“Ambassador Akbar Ahmed is Distinguished Professor and the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University and a Wilson Center Global Fellow in Washington, D.C. He was Pakistan High Commissioner to the UK and Ireland. Ahmed’s career has included distinguished posts in both academia and public service. He won the Star of Pakistan award, the inaugural Gandhi Peace Award and with Professor Judea Pearl the inaugural Purpose Prize. The Bishop of Washington hosted an unprecedented Evensong in his honor at the National Cathedral. Highlights from the past four decades of Ahmed’s academic career include appointments such as: Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution; the First Distinguished Chair of Middle East and Islamic Studies at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD; the Iqbal Fellow and Fellow of Selwyn College at the University of Cambridge (Iqbal Chair of Pakistan Studies); and teaching positions at Harvard and Princeton Universities. Ahmed dedicated more than three decades to the Civil Service of Pakistan, where his posts included Commissioner in Baluchistan and Political Agent in the Tribal Areas. He is a Trustee of the World Faiths Development Dialogue headed by Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, and member of the Board of Advisors of the Khalili Foundation headed by Sir David Khalili. He is also a board member of the Center for Excellence, Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad. Ahmed was presented the Mensch Award for integrity and kindness in 2022 by the Mensch International Foundation.
The President of Pakistan, Dr. Arif Alvi, in 2023 announced 10 books as recommended reading in a video that went viral. He discussed Ahmed’s Journey into Europe as number three along with the books of Fukuyama and Huntington.
Ahmed’s expertise has earned high praise around the world. The BBC called him, “The world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam,” and the Saudi Gazette lauded him as, “Perhaps the most influential living authority on contemporary Muslim societies.” Sheikh Hamza Yusuf described him as a “Muslim treasure himself.” Dr. Lord Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, described him as “perhaps the most distinguished and versatile Muslim scholar in the English-speaking world today.” Professor Stanley Wolpert, the renowned American historian and author of Jinnah of Pakistan, introduced Ahmed thus: “Akbar Ahmed is the greatest scholar of Islam in America and the world…nobody else stands so high…he is the Dara Shikoh of modern Islamic leaders.”””
