Senior Fellows
You are here
Abdallah Schleifer | Senior Fellow
Abdallah Schleifer is chief editor of The Muslim 500 – an annual publication identifying the 500 most influential Muslims and in the world. He is also regular columnist for Al Arabiya News. According to The Economist, Schleifer has achieved global “distinction as a Muslim intellectual” actively involved in Inter-Faith initiatives. He was one of the original 138 Muslim scholars (including the Muftis of Egypt, Bosnia, Syria and Indonesia) who signed an Open Letter known as “A Common Word” to Christian leaders and he was a member of the Common Word delegations that met with Pope Benedict at the Vatican and with Protestant leaders gathering at Yale University. A professor emeritus of journalism at the American University in Cairo Scheifer has served as NBC News Cairo bureau chief, Al Arabiya Washington DC bureau chief, Middle East correspondent of Jeune Afrique and special correspondent for the New York Times.Jan Opsal | Senior Fellow
Jan Opsal is a professor of Science of religion at the School of Mission and Theology (MHS) in Stavanger, Norway. His scholarly focus is on Islam and Christian-Muslim relations, and has also worked as a journalist. Since 1990, Prof. Opsal has frequently visited Egypt and from 2006 to 2010 he was a visiting professor at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo. In his position at MHS he has frequently taken groups of Norwegian students to Egypt and introduced them firsthand to Muslim-Christian relations in the country. Many of these students have benefitted from the work of Arab-West Report in their own research. In October 2012, MHS invited AWF founder Cornelis Hulsman to deliver the prestigious Bjoern Bue’s Human Rights Memorial Lecture entitled Love amidst fear and conflict: Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt, 2012.
You can find a list of Prof. Jan Opsal’s publications and memberships on the MHS website.
Herman Teule | Senior Fellow
Herman Teule is professor emeritus of Eastern Christianity at the Universities of Louvain (Belgium) and Nijmegen (The Netherlands). He is the current Head of the Institute of Eastern Christian Studies at Nijmegen. His scholarly interests, as witnessed in numerous publications, focus on the interaction between Middle Eastern Christians and the Muslim world. Herman is one of the founders of the Arab-West Foundation and was a board member between 2005 and 2008. In 2008 the Institute of Eastern Christian Studies participated in the Electronic Network for Arab-West Understanding (ENAWU) created by the Center for Intercultural Dialogue and Translation (CIDT tb).
Prof. Teule's CV can be found on the Institute of Eastern Christian Studies website.
Wolfram Reiss | Senior Fellow
Since 2007, Wolfram Reiss has been professor of Comparative Religion at the Evangelical Theological Faculty at the University of Vienna, Austria. He wrote his PhD thesis on reform in the Coptic Orthodox Church in 1996 which was summarized by Arab-West Report in 2002. In the same year, Prof. Reiss became a member of the advisory board of the precursor of Arab-West Report, the Religious News Service from the Arab-World.
From 2001 to 2005, and 2009 to 2012 Wolfram Reiss was a research fellow of an international research project, in which textbooks of six Middle Eastern countries were analysed in regards to their portrayal of Western and Oriental Christianity. The results were documented in three volumes (Vol. I: Egypt and Palestine; Vol II: Turkey and Iran, 2005, and Vol. III: Lebanon and Jordan, 2012). The first volume was part of his habilitation thesis on "The Portrayal of Christianity in Egyptian Textbooks, upon which Arab West Report reported.
From 2007 to 2010, Dr. Reiss was a member in a joint commission of the UNESCO and League of Arab States, which developed recommendations for history textbook authors in regards to the presentation of the other. The work was published by UNESCO in 2011 (2nd Ed. 2012). In 2012, Prof. Reiss published the work of Arab West Report entitled “The Sharia as the Main Source of Legislation? The Egyptian Debate on Article II of the Egyptian Constitution.”
More information on Prof. Reiss can be found on the University of Vienna website.
