Rabia Terri Harris
Rabia Terri Harris is an essayist, editor, peace activist, public intellectual, practicing chaplain, and freelance theologian. Born to a Christian mother and Jewish father, Ms. Harris embraced Islam in 1978. She earned her Bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, her graduate degree in Middle Eastern languages and cultures from Columbia University, and Graduate Certificate in Islamic Chaplaincy from Hartford Seminary. She studies at Suleymaniya Library in Istanbul, Turkey, on a Fulbright grant to investigate unpublished manuscripts attributed to the controversial mystical philospher Muhyiddin Ibn’Arabi. She has published translations of several key medieval Arabic spiritual text. Ms. Harris has served for over 15 years as a contributor and editor of Fellowship Magazine, the bimonthly publication on the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an international, interfaith peace and justice group founded at the outbreak of World War I. She is the founder and director of the Muslim Peace Fellowship, an influential forum for progressive Muslim thought and the first organization specifically devoted to the theory and practice of authentically Islamic active nonviolence. In this latter role she edits an international newsletter and regularly addresses church, school, and organizational groups on a variety of Islamic issues. She is the Resident Elder at Dar Anwar as-Salam, the Muslim component of the Community of Living Traditions, a tripartite Abrahamic residential peace community located in Stony Point, New York. Ms. Harris is a senior member of the Jerrahi Order, a 300-year-old Muslim Religious sodality headquartered in Istanbul. She is also among the organizers of a new venture in Islamic pastoral care; the Muslim Chaplains Association.
Mubarak Awad
Dr. Mubarak Awad is the founder of Nonviolence International, which works to promote nonviolent social change and peace education with various organizations and movements across the globe; the National Youth Advocacy Program, which provides alternative foster care and counseling to at-risk youth and their families; and the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence in Jerusalem where he was born. He was deported by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1988 after being jailed for organizing activities involving nonviolent civil disobedience. Dr. Awad earned his Doctorate in psychology from the International Graduate School, a Masters in education from St. Francis University, and a Bachelors in social work and sociology from Bluffton University. He serves as an adjunct professor at the American University since 1989 teaching on methods and theory of nonviolence.
