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Akbar Salahuddin Ahmed, Sitara-i-Imtiaz, or Akbar Ahmed, is currently the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, American University in Washington, D.C., the First Distinguished Chair of Middle East and Islamic Studies at the US Naval Academy, Annapolis, and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is considered “the world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam” by the BBC.

Ambassador Akbar Ahmed has advised world leaders including most recently General David Petraeus, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and Secretary Michael Chertoff on Islam and foreign policy. He is regularly interviewed by CNN, CBS, BBC, and Fox News and has appeared several times on the Oprah Winfrey Show. He is the author of over a dozen award-winning books, including Discovering Islam (the basis for the BBC six-part TV series entitled “Living Islam”) and Journey into Islam; his books have been translated into many languages, including Chinese and Indonesian. His latest project based in extensive fieldwork has resulted in a full length documentary, Journey into America, which has been shown at several film festivals and the book, Journey into America; the Challenge of Islam (Brookings Press, June 2010). "A brilliant follow-up to Journey into Islam. Ahmed's insights should be required reading for anyone grappling with national security, national identity, and national cohesion in today s complex era."... Colonel David Kilcullen, author of The Accidental Guerrilla.

He joined the Civil Service of Pakistan (CSP), the elite cadre of the Central Superior Services of Pakistan in 1966, and held important posts in Pakistan and Bangladesh...including Commissioner, Quetta; Political Agent, South Waziristan Agency. He has also been the Ambassador from Pakistan to the UK.

Ambassador Ahmed is one of the world’s foremost anthropologists and was inducted into the legendary figures in Anthropology’s Hall of Fame as part of the "Anthropological Ancestors" audio-visual interview series at Cambridge University in July 2004. He has written extensively on the tribal areas of Pakistan, including his book Resistance and Control in Pakistan (1983), and the anthropology of Muslim societies. His most recent projects have been unprecedented large-scale anthropological studies and as one Harvard intellectual noted, he is “changing the face of anthropology.”

A prolific author, he is also a playwright and three of his plays were staged in the DC area: "Noor", "The Trial of Dara Shikoh", and "From Waziristan to Washington: A Muslim at the Crossroads". Two plays, "Noor " and "The Trial of Dara Shikoh", were published by Saqi Books in the summer of 2009.

Ambassador Akbar Ahmed has also been a leader in interfaith dialogue and tries to build bridges between civilizations. Along with Judea Pearl, father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl he has had public dialogues in an effort to dispel hate and ignorance. For their efforts they were awarded the prestigious Purpose Prize in 2007.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Akbar S. Ahmed", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0