Liberalism and progressivism within Islam involve professed Muslims who have created a considerable body of progressive thought about Islamic understanding and practice. Their work is sometimes characterized as "progressive Islam". Some scholars, such as Omid Safi, differentiate between "Progressive Muslims" and "Liberal advocates of Islam".
Warith Deen Mohammed, also known as W. Deen Mohammed, Imam W. Deen Muhammad and Imam Warith Deen, was an African-American Muslim leader, theologian, philosopher, Muslim revivalist, and Islamic thinker.
Vincent Cornell is an American scholar of Islam. From 2000 to 2006 he was a professor of history and director of the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Arkansas. He was an advisor to the award-winning, PBS-broadcast documentary Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet (2002), produced by Unity Productions Foundation. He left Arkansas in 2006 to become a professor of history at Emory University, in Atlanta. Sufism and Islamic philosophy are among his specialities. His books are available in over 2,200 libraries.
John Louis Esposito is an American academic, professor of Middle Eastern and religious studies, and scholar of Islamic studies, who serves as Professor of Religion, International Affairs, and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He is also the founding director of the Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim–Christian Understanding at Georgetown.
Ahmed Raza Khan Barelvi, known reverentially as Ala Hazrat, was an Indian Islamic scholar, theologian, Mujadid or reviver of Islam jurist, preacher, poet from Bareilly, British India, considered as the founder of the Barelvi movement and the Razvi branch of the Qadri Sufi order.
amina wadud is an American Muslim theologian. Wadud serves as visiting professor at Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies and was also a visiting scholar at Starr King School for the Ministry. Wadud has written extensively on the role of women in Islam.
Michael B. Wolfe is an American poet, author, and the President and Co-Executive Producer of Unity Productions Foundation. A secular American born in Cincinnati, Ohio to a Christian mother and a Jewish father, Wolfe converted to Islam at 40 and has been a frequent lecturer on Islamic issues at universities across the United States including Harvard, Georgetown, Stanford, SUNY Buffalo, and Princeton. He holds a degree in Classics from Wesleyan University.
The depiction of Islamic prophet Muhammad in film is a controversial topic both within and outside of Islam. Although the Quran does not explicitly forbid images of Muhammad, there are a few hadith which have explicitly prohibited Muslims from creating visual depictions of figures. Because the different branches of Islam use different Hadith collections, there is a split on this issue between the two major denominations of Islam, Sunni and Shia Islam.
Alexander Kronemer is a writer, lecturer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on religious diversity, Islam, and cross-cultural understanding. He is the co-founder and executive producer of Unity Productions Foundation. Alex Kronemer is the co-founder of Unity Productions Foundation (UPF), its Executive Director, and Executive Producer for all UPF Films. He is an internationally known speaker and has published numerous articles newspapers and journals in the US and abroad, including The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, the Huffington Post and in syndication in international publications as widespread as the UK, Indonesia, Egypt, and Pakistan. He frequently presents at 20,000 Dialogue events, and has appeared as a CNN commentator on several occasions. Mr. Kronemer has won numerous awards for his work in promoting peace and interfaith understanding. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, he previously served in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Human Rights and was one of the founding staff members who helped establish the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Al-Sayyid Muhammad al-Hasan bin ‘Alawi bin ‘Abbas bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz (1944–2004), also known as Muhammad ibn Alawi al-Maliki, was one of the foremost traditional Sunni Islamic scholar of contemporary times from Saudi Arabia. He is considered to be the Mujaddid of 20th-21st century.
Dr. Sulayman S. Nyang was a professor and former chairman of the African Studies Department at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He was a co-principal investigator of the Project MAPS and also a former deputy ambassador and head of chancery of the Gambia Embassy in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Nyang served as consultant to several national and international agencies and on the boards of the African Studies Association, the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies, America's Islamic Heritage Museum, and the Association of Muslim Social Scientists. He wrote extensively on Islamic, African and Middle Eastern affairs. He held a master's degree in public administration and a Ph.D. in government from the University of Virginia. Nyang was an advising scholar for the award-winning, PBS-broadcast documentaries Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet (2002) and Prince Among Slaves (2007), produced by Unity Productions Foundation.
Sayyid Hassan al-Musawi al-Qazwini is an Iraqi-American Shia Imam.
Azizah Y. al-Hibri is an American philosopher and legal scholar who specializes in Islam and law.
Anwar Nasser Abdulla al-Awlaki was an American Islamic scholar and lecturer who was killed in 2011 in Yemen by a U.S. government drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki became the first U.S. citizen to be targeted and killed by a drone strike from the U.S. government. U.S. government officials argued that Awlaki was a key organizer for the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda, and in June 2014, a previously classified memorandum issued by the U.S. Department of Justice was released, justifying al-Awlaki's death as a lawful act of war. Civil liberties advocates have described the incident as "an extrajudicial execution" that breached al-Awlaki's constitutional right to due process, including a trial.
Khalid Yahya Blankinship is an American historian who specialises in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies.
Prince Among Slaves is a 2006 historical drama directed, written and produced by Andrea Kalin and narrated by Mos Def made for PBS by Unity Productions Foundation. The film, made in association with Spark Media and Duke Media, is based on the story of Abdul Rahman Ibrahima Sori, a prince from Guinea who was made a slave in the United States and freed 40 years later.
Jonathan Andrew Cleveland Brown is an American scholar of Islamic studies. Since 2012, he has served as an associate professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He holds the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization at Georgetown University.
Anwar al-Awlaki was an American-Yemeni cleric killed in late 2011, who was identified in 2009 by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a known, important "senior recruiter for al Qaeda", and a spiritual motivator.
Criticism of Twelver Shia Islam dates from the initial ideological rift among early Muslims that led to the two primary denominations of Islam, the Sunnis and the Shias. The question of succession to Muhammad in Islam, the nature of the Imamate, the status of the twelfth Shia Imam, and other areas in which Shia Islam differs from Sunni Islam have been criticized by Sunni scholars, even though there is no disagreement between the two sects regarding the centrality of the Quran, Muhammad, and many other doctrinal, theological and ritual matters. Shia commentators such as Musa al-Musawi and Ali Shariati have themselves, in their attempts to reform the faith, criticized practices and beliefs which have become prevalent in the Twelver Shia community.
