Professor Nyang has served as consultant to several national and international agencies. He has served on the boards of the African Studies Association, the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies and the Association of Muslim Social Scientists. He is listed on the editorial boards of several national and international scholarly journals. He has lectured on college campuses in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas.  Professor Nyang has written extensively on Islamic, African and Middle Eastern affairs. His best known works are Islam, Christianity and African Identity (1984), A Line in the Sand: Saudi Arabia's Role in the Gulf War (1995), co-authored with Even Heindricks, Religious Plurality in Africa, co-edited with Jacob Olupona, and his latest book, Islam in America. Professor Nyang has also contributed over a dozen chapters in books edited by colleagues writing on Islamic, African and Middle Eastern subjects. His numerous scholarly pieces have appeared in African, American, European and Asian journals.

Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah (Wymann-Landgraf) is an American Muslim, born in 1948 to Protestant family of the Midwest. Early in 1970, he embraced Islam in Ithaca, New York while studying English literature at Cornell University as a Woodrow Wilson honorary fellow. He then changed his field of study and transferred to the University of Chicago in 1972, where he received with honors his doctorate in 1978 for a dissertation pertaining to the origins of Islamic Law. He taught at the Universities of Windsor (Ontario), Temple, and Michigan from 1977 until 1982, when he left America to teach Arabic in Granada (Spain). In 1984, he was appointed to the Department of Islamic Studies at King Abdul-Aziz  University in Jeddah and taught Islamic studies and comparative religions there until 2000. During his years abroad, Dr. Abd-Allah  had the fortune to study with several traditional Islamic teachers. He has written and published in Arabic and English, is fluent in Arabic, and acquainted with several ancient and modern tongues. He returned to Chicago in August of 2000 to work as general director of the newly founded Nawawi Foundation and, in conjunction with this postition, is now teaching in Chicago and conducting research in Islamic studies and cognate fields.

An associate professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University, Dr. McCloud is the author of four books, including "The Religion and Philosophy of the Nation of Islam," and "Immigrant American Islam." She is currently working on "The Religion and Philosophy of the Nation of Islam" and "American Muslim Women," and is the author of over twenty articles on topics ranging from Islamic Law to Muslim women. Dr. McCloud is a Fulbright Scholar, Islamic Legal Expert, and current managing editor of The Journal of Islamic Law and Culture. She is the founder of the Islam in America Conference at DePaul University which houses The Journal of Islamic Law and Culture and the Islam in America Archives. She is a current member of the Centre for Islamic Studies in Oxford, a board member of Iqra Foundation, a board member of "the Healing Project" at Boston University Hospital, a consultant for various encyclopedia projects on Muslims in America and Islam.  She has received grants for her work from the Ford Foundation, Illinois Humanities Council, Graham Architectural Foundation and the Lilly Foundation. 

Dr. Muneer Fareed is originally from South Africa. He is currently associate professor of Islamic studies at Wayne State University Department of Near Eastern and Asian Studies in Detroit, Michigan. Dr. Fareed fields of interest are modern Islamic reform movements, Muslim personal law, Muslim legal reform, and women's studies. He has written two books, one entitled Legal Reform in the Muslim World: Ijtihad and its Interpretations in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (1996) and the other Muslim Personal Law in the West (forthcoming). In addition, he has translated into English numerous Arabic scholarly works. He obtained his B.A. in Arabic Language and Literature from King Abdul Aziz University in Mecca in 1979. Afterwards, he spent three years in the Dar al-Uloom Seminary in Deoband, India for training in traditional Islamic knowledge. He arrived in the United States in 1989 as an imam and scholar-in-residence for the large Muslim community in Detroit, centered around the Islamic Association of Greater Detroit in Rochester Hills, Michigan. While imam, he obtained his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1994, with his dissertation centered around the topic of ijtihad and its myriad interpretation in Muslim history. Dr. Fareed combines both an intellectual outlook and a deep understanding of the needs of the Muslim community in America. He has been teaching Usul al-Fiqh and 'Islam and Modernity' at the American Learning Institute for Muslims (ALIM) since its inception.