Dr. Mustafa Ceric served as Grand Mufti of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1993 to 2012. He was previously an Imam in Northbrook, Illinois, United States and Zagreb, Croatia. He is the founder of the Bosniak Academy of Arts and Sciences. In December of 2012, he co-founded World Bosniak Congress.
Dr. Mustafa Ceric is a member of the Interreligious Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the European Council for Fatwas and Research, World Conference of Religion & Peace, and the executive committee of the European Council of Religious Leaders, amongst many other organizations. He is also a member of UNESCO International Commission for Peace Research.
Dr. Mustafa Ceric has received numerous awards including the 2003 UNESCO Felix Houphouet-Boigny Peace Prize, the International Council of Christians and Jews Annual Sternberg Award for “exceptional contribution to interfaith understanding” and the 2007 Theodor-Heuss-Stiftung award for his contribution to spreading and strengthening democracy. In 2007, he was named the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Association of Muslim Social Scientists UK. In 2008, he received the Eugen Biser Foundation award. In 2010, he received the King Abdullah I Bin Al-Hussein International Award and in 2012 he received the Ducci Foundation Peace Prize.
I'm an intellectual historian who is interested in the course of philosophy in the Islamic world both past and present. Increasingly I am interested in how that study and category of philosophy coincides with the emergent category of global philosophy. In terms of method, my research is informed by the need for a decolonial and reparative study of Islam.
I supervise graduate students broadly in Islamic intellectual history, especially in philosophy, theology and Quranic exegesis. I am the director of the Centre for the Study of Islam.
I work on Islamic intellectual history in the wider Persianate world. My particular interests which grew from my PhD at Cambridge on the philosophy of Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. c. 1636) lie in post-Avicennan philosophical, theological and mystical traditions. My second main area of interest is Qurʾanic exegesis and textual hermeneutics.
Professor, Institute On Globalization and the Human Condition
Professor Liyakat Takim is the Sharjah Chair in Global Islam at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. A native of Zanzibar, Tanzania, he has spoken at more than eighty academic conferences and authored one hundred scholarly works on diverse topics like reformation in the Islamic world, the treatment of women in Islamic law, Islam in America, the indigenization of the Muslim community in America, dialogue in post-911 America, war and peace in the Islamic tradition, Islamic law, Islamic biographical literature, the charisma of the holy man and shrine culture, and Islamic mystical traditions. He teaches a wide range of courses on Islam and offers a course on comparative religions.
Professor Takim’s second book titled Shi'ism in America was published by New York University Press in summer 2009. His first book, The Heirs of the Prophet: Charisma and Religious Authority in Shi‘ite Islam was published by SUNY press in 2006. He is currently working on his third book, Ijtihad and Reformation in Islam. Professor Takim has taught at several American and Canadian universities and is actively engaged in dialogue with different faith communities.
