Speakers Profiles
Dr. Usaama al-Azami is an Assistant Professor in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He pursued formal Islamic studies from 2002 and completed his BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Oxford in 2008. He has studied with numerous renowned scholars, including Shaykh Mohammad Akram Nadwi and Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. With a PhD from Princeton University, his expertise lies in contemporary Islamic political thought. He’s also the author of Islam and the Arab Revolutions, exploring the role of the ulama in the 2011 Arab Revolutions.
Moazzam Begg is a British-born Muslim and one of the most prominent advocates for justice and political prisoners worldwide. After being wrongfully detained in Guantanamo Bay, he has dedicated his life to exposing injustice. He is the author of the best-seller Enemy Combatant, which recounts his experiences of wrongful imprisonment and torture in Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar. Recognised in The Muslim 500 as one of the world’s most influential Muslims and by The New Statesman as one of the top 50 “Heroes of our Time,” Moazzam has travelled extensively, investigating state abuses and Western complicity in torture. His life and work have been documented in the BBC Storyville documentary The Confession and preserved by Columbia University’s Oral History Project.
Sufyan Gulam Ismail is an award-winning serial entrepreneur and philanthropist and has been ranked amongst the 500 most influential Muslims in the world on five separate occasions. Sufyan has built numerous businesses over the years, specialising in financial services, private equity, and real estate.
In 2014, Sufyan formally retired from full-time business activity to focus on philanthropic ventures, with a key focus on tackling Islamophobia. To this end, he was the founder of MEND, which specialises in tackling Islamophobia through a dual approach of advocacy in Westminster and media engagement, as well as improving media and political literacy of grassroots British Muslims across the UK. MEND’s work has been recognised by the World Economic Forum and various other global bodies.