Advisory Board

He graduated from Faculty of Divinity, Marmara University (Istanbul) (1997). He received his MA and PhD in Islamic philosophy and sufi studies from Selçuk University (Konya). Dr. Özel taught history of Sufism. Sufi thought and literature in some different universities as Yalova University, Ibn Haldun University. And currently a faculty member at the Faculty of Islamic Sciences at Istanbul Medeniyet University. He is the editör-in-chief of the monthly magazine Nihayet. He’s a member of editorial board of Center for Islamic Studies (ISAM) and also a member of advisory board of Ketebe Publishing House. His main academic interests are: Sufism in North Africa, Shadhiliyya, the formative period of Sufism, Turkish Sufi literature. He has many books, articles and papers published in these areas.

Aisha Imam, based in Washington, DC, US, is currently a Founder and Director at Reed Society for the Sacred Arts. Aisha Imam brings experience from previous roles at Reed Society for the Sacred Arts. Aisha Imam holds a 1999 - 2001 Master of Public Health - MPH in Public Heath @ University of Michigan School of Public Health.

Baraka Blue is a poet, musician, author, and teacher from Seattle, Washington. In addition to releasing multiple studio albums, authoring books of poetry, and performing internationally, Baraka Blue is a prolific educator with a master’s degree in Islamic Studies from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

He spent a number of years studying with traditional spiritual masters in Africa, Turkey, Asia and the Arab world. He has performed and taught all over the world, including at institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, and the School of Oriental and African Studies.

In 2018, Baraka Blue founded the Rumi Center for Spirituality and the Arts which provides online courses to seekers from anywhere in the world. Baraka Blue has also conducted creative writing workshops for K-12 schools, universities, cultural and religious centers, and various organizations worldwide.

He is the host of the award winning podcast Path & Present, which features conversations on spirituality in the modern world. He lives in Seattle where he is the director of Wasat, an organization that builds community through spirituality, arts and culture, and service.

Carl W. Ernst is the Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Islamic studies at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was also the founding director (2003-2022) of the UNC Center for Islamic and Middle East Studies.

James Winston Morris (born 1949) is an American Islamic theologian, currently a professor in the Department of Theology at Boston College. Before teaching at Boston College, he held the Sharjah Chair of Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter.

Prof. Dr. Mahmud Erol Kılıç was born in 1961 in Istanbul. He graduated from the Faculty of Political Sciences of Istanbul University (1985). During his high school and university education he also studied the sciences of Sarf-Nahw, Tafsir, Hadith and Fiqh with some scholars. He attended the lessons of some Sufi scholars as well.

After graduation, he stayed for some time in the U.K. and in Egypt. Before entering academia, he worked as the director of a publishing house. At the Department of Islamic Philosophy of Marmara University where he started to work as an assistant, he wrote his master’s thesis titled “Hermes and Hermetic Thought in the Light of Islamic Sources” (1989) (published). After the establishment of the departments of Sufism in Turkish universities in 1993, he defended his thesis titled “Being and its Stages in Ibn Arabi’s Thought” (1995) (published), which was considered as the first PhD thesis to be written in that new academic branch.

Then he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1998 and full Professor in 2004. He directed many MA and PhD theses. Articles he wrote were published in several encyclopedias and journals. He presented papers at national and international congresses. His work titled Sufi ve Şiir: Osmanlı Tasavvuf Şiirinin Poetikası (The Sufi and Poetry: Poetics of Ottoman Sufi Poetry) was awarded the Study and Research Prize of the Turkish Authors’ Association in 2004 and translated into several languages. Until the present, 16 books he wrote, 5 books he translated and 2 books he edited were published. Prof. Kılıç knows English, Arabic, Persian and French. He also teaches at the Institute for Sufi Studies, Üsküdar University, Istanbul.

Mohammed Rustom is Professor of Islamic Thought and Global Philosophy at Carleton University and Director of the Carleton Centre for the Study of Islam. He has been the recipient of a number of academic distinctions and prizes such as the Ibn ‘Arabi Society Latina’s Tarjuman Prize, a Templeton Foundation Global Philosophy of Religion grant, The Institute of Ismaili Studies’ Annemarie Schimmel Fellowship, Iran’s World Prize for the Book of the Year, and Senior Fellowships courtesy of the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute’s Library of Arabic Literature and Humanities Research Fellowship programs.

An internationally recognized scholar whose works have been translated into over ten languages, Professor Rustom’s research focuses on Islamic philosophy, Arabic and Persian Sufi literature, Quranic exegesis, translation theory, and cross-cultural philosophy. He is author of The Triumph of Mercy: Philosophy and Scripture in Mulla Sadra (SUNY Press, 2012), co-editor of The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (HarperOne, 2015), and translator of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, The Condemnation of Pride and Self-Admiration (Islamic Texts Society, 2018).

Dr. Rustom’s more recent books include Inrushes of the Heart: The Sufi Philosophy of ‘Ayn al-Qudat (SUNY Press, 2023), The Essence of Reality: A Defense of Philosophical Sufism (NYU Press, 2022), and A Sourcebook in Global Philosophy (Equinox, in press)

Professor Rustom is also Editor of Equinox Publishing’s Global Philosophy series and Editorial Board member of the Library of Arabic Literature (NYU Press).

Oludamini Ogunnaike is an Assistant Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia.

"My research examines the philosophical and artistic dimensions of postcolonial, colonial, and pre-colonial Islamic and indigenous religious traditions of West and North Africa, especially Sufism and Ifa. My research falls into two general areas: the intellectual history and literary studies of the Islamic and indigenous traditions of West Africa (redressing the general neglect of Sub-Saharan Africa as an important center of Islamic scholarship and literary production and the neglect of the intellectual dimensions of indigenous African religious traditions), and employing the insights and ideas from these traditions to contribute to contemporary philosophical debates relevant to a variety of disciplines.

I am completing work on two book manuscripts — Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (Penn State University Press) and Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: West African Madīḥ Poetry and its Precedents (Islamic Texts Society). I've also begun work on another project comparing and contrasting the work and decolonial projects of Frantz Fanon and Amadou Hampâté Bâ who represent two distinct and important traditions in Black Atlantic and global decolonial thought.

I also write and do work on the Philosophy of Religion, African Philosophy, Anthropology, Decoloniality, Race, and Imperialism."

Omid is a scholar of Islamic mysticism (Sufism) as well as contemporary Islamic thought at Duke University. He returned to Duke University in 2014 (after having obtained a BA, MA, and PhD from Duke earlier) to lead the Duke Islamic Studies Center.

Omid’s passion for teaching has been recognized through the ten times that he has been nominated for professor of the year awards.  A leading Muslim public intellectual, Omid is committed to the intersection of spirituality and social justice.

Omid has published extensively on the foundational sources of Islam and Sufism. His Memories of Muhammad is a biography of the Prophet Muhammad.  His most recent book is Radical Love:  Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition (published by Yale). His next book is Breathing With God:  Spiritual Sayings of Kharaqani (also by Yale), followed by a book on the mystic Rumi from Princeton.

Omid is also deeply committed to liberationist prophetic traditions in the legacy of Martin Luther King, Rabbi Heschel, and Malcolm X.  He has been invited by the family of Dr. King to speak at Ebenezer Church on the relevance of Dr. King for today’s America, and has delivered the Martin Luther King keynote in the annual national MLK service.

Omid often appears as an expert on Islam in the New York Times, Newsweek, Washington Post, PBS, NPR, NBC, BBC, CNN and other outlets. He is a recent columnist for On Being, and now has a podcast (“Sufi Heart”) at Be Here Now. In his work outside of Duke, his Illuminated Tours have taken more than a 1,000 friends from over twenty countries to Turkey and Morocco since 2002, and he is now offering Illuminated Courses for online offerings on spiritual traditions open to seekers of all backgrounds.

Murata completed her BA in family law at Chiba University in Japan, worked for a year in a law firm in Tokyo, and then went to Iran to study Islamic law. She completed a PhD in Persian literature at Tehran University in 1971, and then transferred to the faculty of theology, where she was the first woman and the first non-Muslim to be enrolled. She finished her MA in Islamic jurisprudence in 1975, and while continuing work on her PhD dissertation in law she became a research associate at the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. Her work on her second PhD was cut short by the revolution. Since 1983 she has taught religious studies at Stony Brook.

Murata has published many scholarly articles and a number of books. These include Isuramu Hôriron Josetsu (Iwanami, 1985), the translation of a major text on the principles of Islamic jurisprudence from Arabic into Japanese; The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought (SUNY Press, 1992); Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Tai-yü's Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih's Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm (SUNY Press, 2000); and with the collaboration of William C. Chittick and Tu Weiming, The Sage Learning of Liu Zhi: Islamic Thought in Confucian Terms (Harvard University Press, 2009.

Murata has been the director of Japanese Studies since its founding in 1990 and regularly teaches Introduction to Japanese Studies, Japanese Buddhism, Feminine Spirituality in World Religions, and Islam and Confucianism.

‍

Seyyed Hossein Nasr (C.V.) graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an undergraduate degree in Physics and Mathematics. He went on to Harvard University where he studied Geology and Geophysics, and then completed a PhD in the History of Science and Philosophy.

He is a world renown scholar on Islam and is currently a University Professor at GW. He has published over fifty books and hundreds of articles in numerous languages and translations.

‍

She was born on December 16, 1946, in Üsküdar, Istanbul. She is the daughter of writer and thinker Cemil Meriç and history-geography teacher Fevziye Menteşoğlu Meriç. She graduated from Çamlıca Girls' High School. While studying in her third year in the French Language and Literature Department, she changed her mind and followed in her father’s footsteps, graduating from the Sociology Department at Istanbul University Faculty of Literature and becoming an assistant in the same department. She later served as the Head of the Sociology of Institutions Department.

Starting her academic career as an assistant in the Sociology Department of Istanbul University Faculty of Literature in 1969, she continued until 2000, when she served as the Head of the Department. In addition to her works Cevdet Paşa’s Views on Society and the State and My Father, Cemil Meriç, both of which have reached their fourth editions, she has also authored Turkey Under Your Wings and Prayers and Amens. Additionally, she compiled Sociology Conversations.

Virginia Gray Henry-Blakemore is the director of the interfaith publishing houses Fons Vitae and Quinta Essentia, a contributing editor for Parabola magazine, a founding member of the Thomas Merton Foundation, et al. She is both a writer and film producer– among recent films are Beads of Faith: The Universal Use of the Rosary and Death and Transformation: The Personal Reflections of Huston Smith, Autumn 2006 (co-produced with Elena Lloyd-Sidle). BA, Sarah Lawrence College (Joseph Campbell was her don, 1965), studied at the American and al-Azhar Universities in Cairo (1969-79), MA in education (1981), research fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University 1983-1990, currently preparing her PhD at the Faculty of Divinity at Canterbury, Kent.

William C. Chittick was born in Milford, Connecticut in 1943. As an undergraduate student majoring in history at the College of Wooster (Ohio), Chittick spent the 1964–1965 academic year abroad, studying Islamic history at the American University of Beirut. It was here that he first came into contact with Sufism, as he decided to write his junior year independent study on the topic. Having become familiar with the standard accounts of Sufism, Chittick attended a public lecture on the topic by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who was the University’s Agha Khan Visiting Professor that year. Nasr’s lecture deepened Chittick’s interest in Sufism to the point that he eventually resolved to pursue graduate studies in Tehran. Chittick began his graduate work in the foreign students program at the University of Tehran’s Faculty of Letters in 1966. In 1974, he obtained a doctoral degree in Persian language and literature under Nasr’s supervision. Chittick then began teaching comparative religion at Aryamehr Technical University (now Sharif University of Technology) and, in 1978, joined the faculty of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy (now the Iranian Institute of Philosophy). Shortly before the revolution in 1979, he returned to the United States with his wife, Sachiko Murata, who also graduated from the University of Tehran (PhD in Persian Literature) and is a professor of Islamic and East Asian Thought (Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism…).