanbul, Turkey. He was a founder of the Association for Liberal Thinking, the first classical liberal intellectual movement in the Islamic World. He is head columnist of the Yeni ­Yuzyil daily newspaper.