Albert Habib Hourani, was a liberal Lebanese British historian, specialising in the history of the Middle East and Middle Eastern studies.
Richard Nelson Frye was an American scholar of Iranian and Central Asian studies, and Aga Khan Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Harvard University. His professional areas of interest were Iranian philology and the history of Iran and Central Asia before 1000 CE.
Middle Eastern studies is a name given to a number of academic programs associated with the study of the history, culture, politics, economies, and geography of the Middle East, an area that is generally interpreted to cover a range of nations including Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and Yemen. It is considered a form of area studies, taking an overtly interdisciplinary approach to the study of a region. In this sense Middle Eastern studies is a far broader and less traditional field than classical Islamic studies.
William Montgomery Watt was a Scottish historian and orientalist. An Anglican priest, Watt served as Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh from 1964 to 1979 and was also a prominent contributor to the field of Quranic studies.
Oriental studies is the academic field that studies Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, peoples, history and archaeology. In recent years, the subject has often been turned into the newer terms of Middle Eastern studies and Asian studies. Traditional Oriental studies in Europe is today generally focused on the discipline of Islamic studies; the study of China, especially traditional China, is often called Sinology. The study of East Asia in general, especially in the United States, is often called East Asian studies.
George Michael Wickens was a distinguished Canadian-British Persianist as well as Arabist, translator and a University lecturer.
John E. Woods is a Professor Emeritus of Iranian and Central Asian History in the Departments of History and of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the College at the University of Chicago.
Caesar E. Farah was a professor of history at the University of Minnesota.
Daniel Carl Peterson is a former professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at Brigham Young University (BYU).
George Fadlo Hourani was a British philosopher, historian, and classicist. He is best known for his work in Islamic philosophy, which focused on classical Islamic rationalism and ethics.
Muḥsin Sayyid Mahdī was an Iraqi-American Islamologist and Arabist. He was a leading authority on Arabian history, philology, and philosophy. His best-known work was the first critical edition of the One Thousand and One Nights.
Nader El-Bizri served as the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Sharjah. He was before that a tenured longstanding full Professor of philosophy and civilization studies at the American University of Beirut, where he also acted as an Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and as the Director of the General Education program. El-Bizri specializes in phenomenology, Islamic science and philosophy, and architectural theory. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Phenomenological Quest between Avicenna and Heidegger (2000).
Leo Aryeh Mayer OBE, was an Israeli scholar of Islamic art and rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Dimitri Gutas is an American Arabist and Hellenist specialized in medieval Islamic philosophy, who serves as professor emeritus of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University.
Wolfhart P. Heinrichs was a German-born scholar of Arabic. He was James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard University, and a co-editor of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam. He taught Classical Arabic language and literature, particularly Arabic literary theory and criticism.
Wadie Elias Jwaideh was an Iraqi American professor of history known for his work on the Kurds.
Mahmood Fotoohi Rudmajani is Professor of Persian Language and Literature at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran. Since 2008 he has served as the editor in chief of Literary Criticism Quarterly, an academic Journal of Tarbiat Modarres university. He was the editor in chief of Journal of Faculty of Letters and Humanities, at Tehran Tarbiyat Moallem University, Iran from 2001 to 2008 and has served as a Member of editorial staff in Monthly philosophy and literature in Tehran (1997–2005). In 2009 he was selected as the chair of Iranian Literary Criticism Association (ILCA), an academic NGO in Iran, for two years. He has hold the position of Lecturer in the Persian language and Iranian studies at Australian National University (ANU) in 2012 and in Belgrade University in 2001-2003. His areas of specialization encompass Persian poetry in Safavied period, Indo-Persian poetry, Persian stylistics, traditional rhetoric, Persian literary history, and teaching Persian language.
Mohammed Rustom is a Canadian Islamic studies scholar. He is professor of Islamic thought and global philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and Director of the Carleton Centre for the Study of Islam. His research interests include Arabic and Persian Sufi literature, Islamic philosophy, Qur’anic exegesis, translation theory, and cross-cultural philosophy.
Frank Griffel is a German scholar of Islamic studies. He is the Professor in the Study of Abrahamic Religions at the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University and Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall. Until 2024 he was the Louis M. Rabinowitz Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University, where he is still an emeritus professor.
Asad Q. Ahmed is an American scholar who is the Magistretti Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture and Professor of Arabic and Islamic studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
