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Featured Scholars
Cities of Light: The Rise and
Fall of Islamic Spain is informed by a diverse group
of world-class historians and scholars. These experts
provide historical context, analysis, and critical
perspective, to tell a story of vital importance and offer
lessons for our contemporary world. (In order of appearance
in the film.)
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf
Lourdes Maria Alvarez
Brian Catlos
Olivia Remie Constable
Ahmad S. Dallal
Mustapha Kamal
Chris Lowney
David Nirenberg
Dede Fairchild Ruggles
Raymond P. Scheindlin
Imam
Feisal Abdul Rauf
 Feisal Abdul Rauf was born in Kuwait in 1948 into an
Egyptian family steeped in religious scholarship. He was
educated in England and Malaysia and has a degree in physics
from Columbia University in New York.
He is founder and CEO of the American Society for Muslim
Advancement (ASMA Society http://www.asmasociety.org ). He
is also the Imam, or prayer leader, of Masjid Al-Farah, a
mosque in New York City, which is located 12 blocks from
Ground Zero. Imam Feisal has dedicated his life to building
bridges between Muslims and the West. He is a leader in the
effort to build religious pluralism and integrate Islam into
modern society. He also designed the Córdoba Initiative, an
interfaith plan for improving relations between Muslims,
Europeans, and Americans through international dialogue and
cooperation. He places special emphasis on finding a
peaceful and just solution to the Israel-Palestine issue.
Imam Feisal speaks frequently at national and international
conferences, and teaches about Islam, appearing frequently
in the media. He is a member of the World Economic Forum
Council of 100 Leaders (Islamic-West dialogue), Board of
Trustees of the Islamic Center of New York, and advises the
Interfaith Center of New York. His books include Islam: A
Search for Meaning, Islam: A Sacred Law; and
What's Right With Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the
West.
Lourdes
Maria Alvarez
 Dr. Lourdes Maria Alvarez is Director of the Center for
Catalan Studies and Professor of Spanish at Catholic
University in Washington, DC. The main focus of her research
and scholarship is cultural and literary relations between
Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain, and
Hispano-Arabic poetry from the same time period. She is also
interested in studying the influence of Islamic Spain in the
contemporary Arab political and cultural imagination.
Before teaching at Catholic University, Prof. Alvarez taught
at Yale University at the Yale Summer Language Institute in
1992. She received her B.A. from University of California at
Berkeley, her M.A. from San Francisco State University, and
her Ph.D. from Yale University. In addition to English, she
is fluent in Spanish and Arabic. Prof. Alvarez is a CASA III
fellow (Center for Arabic Studies Abroad) at the American
University in Cairo, Egypt. And in 2000, she was awarded a
Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship, which she used to
complete research in Morocco. Prof. Alvarez has published
numerous articles in her research field.
Brian Catlos
 Brian Catlos is Associate Professor of History at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, with a doctorate from
the University of Toronto. He spent six years in Barcelona,
Spain, where he was a research fellow at the Spanish
National Research Council and held a postdoctoral fellowship
from Boston University. He is co-winner of the 2005 John
Edwin Fagg Prize from the American Historical Association
for his book The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians
and Muslims in Catalonia and Aragon, 1050-1300
(Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Professor Catlos is interested in studying ethnic and
religious minorities in Medieval Europe, and in researching
the interactions among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in
Medieval Iberia, Europe and the Mediterranean region. He
believes that his historical research helps improve
understanding among religious groups in the world today, by
showing that seemingly deep conflicts among religious groups
are usually based on issues other than religion. "Ethnicity
and religion becomes the language with which we speak about
our aims and politics, but I don't think it's what's
actually behind them," Catlos says. "We have to critically
analyze the present in the same way that we critically
analyze the past." Catlos has published several books and
numerous articles in his field.
Olivia
Remie Constable
 Olivia Remie Constable is Professor of History at the
University of Notre Dame. She received her B.A. from Yale
University in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, and
her Ph.D. from Princeton University in Near Eastern Studies.
Professor Constable is interested in the economic, social,
and urban history of the Medieval Mediterranean region, and
especially in the contacts between Muslims, Christians, and
Jews.
She has published several books, including: Trade and
Traders in Islamic Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the
Iberian Peninsula 900-1500 (Cambridge University Press,
1994), which won the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the
Medieval Academy of America; Medieval Iberia: Readings from
Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1997); and Housing the Stranger in
the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late
Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge University
Press, 2003); in addition to many articles. She has won
several awards for excellence in teaching.
Professor Constable is currently working on a book about
Muslims living in Europe during the 13th century, comparing
different regions of Spain, France, and Italy. She says this
period is important because it was a time when European
attitudes towards Islam were affected by the crusades in the
Near East and territorial conquests in Spain.
Ahmad S. Dallal
 Ahmad Dallal is Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic
Studies and Chair of the Arabic and Islamic Studies
Department at Georgetown University. He has taught at
Stanford University, Yale University, and Smith College. He
has a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from Columbia University and
a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the American
University of Beirut.
His academic training and research cover the history of the
disciplines of learning in Muslim societies, including both
the exact and the traditional sciences, as well as early
modern and modern Islamic thought and movements. He has
written books and articles on the history of science,
Islamic revivalist thought, and Islamic law, including An
Islamic Response to Greek Astronomy: Kitab Ta‘dil Hay’at al-Aflak
of Sadr al-Shari‘a (E.J. Brill, 1995). He is currently
finishing a comparative study of 18th century Islamic
reform, entitled Islam Without Europe: Traditions of Reform
in Eighteenth Century Islamic Thought. He has also written
and lectured about the September 11 attacks.
Mustapha Kamal
 Dr. Mustapha Kamal is a native of Morocco, who received his
Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is
Lecturer in Arabic in the Department of Classics and
Mediterranean Studies at the University of Illinois,
Chicago. His major focus is instruction in Arabic language
and literature. He has lectured on Classical and Modern
Arabic Literature, Arab Intellectual History, and the
literature and history of Medieval Iberia.
He also lectures on Arabic literature and music from Spain
and Morocco. He has published many translations of French
and English works, including articles in Structuralism and
Semiotics by Terence Hawks (1987); Towards a Semiotics of
Authoritarian Discourse by Alain Goldschläger (1987), an
anthology of the works of Jacques Lacan (1988); Mythologies
by Roland Barthes, (1988); and writings from Umberto Eco,
Noam Chomsky, Fernand Braudel, Jean Piaget, and Edward Said,
among many others.
Chris Lowney
 Chris Lowney is the author of
A Vanished World: Medieval
Spain's Golden Age of Enlightenment and Heroic Leadership:
Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company that Changed the
World (Loyola Press, 2003). He lives in New York, where he
serves part-time as Special Assistant to the President of
the Catholic Medical Mission Board (CMMB). The CMMB is the
leading U.S.-based Catholic charity providing healthcare
programs and services to people in need around the world.
Mr. Lowney was a Jesuit seminarian for seven years, teaching
and studying at Jesuit institutions in the U.S. and Puerto
Rico. He is a summa cum laude graduate of Fordham
University, where he also received his M.A. He holds
honorary Doctoral degrees from Marymount Manhattan
University and from the University of Great Falls. He serves
on the Board of Directors of Nativity Middle School and on
the Board of Regents of St. Peter's College.
He has served as Managing Director of J.P. Morgan & Co., and
held senior positions in New York, Tokyo, Singapore and
London. He served on Morgan's Asia-Pacific, European, and
Investment Banking Management Committees. Mr. Lowney
lectures frequently on leadership, business ethics, and
inter-religious dialogue in the U.S. and in the Philippines,
Mexico, Indonesia, Colombia, and Spain.
David Nirenberg
 David Nirenberg is Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of the
Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches
Medieval history. His research and writing focuses on Spain
and the Mediterranean, and on social and cultural relations
between Jews, Christians, and Muslims during that period.
He has published books and articles, such as Communities of
Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages
(Princeton University Press, 1996), on violence and
co-existence of Muslim and Jewish minorities with the
Christian majority in the 14th century Crown of Aragon. They
also focus on French and Iberian Christian attitudes toward
non-Christian minorities. He is currently working on two
projects: one on the collapse of religious pluralism in
Spain from the massacres of 1391 up to the beginning of the
Inquisition; and the second on Medieval ideas about
communication, exchange, and social relations -- a cultural
history of poison from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance.
Dede Fairchild Ruggles
 D. Fairchild Ruggles is Associate Professor at the
University of Illinois, Urbana in its program on landscape
history. She studied Islamic art and architecture and wrote
her dissertation on the 10th century palace city outside of
Córdoba, Madinat al-Zahra. Her first book was Gardens,
Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain.
Prof. Ruggles is a pioneer in the field of landscape
history. She is especially interested in the way palaces and
gardens were intertwined in Al-Andalus, and what these
gardens meant to the people who built them. She has also
studied Arabic agricultural technology and scientific
writings from the 10th through 14th centuries. She has
taught architectural, art, landscape, and cultural history
at Cornell University, Binghamton University, and Harvard.
She, herself, gardens.
She has published essays and given lectures on the cultural
conditions that gave rise to the art, architecture, and
landscape of the Hispano-Islamic kingdom of Al-Andalus. Her
research interests are the visual culture and built
environment of the Islamic world. She is the author of
Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic
Spain (2000). She edited the volume Women, Patronage, and
Self-Representation in Islamic Societies, and most recently,
Islamic Gardens and Landscape (University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2005).
Her current research interests extend her work to South
Asia, especially the palace and tomb gardens of the Mughals
and the Rajputs, appearing in the book, Islamic Landscape
and the Built Environment, soon to be published. She also
has written many articles on these subjects.
Raymond P. Scheindlin
 Raymond P. Scheindlin received a B.A. in Oriental Studies
from the University of Pennsylvania, a Masters of Hebrew
Letters and rabbinic ordination from International
Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow and served for three years as
part-time Rabbi of the Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn.
Dr. Scheindlin is Professor of Medieval Hebrew Literature at
the Jewish Theological Seminary and director of its Shalom
Spiegel Institute of Medieval Hebrew Poetry. He teaches and
conducts research on the interactions between Hebrew and
Arabic cultures in Spain, especially in the poetry of the
two traditions. An expert on Arabic literature, Dr.
Scheindlin is the author of a reference book for students of
Arabic, entitled 201 Arabic Verbs.
His thesis, a study of a Medieval Arab poet from Spain, was
published as a book in 1975. He has also published
translations of literature, including: a Yiddish novella by
Mendele Mocher Seforim; a book on secular Hebrew poetry in
Islamic Spain, entitled Wine, Women, and Death: Medieval
Hebrew Poems on the Good Life (1986); and a companion volume
on religious poetry, entitled The Gazelle: Medieval Hebrew
Poems on God, Israel, and the Soul (1991).
He also translated Ismar Elbogen's history of Jewish liturgy
(1993). Other books include: The Book of Job (W.W. Norton,
1998) and A Short History of the Jewish People (Macmillan,
1998). He has written many articles in Spanish and English,
and is also fluent in Hebrew and Arabic. Dr. Scheindlin was
co-editor of a volume of the Cambridge History of Arabic
Literature, entitled The Literature of Al-Andalus (2000). Back to
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