Mirjam Künkler (Ph.D. Political Science, Columbia University) is Senior Research Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. Her books include Democracy and Islam in Indonesia, Columbia University Press, 2013; A Secular Age Beyond the West, Cambridge University Press, 2018; Female Religious Authority in Shi‘i Islam: Past and Present (with Devin Stewart), Edinburgh and Oxford University Press, 2019; and The Rule of Law and the Politics of the Judiciary in Contemporary Iran (with Hadi Enayat), Cambridge University Press, 2019. Before joining SCAS, she taught Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, where she also directed the Oxford-Princeton research cluster on “Traditional authority and transnational religious networks in contemporary Shi’i Islam,” and co-directed the Luce Program on “Religion and International Affairs” for many years. She is a founder and PI of the Iran Data Portal and sits on the boards of various academic journals.

Abdullah Alaoudh is a Senior Fellow at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding and a fellow at Yaqeen Islamic Institute. He was Research Scholar in Law and an Islamic Law & Civilization Research Fellow at Yale Law School (2017-2018). He earned his LL.M. and S.J.D. from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where his dissertation focused on the role of religious institutions in post-revolutionary Arab countries and the transition to democracy. Alaoudh also received his bachelor’s degree in Islamic law from Qassim University.