PARTICIPANTS:
miriam cooke is Professor of Arabic, Department of Asian & African Languages & Literature at Duke University. She is author of: The Anatomy of an Egyptian Intellectual. Yahya Haqqi (1984) ["Choice" Outstanding Academic Book 1985]; War's Other Voices. Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (1988); Women and the War Story (1997) ["Choice" Outstanding Book 1997]; Hayati. My Life. A Novel (2000);Women Claim Islam. Creating Islamic Feminism Through Literature (2001)

Muhammad Qasim Zaman is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University and, currently, a fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. He is the author of Religion and Politics under the Early `Abbasids (1997) and of many articles on issues of religious authority and identity in classical and modern Islam. His book, Paths of Religious Change: Islam and the `Ulama' in the Modern World, is near completion.